Thursday, July 4, 2013

Outsourcing Social Media presence - myth or reality?

Before you start reading this post, I want you to Google following "social media presence maintenance"

The result you see is a proof that it is possible to outsource social media presence or at least this is how it appears.


Before jumping to any conclusions, lets first understand what is meant by outsourcing social media presence for a business. Lets take an example of a small business as they are easier to understand and visualize. Say I own a coffee shop, I sell gourmet coffee, cakes etc. I do most of my operations on my own and this do not get time to ensure that my brand is actively present on various social media or may be I do not know how to handle my brands presence on social media.

One day some one comes to my shop and asks me if I would like some help on making sure that my brand is actively present on social media, he/ she also tells me that by doing so I would be able to do the following things which would help my brand

1. Marketing of new / existing products
2. Sales and promotions
3. Maintain relatinship with my clients and gain feedback on my products


I say yes (obviously :D ), he/ she then tells me what all he can do for my brand and what would be the price of the same.

I agree and get into a contract, now this person makes sure that my brand is actively posting on Twitter, Facebook, etc. by making accounts on these websites and representing my brand on these sites. He/ She actually logs into FB as administrator of the Pages and posts latest about my brand. How does He/ She comes to know about what happening in my coffee shop? He calls me daily and asks me about what’s happening in the coffee shop? what are the cakes we are selling today? which products are on discount etc.

After some time as the number of followers for my brand increase and they start interacting with my brand it becomes difficult for this person to make sure that he is answering all the questions and thus he has to hire more people to do so and so he increases the price of hi services to me.

After some time i realize that i can do it inhouse if my wife learns to handle social media presence and does it for my coffee shop and thus my wife takes a training on social media presence and starts doing it for my coffee shop. I no longer take service from this person. My wife act as the page administrator now.

After some time I realize that it would be better if my wife helps me in preparing coffee, making cake etc. as we have no loads of customer in our shop so I call up this person and ask for his services again.

End of story...

So what I could understand from this example is that answer is "Yes" and "No"

it depends on what you want to do with your brands social media presence. Please share your views in comments below!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very true. ... i feel social media presence can b outsourced so that the organization can focus on their core competency. Interesting topic. Good work jiju keep writing....