Why You Should Hire a Social Media Expert for Your Business

Also known as: “Don’t have your friend/niece/neighbor’s kid do your social media.”

If there’s one battle we’re constantly fighting in social media marketing, it’s the number of people who think they can just have a friend or family member “do social media” for their business.

This attitude seems to stem from one major misconception: that social media marketing is just posting on Facebook and Twitter– and maybe Instagram, if you’re going after that younger demographic. Yet, time and time again, we see clients get frustrated when these efforts fall flat and fail to bring in real results.

This brings us to a mantra worth constantly repeating: just because you know someone on social media, doesn’t mean they know how to market your business on social media.

While having a consistent online presence is one of the major tenets of social media, does the person executing your content and community management truly understand what a powerful asset social media can be in accomplishing your overall business goals?

Here are the top reasons why you should only have a professional develop and execute your social media marketing strategy.

Social media experts are immersed in the industry.

For an ever-changing field like social media, staying on top of the latest news, updates, and approaches is crucial to being competitive. With new Facebook algorithms and SEO best practices emerging seemingly every week, the only way to remain relevant is to live, work, and play in this field.

A team of professionals easily stays up-to-date on the best resources, shares their favorite content and tips amongst themselves, and comes together to solve problems by strategizing creative and impactful solutions.

Social media experts understand all aspects of both social media and your business.

A good social media professional is a Renaissance man or woman: they’re writers, advertisers, customer service reps, SEO consultants, branding experts, inbound marketers, business strategists, budgeters, analytics pros, and PR reps, all while multi-tasking. And they know which of those skills matter most for your particular business.

Is your focus on brand awareness? Lead generation? Press relations? Only someone with a wide variety of experience can expertly formulate the social media plan that accomplishes those goals, plus identify ones you may have never considered.

Social media experts have done this– a lot.

The social media team at C-leveled jokes that we’ve developed multiple personalities because of all the different accounts we’ve managed in our careers. And experience is truly the greatest teacher.

Like any service, what you’re really paying for is a certain level of expertise. It’s doubtful that your neighbor or friend’s niece has experience that goes beyond posting on their own personal accounts, to their group of friends. Juggling the multiple accounts of a business is a completely different animal that only an expert could handle.

Social media experts have also failed.

The Internet is fast-paced and relentless, and the reality is, you’re bound to make mistakes. Every year, bloggers and news outlets aggregate lists of the biggest social media goof-upsand there’s rarely a prominent brand that’s never been on one of these lists.

The key is to learn from these mishaps. In both life and social media, you can definitely get more out of your mistakes than from your successes– send one typo on behalf of a client (which happens to everyone) and a social media expert will quadruple-check every message they post from there on out.

Social media experts know how to be efficient.

Here’s something you probably know from your personal life– you could spend all day on social media yet accomplish nothing. The same applies to marketing your business through social media if you don’t know where to focus your efforts.

Each business has a completely different approach based on industry and audience, so some content, tactics, and platforms are simply a waste of time. The right social media manager will have the expertise and tools to be as productive as possible.

Social media experts know who matters in your industry.

Too often we see people that are focused on the wrong numbers– mainly overall followers and likes. The sheer number of likes or followers you have doesn’t mean anything if these aren’t potential customers and brand evangelists. Identifying influencers is a critical step in marketing your business on social media.

And influencer identification and outreach isn’t necessarily easy. Picking the truly worthy accounts and people out of the millions online requires expertise, discretion, and plenty of tools (we have more subscriptions than we can count).

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