When Should Business Owners Use an Agency for Social Media?
Social media should be more than posting pretty images and motivational quotations. Depending on the social media platform, you need to measure engagement with your customers, prospects and partners. Is your business team able to measure how they engaged others month over month and are you seeing more engagement over time? Is your team reporting on this each month? As a business owner or leader, if you’re not seeing this data shared each month, your company may not be reaching important goals. Alternatively, your internal team over social media may not have the time or know-how to do this right. In either case, it’s likely time to rely on the social media expertise of a proven marketing agency.
Integrating Social Media & PR
Another important consideration is whether your social media efforts are integrated with your overall public relations (PR) strategy as they should work hand in hand. An agency is often well-equipped to handle both PR and social media while an internal hire/resource may have limited experience with one or the other.
Let’s dig deeper into an example. For instance, if one of your company’s goals is to better position your executives as thought leaders in your industry, a few PR activities to embrace may be:
- Updating your executives’ biographies on your company website and on individual LinkedIn accounts to showcase their experience and knowledge.
- Identifying a specific number of speaking engagements that overall your company aims to secure for these executives in a given time period and then researching the events that align with your executives’ knowledge to which you can submit speaker proposals.
- Pinpoint media outlets that your prospects read/watch that either offer opportunities for your executives to submit bylined articles or provide chances for your team to be interviewed by these publications’ reporters. Develop a plan to reach out to those media outlets and execute the plan.
There are many more ways to position your execs as thought leaders but for this blog post, we’ll stop with these initial examples. Now, let’s examine how your social media efforts should work with these PR efforts to strengthen your outreach and better reach your business goals.
- As mentioned above, you want to update your execs’ bios on LinkedIn, not just your company website. It’s a good idea to specifically mention that the exec is a frequent speaker and interviewed expert on topics X, Y and Z. You can also encourage colleagues and partners to endorse your team on LinkedIn for the indicated area of expertise. We also recommend that when blog posts are published by each of your executives, you hyperlink from each of their names to the corresponding online bio on the company website to allow readers to get more information about that expert. Make it easy for people to find more about your leaders.
- As your experts are featured in the media or as speakers at events, promote the media coverage or upcoming speaking gigs on social media. (If it’s a speaking engagement, post the promotion in advance of the event with a link to event details and online registration, if it’s available. That allows more people to register for the conference or seminar easily. If it’s media coverage, give a short teaser of the expertise your exec shared and the link to the full article.) You can also update this information on LinkedIn in the Accomplishments section.
- Remember to use your chosen social media platforms to show others what your company culture is like. If your company is very traditional and that aligns with the needs of your customers, show a typical day in the office through tools like Instagram and Facebook. If your company culture is fun and lively, yet still hard-working, share photos of what that looks like. These images on social channels should align well with the personalities of your executives and how your business operates (showing authenticity) and allows event coordinators to see you behind-the-scenes. (Peek at Tell Your Tale’s Instagram account for insight into what we’re like.)
It’s no surprise that Tell Your Tale believes in letting PR and social media experts focus on this area. Time and again, we’ve heard the stories of business leaders who thought they could hire one or two people to handle ALL their marketing and were really disappointed with the results. Relying on a team of focused marketing experts with strong skills in specific areas, which is often found in an agency, really delivers measurable results. Plus, it’s the agency’s job to deliver results.
