When it comes to marketing yourself on the internet, it’s a lot to do for one person, especially if you’re responsible for updating your website, updating your social media, and doing everything else to run your business smoothly and effectively. When it starts becoming too much for you to handle social media on your own, you may be looking to hire someone to help you with your social media marketing and presence. How do you determine if the person you pick is right for you? Let’s look at some different social media marketing programs and ways you can tell if a social media marketer is for you! I’ll compare marketing agencies and virtual assistants, and give you some eagle-eye tips for things to look out for when making your decision.
#1: Setting your goals
Your first step to having someone else run your social media is to determine what your goals are. You will want to set something concrete, especially if you plan to pay someone hundreds (or even thousands!) to work on your social media accounts. When setting a goal, you may want to determine something simple like “make more sales”, however, not everyone’s goals may be the same, and the pricing will vary depending on what you’re looking to do. Here’s some example goals to help guide you:
- Keeping social updated: You’re not necessarily interested in landing more sales (though it would be nice!) but you do want to keep your social media up to date so you always look “in business”. A program like this is likely to cost the least amount of money, and you may be able to sign up with a marketer to just make holiday posts, a monthly post, or a weekly post, depending on how often you want your social media updated.
- Someone to be “you” when you can’t be: If you only need temporary assistance, or someone to answer questions, post existing content, etc, then this type of goal might be good for you. This is likely to cost a moderate amount of money.
- Landing more sales or leads: This type of goal requires a more aggressive approach and will require much more time spent on it than just sending out a few posts to keep social updated. Expect to pay more here.
- Landing more followers and engaging with people on social media: Like the goal above, this social media marketing approach requires a lot more time spent and can be costly. But it also results in more sales and leads in the end and is likely to pay off when done correctly!
Once you know your overall goals for hiring someone beyond “doing it so I don’t have to”, you can move on to looking for the right person to help you with your social media.
#2: A virtual assistant or an agency?
Many people can get away easily with a virtual assistant helping them with their social media marketing. A virtual assistant is not a computer, AI, or otherwise a fictional person as the name might suggest, but instead an actual real person who acts as your assistant. VAs are capable of running social media for you, though may not be as well informed on what’s going on in the social sphere to make the most of your posts. A VA is likely to be cheaper than an agency and might not make you sign a lengthy contract. This is great because if it doesn’t work out, you can move along to another VA or even a marketing agency.
A marketing agency, on the other hand, is likely to cost more money, but would generally have more knowhow on getting the most out of your social media marketing efforts. An agency may also make you sign a minimum length commitment contract.
#3: Vetting the right social media person
Demonstrable success
Anyone can promise to do social media marketing for you, but doing it right takes a certain amount of knowhow and a keen eye on what’s happening in the social media marketing sphere. A good VA, social media marketing agency, or a marketing agency offering social media management should be able to share with you prior successes right away during the consultation. They should be able to demonstrate work they’ve done for others, and give some sort of concrete number to their successes like “we grew this account by (percentage) over (time period)” or “we have had repeated successes with clients on (platform), which you can see at…”
Comes with their own ideas
The social media marketer you are vetting should be able to provide you with some ideas and should develop a social media strategy for you early on in your relationship, and the social media strategy should evolve and shift with time as social media platforms change, and your goals may evolve.
It should be routine that you review posts before they go up, and you should be able to have one area you can check to see when and if posts are going up (and what platform they’re going up on) without having to reach out to your social media marketing team to find out. The power should be in your hands to find out if necessary, and when everything is going smoothly, it should feel like a ghostly version of “you” is doing your social media for you.
Reports and develops changes based on those reports
Reporting is how everyone knows if what is happening is working. If you’re looking to make a goal of “more sales”, then you will need to make sure that your reporting can tell your social media marketer when something they’ve done on social media has worked in your favor. If your social media marketer never reports to you anything, success or failure alike, then they may not even be looking at your reports.
You can ask up front for any social media marketer you’re vetting what reports look like, how often they are sent, and how they can put successes in a form that both of you can understand and evolve out of. They should understand the multiple facets of your social media marketing plan and how to extrapolate meaningful data from posts as they’re made.
#4: Things to stay away from
Once a VA or agency provides to you some accounts they have worked on or are working on, take a look at the posts the VA or agency is doing for that client. You will want to stay away from anything that:
- Has poor graphically designed content such as brand fonts or colors not being honed in and generally looking poor on the social media account. Look for things getting cut off, blurry photos, weird halos or spots around things, mismatching and bizarre text
- Misspellings, malformed emojis, etc
- Uses old, outdated social media tactics like big clouds of hashtags, only square posts, only news feed posts, only sharing articles and links on Facebook, etc
- Doesn’t format each post appropriately for each type of platform (i.e. putting links in Instagram posts, lacks alt text on Mastodon, etc)
These types of details can tell you that the agency you’re vetting isn’t staying up to date with best practices, or is lacking in attention to detail.
#5: When to break up
The best successes in social media come when everyone can work together to make the very best things they can. That means that it’s usually not possible to walk entirely away from your social media wholly – you will still need to be on hand to provide assets to your social media marketing team for the best possible results. With that being said, if you provide hundreds of photographs and videos up front, your social media marketing team shouldn’t constantly be asking for new things (unless they’ve already run through everything you’ve sent). If you keep providing assets in bulk and they keep asking for more things to make their social media posts, they may not be effectively using all of your assets and instead putting the onus on you to “create”, which places a burden on you. If you ever feel burdened by your social media team, you may want to reconsider your relationship with them.
Your social media marketing team should want to make decisions that benefit you, and prove their worth to you as a customer. You should never, at any point, not know what your social media team is doing for you. It should be abundantly clear the work you are paying them for. If you’re feeling slighted or cheated by what you’re getting and what you’re paying to get it, you should start asking questions to re-evaluate your relationship with your social media marketing company.
If you never get any of the following, you may want to start re-evaluation:
- A social media strategy in some written form you can read and access whenever you like. It should be periodically updated from time to time
- New ideas regarding formats to try, new platforms to experiment on, and other opportunities to build your business
- Timely replies to special requests and questions
- Reports from time to time about what’s working and what isn’t
- A content calendar, or a system in which you can log in at any time and see when posts are going up and where
Breaking up with your social media manager might even be just a difference of personalities. If you’re asking questions all the time and the person on the other end seems annoyed by it, or takes quite a bit of time to get back to you, then you may be feeling unimportant to them. It’s simple enough to break it off just because you don’t like them. You shouldn’t feel badly if this is the case.
Sometimes everything might be going great with your social media marketing company, but you’re low on cash and looking to cut down on paid services and save some money. Reach out to your social media marketer to see if there’s anything they can do. Sometimes they can reduce elements of a plan to save money and help alleviate some of the cost burden.
Hopefully this helps you identify some ways you can evaluate a new social media person or your current person. Have questions? Let me know in the comments!