Bringing your social media inhouse?
Bringing your social media inhouse? Read our essential guide first
By Stephanie Oley
If you’re in business, you’re probably on social media. And why wouldn’t you be? Social media marketing achieves wonders for business. You can connect with customers, promote offers, answer questions, demonstrate expertise, and basically show how special your business is, compared to all the rest.
Yet despite the number of businesses now on social media, not all manage it well. Some outsource the problem to a specialist, which doesn’t always drive the returns they’re after.
Others bring their social media marketing in-house. This can be effective if you have a solid plan, a well-considered strategy and some talented people to make it all happen.
Which brings us to this article. If you’re considering bringing your social media in-house, this is a quick guide on steps to take and potential snarls to avoid.
Some important principles of social media
Firstly, you’ll want to be clear on your objectives. Are you seeking to grow brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Build a community? Boost brand engagement? Each of these digital strategies involves different tactics.
For example, for a new business breaking into a competitive market, success might simply mean growing their follower numbers. By contrast, for a business offering high-value products, such as building supplies, the core objective might be to promote special offers. Even with just a few hundred followers, such a business might make six-figure sales each week from their promotions.
Your social media feed should offer a balanced mix of content, with a focus on starting conversations. A good rule of thumb is to allocate 30 per cent of your content towards driving sales, and 70 per cent to addressing your audience’s interests.
You’ll also want to be on the right platform for your business. That means reaching out to your audience wherever they are, regardless of your prior experience or personal preference for other platforms. It also means avoiding shiny-new-thing syndrome, and doing your homework before attempting to join newer platforms.
Other principles include addressing your customers’ questions, sticking to a consistent style and schedule, and communicating one soundbite at a time. No point in sharing your manifesto – social media is all about split-second takeaways.
In-house social media: what you need
With the basics in place, you’ll want to consider the roles, responsibilities and budgets you’ll allocate to different aspects of your social media. A few pointers:
- Strategy – As mentioned, a good social presence starts with a digital strategy. This will establish clarity around the content pillars to develop, schedules you’ll post, trends to embrace, policies to uphold, audiences to target, and any keywords and hashtags to use.
- Creative – Writing, photographing, filming and designing all that social media content takes time, thought and expertise. And you’ll be hard pressed to find one individual who can accomplish all those tasks equally well. Decide which of these skills must be completed inhouse, and which can be outsourced in batches.
- Customer service –Responding to customer queries, celebrating successes, and knowing how to escalate problems are also critical to an effective social media strategy.
- Budget – So, you’re paying your social media manager $80,000 annually and you have a list of KPIs as long as your arm. But have you factored in additional budget for paid campaigns, collaborations, photoshoots or other productions? Be prepared to spend a few thousand or more each quarter, on activities that support your social media manager’s capabilities.
- Monitoring – Your social media team needs to know what insights to monitor, which algorithms to work with and when to make improvements. What works on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn will be different to Twitter, Pinterest or YouTube. Make sure your team has the latest skills.
- Learning – The social media landscape is evolving daily. Specialist agencies are often at the forefront of that change, having preferential relationships with social platforms that give them first-hand access to good deals and knowledge of effective new tactics. Smaller in-house teams may not have access to these privileges. Plan to upskill your team regularly in specific areas of social media marketing.
In-house social media successes and fails
Small teams can achieve remarkable success on relatively modest budgets. A well-documented example is San Francisco-based DoorDash, which has muscled into the top spot for on-demand food delivery into the US thanks to its highly strategic Twitter feed. During Covid-19 lockdowns, DoorDash tailored their content squarely at the community they served, especially small restaurants, delivery drivers and food charities. By showing empathy and generosity to those most at risk, DoorDash connected with thousands of new customers.
Having a good social team also means knowing what to do when the strategy backfires. User-generated content (UGC) has worked wonders for brands like Apple, with its ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign, or Tourism Australia for much content shared in the past decade. Both rely heavily on creative snaps from budding photographers.
However, this approach backfired for the New York Police Department in 2014. Asking users to generate feelgood photos of positive interactions with police officers, the department was flooded with images of police brutality.
Bringing your social media management in-house is clearly an effective way to boost brand awareness and grow your business. Just make sure your team has the right knowledge, and that you know which training provider can help you upskill regularly.