Social media firms?

Lucia Guh-Siesel CEO & Founder, Bandalou

June 9th, 2015

Does anyone have experience (good and bad) with hiring social media firms to manage your company's social media accounts, pages and reputation management? If good, who would you recommend? Thanks!

Adam Broetje CEO at Odd Dog Media

June 9th, 2015

We have both provided and worked with partners to offer this service to our clients. Overall mixed results. A few key things to keep in mind if you're going to outsource:

1) Make sure they are measuring business (leads) generated from their work. Don't confuse activity with results.

2) Pay attention to the demographics of the users you are seeing engagement from. If your business targets 20-40yr old mothers in California, but your engagement is from 15-25 year old males in New York, that's probably not effective for you.

3) Pay attention to the voice they are using to represent your business. The more people get familiar with social media, the easier it is to tell if the person posting actually knows what they are talking about. Losing credibility in front of a hard-earned audience is never fun and it's always hard to earn trust back.

Overall we've found that it's most effective to train an in-house person to execute the social strategy (which is ideally part of a larger "Digital Marketing" strategy). This way you have someone who is well versed in your business/industry and is already there to help share those impromptu moments an outsourced service could never capture because they aren't in your office.

One great aspect of social media is that it allows you to connect with your audience on a more personal level and show some personality. Be careful not to lose this communication tool by hiring the wrong person/company.

Ed Frazier Vice Chairman of the Board at Rural Media Group

June 9th, 2015

I have used a number of firms to provide social media. Not very pleased with the result from any of them. However, there are some upside results in limited cases. I measure success by the number of engagements, and retweets, or shares. Likes are not the same thing. Nothing wrong with likes and they make you site look like some one cares, but at the end of the day it is generating business that counts.

So its possible to spend a lot on social media but not realize a benefit from it. I see a lot of recommendation in the discussion which also demonstrates the number of ideas out there. It seems to me that each firm can deliver certain things but it is rare to find a firm that can actually do it all. So it will depend on your goal. How you intend to measure success and what you want the end result to be. Be sure to identify those goals and measures going in so you can evaluate the results.

It works best to keep you social media engaged in real time, which means knowing when you get a comment or inquiry and getting back to that person promptly to expand the engagement. Automated systems are just robots talking to robots. The readers are wise to those approaches so they will ultimately not achieve the desired result.

Good luck in your quest and see you on social media.

Kent Lewis Anvil President & Founder | Purveyor of measurable marketing that moves you (analytics, search & social media marketing)

June 12th, 2015

Although I own a digital marketing agency specializing in social media marketing, I believe a brand should represent themselves in social, not an agency. As a result, we tend to focus on strategic planning, training and measurement. For brands lacking bandwidth, we do provide content management support. Here are a few articles on the topic:

5 Reasons for Brands not to Outsource Social Media Marketing

http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2011/03/14/outsourcing-social-media-management/

Why You Should Fire Your Social Media Marketing Manager

http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/02/08/fire-your-social-media-marketing-manager/

Social Media (Marketing) Evangelist Job Description

http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/03/10/social-media-marketing-evangelist-job-description/

Marketing Consultant vs. Agency: Which is Right for Your Business?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141023191624-325170-marketing-consultant-vs-agency-which-is-right-for-your-business

Six requirements for a value-added SEM vendor

http://www.dmnews.com/get-beyond-clicks-and-conversions/article/90202/

The Social Media Metrics That Truly Matter

http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/02/22/social-media-metrics-that-matter/

Let me know if you have any questions.

Itai Hirsch --

June 10th, 2015

I used many social media firms and by far vedilo.com was and is the best. They truly understand user engagement acquisition strategies. They were able to increase our traffic substantially over a short time using simple tools they deployed.

Jesse Landry

June 9th, 2015

Likeable Media --- Sent from RelateIQ for Android On Jun 9, 2015 5:07 PM, Lucia Guh-Siesel

Yazan Alami Marketing meets Engineering

January 19th, 2017

You can try http://zocreate.com/ if you just want relevant content created and posted to your page. They're probably the cheapest and highest quality I've seen so far, and they have a 5 posts free trial. Hope this helps, good luck!

Kelli Sharpley Entrepreneur, Problem Solver, People Connector, Music Lover, Foodie.

June 9th, 2015

The results are just as much dependent on the client as they are on the vendor. I've worked with several organizations doing their social with mostly satisfied customers. The customers who have issue are the ones who fail to define or "stick to" their goals and refuse to allocate a budget to grow the presence.

Every organization should have a clear understanding of what it is they hope to achieve in a social media program, what the KPIs will be, and how it will integrate with their other outreach or media programs BEFORE they hire anyone - internally or in a consulting role.

There are many software options available for scheduling, monitoring, tracking, and even competitive intelligence. These offerings vary greatly in price and robustness. My suggestion is to first define what you need most, what type of person/company is the right fit for those needs - then look at the options to determine best fit and the KPIs most important to your company.

Brittany Hudson Director of Content Strategy at Wisdom and Craft, Inc.

June 10th, 2015

It really depends on what you are looking for. Firms can promise a lot of followers but you want followers that have a likelihood of doing business with you. That takes consistency, posting relevant, meaningful content and of course, time to build it.

Of those who have been dissatisfied with Social Media firms, I've found that either they didn't want to wait for it to build or they were using firms that promised big numbers without understanding what they were getting.

We are a Social Media firm and I'd be happy to refer you to our clients and let them tell you what their results were to see if that is what you are looking for.

Nate Mordo Head of Brand Marketing, Internet.org by Facebook

June 9th, 2015

I've worked with Spredfast in the past and they've provided a good service.

LanVy Nguyen Founder & Managing Director at Fashion4Freedom

June 9th, 2015

@Adam, this is excellent and sound advice.

To others who are also seasoned "socialites", what might we expect to pay for such services? Is there a market median?

Thank you in advance