I’ve lost many social media marketing jobs and I’m ok with that. It’s not because I don’t know how to do it. I just believe social media should not be outsourced 100% and my answer remains that “social media should be done semi-in-house”.

Businesses feel they don’t have time to update their Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Instagram and Pinterest accounts and want to outsource it 100%. I don’t tend to agree with them.

Social media should be done by the business and could be assisted, taught or helped by a consultant.

It’s also super duper easy to streamline your social media, so there are no excuses. If you looking for a solution you can check out IFTTT, SNAP wp Plugin or Publicize for Jetpack WP plugin, Buffer or Hootsuite.

Business is very much about building relationships and social media is an extremely important function of that. It’s how I get 30% of my customers and it should be where you get a some of yours, or at the very least maintain relationships.

A previous company I consulted for asked me I would take over their social media. I politely declined and said I could teach and assist where possible.

In the end they gave it to someone who is a “social media expert”. I have asked if I may use their stats for this post and they have kindly agreed.

Facebook

Facebook is the most important social media platform for the majority of B2C businesses because that is where most of their customers hangout. I recently wrote a post on Linkedin about why Facebook Matters and the best ways to make it matter.

Why Facebook engagement is so important

Facebook can be Tricky

If people don’t engage in your content, your content is not deemed valuable by Facebook and they will start restricting your reach

1. If you invite the wrong people to like your page they won’t engage
2. If you use paid advertising incorrectly you will get the wrong people to like your page and they won’t engage
3. If you post at the wrong times, your post won’t get the best engagement
4. If you use a 3rd party software to post you won’t get full engagement
5. If you do these wrong it is extremely hard to correct it.

As you can see engagement is the most important thing for your page Facebook page.

When I chat to marketers I ask them what’s the biggest mistake they made and they answer is always roughly the same “I got the wrong people to like a Facebook page”. Why is this such a big mistake? Because you cant get these people to unlike your page or kick these unengaged readers from your page.

Let me show you what happened to the company who decided to outsource their Facebook page 100%.

The first thing the Social media expert did was get paid likes. They want to get you loads of likes and make you happy. Which they did:

Those massive spikes look awesome, lots of likes – look what happened

They doubled their Facebook page likes – in a month! Looks great to any business owner. Theoretically, we feel we are going to reach double the amount of customers. Unfortunately it’s not the case.

From using the stats above we can assess how many people the page reached and the %

Facebook Organic Reach

• Nov 1300+ people, reached total 230% of page likes
• Dec 500+ people, reached total of 110% of page likes
• Jan – Feb  300+, reached total of 70% of page likes
• Mar – you can see where they were overwhelmed and wanted help, reached total of 10% of page likes
• Apr 2000 +-, reached total of 200% of page likes (and I’m being generous)
• May 1500 +-, reached total of about 100% of page likes
• Jun 900 +-, reached total of 45% of page likes
• Jul 800 +-, reached total of 40% of page likes
• Aug 800 +-, reached total of 40% of page liked
• Sep 700 +-, reached total of 30% of page likes

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See a trend?

 

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Even with doubling their likes and paying for likes they barely increased their organic reach. They did grow their Facebook likes but may have to pay for every post to reach 100% total of their audience,

The only way that this can be explained is that the quality of the page likes were not great and the ads that were used were not targeting the right people.

They not the only business this has happened to. This video (although old) is very relevant and changed my perspective on Facebook reach and engagement. It worth a watch.

Do you know what sucks the most about this scenario? It is going to be extremely hard for this business to get their audience engaged and reach 100% of page likes without creating a viral post or paying for it.

Be very careful what you do with your Facebook Page and for the love of your customers – do your social media inhouse!!!!

How you can do it in-house?

• Schedule 3 posts a week at least. It will take you less than 10 min but dramatically help your page if you a small business.
• Don’t want to schedule? Fine just post when you are online. (This is Facebook so I may imagine that a decent amount).
• Posts links to your site, Facebook brings up a great preview to your page –  use it.
• Instead of paying someone to take over your social media and do it “professionally” hire someone to teach you for a couple of hours.
• Schedule for hashtag days  #feedbackfriday, #motivationmonday #throwbackthursday.

So so simple, spend 15 min a week streamlining and scheduling your content and I guarantee after a month you will see considerable results in your reach and engagement. And if you don’t you should have a pretty good data to show someone who can teach you to optimize and tweak what you doing for more optimal results.

[bctt tweet=”I agree that Social Media Marketing should not be 100% outsourced! #smm”]

My recommendation has always to make social media semi in-house.

Don’t spend massive amounts of money on an agency, rather get taught do some of the posts yourself and stay authentic to your brand.