Outsourcing your blog, Twitter account, or Facebook account is an effective way to ensure that your social media presence is active and constantly updated with fresh material. A mistake many companies make after a website redesign or when beginning online marketing efforts, is assuming they can blog themselves all the time. It’s often far more cost effective to hire a good writer or social media professional than it is to take the time out of your day to learn about what your audience wants, research topics, and develop compelling material. Monitoring your blog writing and social media presence takes diligence and organization, and unless you have a devoted in-house marketing person who can spend enough time writing the content for these efforts, it’s easier to have your marketing employees manage a writer than to have writing and content development done in-house.

Getting Started

The first step is developing a program that includes an editorial calendar and identifies which social networks you will be active in, frequency of updates, amount of time allocated, responsible individuals and other details. That way as you execute the plan you can begin to adjust it and fine tune the activity to increase effectiveness. Some activity can easily be outsourced while other tasks need to be done by a subject matter expert, and it’s often necessary to work together with your writer or social media professional.

Curating Content

Social media activity needs to be the right blend of self-promotion, networking and curating links to content, activity events and people. Understanding the types of content your target audience is looking for as well as creating this content is best handled by someone who does this for a living. Help your hired blog writers and social media writers understand your target market by giving them samples of existing marketing materials you already have, as well as being specific with them to determine the ideal target audience based on the type of business you’re in and what you sell. A good writer can take it from there and learn the voice your audience best responds to, what type of resources they need, as well as who the influential figures are in that industry. At first you may have to work more closely with the writer to help them understand the type of content they need to be posting, but after a while they should be able to learn how to gauge it pretty well themselves.

Level of Participation and Capacity

Maintaining a strong Twitter and Facebook presence requires you to put in plenty of time and be organized and diligent about keeping the momentum strong. A good freelancer or social media marketing company can maintain a high level of participation with your friend and followers, and better understand the needs of your audience and how to engage with them. They can identify respected voices in the customer base, and learn how to develop your company’s social media presence to encourage these people to spread your word. Having multiple people work on your social media output expands the capacity to develop a stronger influence. Having a social media professional keep an eye on your industry news and audience’s needs helps you stay on top of discussing what’s important and helps keep you ahead of your competition.

Staying On Top Of Things

We’ve seen this as the biggest challenge of most companies when they begin blogging. It all starts off great, but after a few weeks, the social media interactions start dwindling and the blog gets a little stale. Hiring a professional writer and social media marketer means you never have to worry about potential customers being turned off by a lack of activity on your blog or social media pages. They can keep you organized and schedule your content posts based on when your audience is most likely to want to read them. Professional writers and social media marketers can develop an editorial calendar, brainstorm topics, research the interest in these topics, and conduct interviews with industry experts. A good writer will understand how to use your help as the industry expert to keep on top of learning about the content and getting it out there to the right people.