When to Outsource Your Social Media

Hello! I’m currently in Raleigh for a day and half of SCA council meetings (I’m on the Membership, Marketing, & Communications one), so this is another prescheduled newsletter. I hope you enjoy it! I also welcome feedback (would you rather not read the whole blog post in the newsletter?) and topic suggestions!

Hope you enjoy – Jenn

When you’re a business owner, you often find yourself pulled in a thousand different directions. Whether because it’s your least favorite activity or it just falls down on the priorities list, social media posting might not be happening for you. That’s okay, as long as you know when to outsource.

I’m writing this piece on an assumption that you know you need social media for your business, but you don’t know if you can handle it. If you need proof to keep up on your accounts, then “social media value” would be a good search term or you can wait until I write a piece about it.

Some key moments might happen where you realize you need help:

• You realize you haven’t posted in a week / month / year
• You found a post from a month ago where a customer complimented / complained and now you’re wondering if it’s too late to respond
• You’ve timed it out and realized you’re spending far too much time on social media

A constant feeling of drowning in work and just doing the bare minimum to keep your head above water

This is where a cost-benefit analysis comes into play. Take finances, for example. I’ve done my own accounting, bookkeeping, and taxes. It’s one of my least favorite things to do and I got really paranoid around tax time that the IRS would audit me (I’m more susceptible since I’m on only freelance income). It took me hours every month to make sure I was doing everything correctly and still at the end of the year, I spent an additional 10 hours just compiling and filing. Once I added all of this up, I realized that if I multiplied my hourly rate by the number of hours I was spending in a year, I could pay for an accountant, bookkeeper, and other services and STILL come out ahead. Oh, and my accountant found me far more write-offs than when I did taxes myself.

So take a moment to think of how much time and money you’re spending on social media.

This includes:

• Planning your posts
• Taking photos / videos
• Actually posting
• Engaging and responding to comments / tags
• Brain space being taken up on remembering to post (I liken this to me getting stressed out about taxes)
• Keeping up on social media feature updates
• Reviewing analytics
• Costs of posting tools

Once you’ve added this all up, ask yourself if it’s all worth it. Do you have enough time, energy, and money to spend on it? Or is your time better dedicated to something else in your business?

Next up in this series: what you can outsource!

You don’t have to outsource everything and outsourcing could just mean it’s off your plate, but still in-house. In fact, most of my recommendations to cafes and roasting companies is to not outsource (out of your company) your social media. I’ll go more in-depth on my reasoning about this in the next post.

If you want to share the post, here’s the blog post link.

Facebook added new analytics for video. It also added a new analytics app for you to access your page data on the go.

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