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Buying Social Media Services

So you are considering outsourcing your social media management. But what kind of social media services is it possible to successfully outsource?

Social media (also known as ‘Web 2.0′) now provides unrivalled potential for internet marketing. It’s still new, but already emerging as the game-changer that is already dominating online communications. The global reach and free use of social media literally overflows with marketing potential. Engaging with your target market through effective use of social media services can increase your brand exposure, as well as delivering other important business benefits.

Some of the best known social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn and Squidoo, but the full list of social media services is practically endless, with new players arriving on the scene daily. Knowing where to start with social media, and how to successfully market your business isn’t immediately obvious, and can be time-consuming. It often pays, therefore, to engage a professional company to handle your social media services for you.

Some social media services you may consider outsourcing to a social media manager include:

Developing a Social Media Strategy: Assessing your needs, outlining the opportunities and formulating an action plan for long-term social media success.
Formulate Implementation Guidelines: Creating a set of in-house guidelines to ensure that your social media team work to maintain your brand integrity, comply with the requirements of different media, and follow best practice in development and communications.
Recommend Software: There are thousands of social media tools available. A social media services firm can assist you in selecting the right ones to monitor performance, identify opportunities, manage social media campaigns etc in line with your needs and budget.
Conduct a Social Media Audit: The starting point (or revision point) of any social media campaign should be an in-depth analysis of your business’ presence across the various social networks and development of a strategy to improve it.
Carry Out Competitive Analysis: Find out what your competition is doing right. A social media services company will conduct a competitive analysis to identify their tactics, and suggest action steps and tools you can implement to effectively compete.
Create Social Profiles: After identifying the social networks where your business should be present, and where your customers are participating, a social media services company can create and manage your profiles to build relationships with customers and prospects.
Establish Your Blog: Creation and/or maintenance of a search engine optimised, network connected blog to act as the hub of your social media operations.
Develop a Blog Strategy: Build your brand with a strategy to leverage your blog activities. Social media services consultants can suggest ideas for blog posts, write the blog posts for you, manage commenting and spam clearance, ping updates to search engines, keyword optimise content, cross-link social media content and build communication between your blog and others to create awareness.
Develop Communities: How to identify the important venues and conversations in your market and when, how and whom to participate with.
Monitor your Community: Brand tracking, mentions monitoring, and optionally responding to mentions and questions, are all tasks you may outsource to a social media manager.

Key Social Media Services

Whilst the social media services you choose to outsource can be as extensive as you wish, there are a number of aspects to your social media strategy that particularly benefit from the services of a professional, for example:

Blogs

Design and customisation of your company blog; integration of social networks and bookmarking; search engine optimisation; custom feature installation; writing, editing and publishing blog content; house-style formulation; comment management; cross-promotion.

Media Updates

Ensure your content is distributed across all social networks where your customers are active; schedule and publish content on a regular basis to maintain consistency and visibility; cross-link content over multiple social networks to ensure multi-channel exposure.

Surveys

Create, distribute and analyse online surveys for internal or customer-facing purposes; publicise and distribute surveys into the social media networks.

Videos

Create video content for any purpose (eg Q&A, product description, offer promotion, reviews, testimonials, etc); distribute videos across social media networks; publish videos on all major video websites (not just YouTube, which accounts for less than half of internet video views).

Social Profiles

Create and manage custom profiles on key social media networks relevant to your business and target customers.

Webinars

Live and recorded video/audio workshops, seminars, trainings and presentations; setup scheduled automatic replays; integrate webinar invitations, reminders and followups into your email marketing and social network activity.

Reputation Monitoring

Real-time monitoring of blogs, social networks, press and niche websites for mentions of your business; advise on or take action to ensure your business is presented positively; monitor and advise on trending in your target market.

Experienced social media and online marketing specialists can also assist your business with search engine optimisation, traffic generation, advertising management, PPC management, link building and copywriting services.