Let’s face it, life is hard for a solo-entrepreneur. You have to wear many hats and perform many roles in order to keep things going smoothly. You come up with the idea, you execute the idea and develop it into a product, service, or course. And finally, you need to market it to commercial success. You realize you need to do social media marketing to get your solutions to would-be customers. But, who has the time to do this? Therefore, you consider hiring a social media manager to do the job for you. You can outsource this crucial role that you just don’t have the time to do.
What does a Social Media Manager Do?
If you have a look at the above illustration, you will see the social media manager should create blog posts, social media posts, and manage the responses to those posts by responding to followers.
Bingo, that’s exactly what you don’t have time the time for.
However, the lack of time is merely a symptom of a bigger problem. Have you considered the reason why you don’t have enough time to perform those functions?
Have a look back at that quote and notice the beginning, “social media managers are responsible for developing and implementing marketing strategies for a business’s social media profiles.”
Do you have a marketing plan and strategy?
The question really is the most pertinent because it really determines how much you’ll have to spend when hiring your social media manager.
- Are you going to hire someone to develop the strategy AND implement the strategy by performing the duties of posting?
- Will you develop the strategy yourself, and then you simply hire someone to carry out the duties of posting?
Option 1 would be significantly more expensive because whose business is it after all? Your social media marketing manager needs the time and access to get the in-depth knowledge of your company needed to begin crafting the message and strategy to reach your target customers.
Option 2, then, would be significantly less expensive because you are simply outsourcing the minor duties of posting towards the message and strategy you set forth before them.
What about option 3?
If you devise your own strategy and message in advance, wouldn’t that take the pain and brainpower out of doing the job on the fly? I mean, isn’t that what’s really preventing you from managing your own social media in the first place? Sitting down to plan your social media posts is like trying to sing a song freestyle. Now imagine trying to do that once a week, scheduling all those posts.
It’s not necessarily the time, but the time and energy you have to devote repeatedly towards coming up with new things to say, and doing that over and over again.
How businesses really Advertise
Just watch live television for a day and observe how many times you see an ad by the same company. How many “new” ads do you see, or is it the same ad repeated over and over again?
Here's the good news
You don’t have to constantly come up with new things to say on social media. What you need to do is sit there one good time and devise all your messages (content) at once.
With your well-crafted content in place, you then repeat them over and over again by pushing those messages out in the direction of your target audience.
Let me show you how I learned to build my own content marketing plan, and how I have developed my own system that saves me time and the headache of coming up with new things to post.
One major advantage is having an optimized WordPress website. With WordPress, I am able to post content through my blog, and the collection of plugins I’ve assembled posts to social media for me – on repeat. I don’t spend much time on Twitter although I have a constant presence because I’ve managed to automate some of my processes.
Before you go off and spend money on a social media manager, read the next article to find out how you can set up your own content marketing plan and have it run on autopilot.
read the next article
The next article takes you through the steps of creating your own content marketing plan. It's about a 5 minute read that could set you on the right path.
