If you spend time researching on how to better market your services and products, you will surely come across content that talks about various advantages of social media. If your search for content related to the usage of social media for your business, it can be off-putting as there seems to be so much information that you may get confused on what content to take into account.
You may also not find time to handle social accounts that are quite active, researching and publishing quality and engaging content, and responding to people online who want to engage with you.
By working with a social media consultant or a social media firm, you can save yourself a lot of time and some headaches, and transform your social presence into an excellent source of new business.
Social media consultant
Let’s talk about social media consultant here. He/she is someone who not only does your pinning, tweeting, sharing, and posting for you, but also will help you in developing a strategy for your social media efforts that ensures your dollars and time are well-spent to grow your business. So, you must be very choosy and careful while hiring your social media consultant.
This article will discuss about few major questions to ask before you hire a social media consultant for your business. Let’s dig deeper into each one of them.
Hire a person you are totally comfortable with
You will be providing your login credentials to the social media consultant for posting in your account. So, you should be 100 percent comfortable with them. You can check up on the person and the organization who will be accessing your account.
You should look for anything that you are not comfortable with, negative and positive reviews of their work, and conflicts of interest. Always remember that this is your social media presence and you must make sure you are hiring the social media consultant you are totally comfortable with.
How to measure success?
Social media isn’t just about numbers. Having a large number of followers on Twitter doesn’t necessarily make your account more popular or successful than someone else’s. In a similar way, having some followers on Facebook who are responsible for driving sales for you might not be hitting your targets for growth. So, how will you track, measure, or even define any social campaign’s success?
It is quite likely that you and the consultant you are going to hire may have a different vision in mind about the results and progress. So it’s better both of you sit and discuss on how to track the success of your social media campaign, like what tools to use, how to integrate data, and so on. There are few tools related to analytics available today to track results. You both can discuss on which one you have to use for your campaign. Â
Getting to know the contacts of their previous and current clients
The social media consultants who are qualified must share the contacts of their past and existing clients. Usually, social media consultants share the contacts of their clients with whom they had a very good relation. So, you must email or call their past as well as the existing clients to find out if they are pleased with the services of the consultant whom you are going to hire.
Present and past work samples
It is suggested that you request links to present and past online examples, as well as the samples of portfolio. This way, you can evaluate the social media initiatives created by the consultant or where he/she had played a central role. Look for campaigns that are engaging and resulted in a significant increase in sales leads and brand exposure and seem quite suited to your target market.
Handling crisis
What will the consultant do if something goes wrong? No matter how experienced the consultant is, marketing campaigns may go wrong in application even if they seem to look really good on paper. So, the question here is, how will the consultant react to this situation? How will they respond to negative comments, tweets, or reviews?
Content development
This is one of the most important questions. The questions to be posed here are, do I need to approve the content that is posted on my social account? Do I need to plan it or trust the person or the agency for creating on-the-fly content for me? Does the consultant I am going to hire have the necessary experience to understand the differences between writing content for different platforms?
The content your brand develops needs to be shareable or likeable. An agency or a consultant should be in a position to show you the examples of content that was created previously for other customers.
Conclusion
Hiring a social media consultant will help you in building your author platform. However, you must understand its options, risks, and benefits. So, with the list of questions mentioned above to ask a social media consultant, you can safeguard yourself and your writer brand.
Guest Post Author Bio: Savaram Ravindra was born and raised in Hyderabad, popularly known as the ‘City of Pearls’. He is presently working as a Content Contributor at Mindmajix.com and Tekslate.com. His previous professional experience includes Programmer Analyst at Cognizant Technology Solutions. He holds a Masters degree in Nanotechnology from VIT University. Connect with him also on LinkedIn and Twitter.
