Number one, everyone knows "time is money". Social media management can take a lot of time, not only to set up, but to maintain. Creating new content, keeping abreast of what's currently popular, and planning future marketing campaigns are all jobs you are probably too busy to do. Hiring a company to handle your social media marketing allows you the benefits of staying current in the marketing world without killing yourself trying to do all the work.
Secondly, perhaps you can come up with creative content to promote through social media. But can you create this content day in and day out for several months? If your content lacks the zing of originality, it will quickly get lost among the thousands of other boring snippets of information that reside on social networks. Creative, original, useful content is in high demand and shows no signs of ever going out of style. Hiring a professional to produce that content can be a much easier solution for you.
Availability is a third reason. Part of the reason consumers want to see businesses on social networks is to discuss their products and voice their concerns. Taking the time to dialogue and even change items based on customers' recommendations is an important part of social media marketing. Unless you are a very technical company, hiring a mediator to manage the multitude of comments, complaints, and issues people bombard you with can allow you to focus on other aspects of your business.
For the past fifteen years Fineman PR has been publishing a list of the Top 10 PR Blunders for the year. What is different about this year's list is that many of the blunders happened in the social media sphere, either directly by the organization or by a slow response to something published on a bolg or social networking site. Two of these blunders were people who were actually able to right wrongs by using social media and the web to publicize the issue.
In an interview with Bulldog Reporter's Daily 'Dog, Michael Fineman, President, Fineman PR said, "In the old days, you had to get on top of a crisis in the first 48 hours. Now, it's the first 48 minutes. In those minutes, you have a responsibility to contain the crisis and alert any audiences that may be in danger or are being impacted by the crisis. Your response must be instantaneous." Social media has pushed PR professionals to consistently monitor the news, blogs and social media outlets, and it has drastically changed the time frame within which we have to react.
Anyone who knows anything about social media will tell you that to succeed you must be transparent. While we would always advise client to be so, it is more important now than ever. Everyone makes mistakes and the best advice is to be transparent, take responsibility and/or set the record straight, as appropriate.
What is also made clear by this list is that an employee's actions represent the company (United Airlines and Dominos). Today it is easier than every for those actions to be apparent to the public and communicated to the public quickly and in scale. Customer service and public relations may be making a movement to be intertwined more than ever. Some of the more prominent Twitter success stories (Comcast and Dell) are companies who have used the service to proactively addressed customer dissatisfaction. Maybe CCSO, Chief Customer Service Officer, will even become a new job function.