Outsource social media or manage it yourself: how not to waste your SMM budget
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:24 am
In this article, we have considered all possible formats of social media management for small businesses and illustrated them with the experience of entrepreneurs. At the end of the material, there are practical tips from Eva Katz and our project manager Vladislav Bezpalko, which will help you understand whether a specialist or agency is really useful and not waste your budget. And finally, there is a checklist that will help you evaluate the results of social media management — yours, a hired freelancer, a full-time specialist, or a third-party agency.
Social networks should bring sales
To do them "for show" means taking away time, finances and human taiyuan telephone number data resources from your business, which you could spend on improving your product, hiring the right specialists or launching a new direction. Not doing them at all means losing potential clients, partners and opportunities for development. Any business needs competent SMM, and you can choose traditional ways:
Agency.
Freelancer.
Self-management + consultations.
Self-management.
From our experience, most often businesses try all the methods - first, they try to manage social networks on their own. If they don't get the results they need, they hire a freelancer, a jack of all trades who manages accounts, launches ads, communicates with potential clients, and works with bloggers on their own. If the freelancer's work doesn't bring satisfactory results, they look for other ways. Let's look at the pros and cons of each method of managing social networks for an entrepreneur, a store, or the service industry.
Hiring an external SMM specialist: simple, cheap, but often leads to a drain on the budget
Why do we claim that freelancers are more likely to “drain” clients’ budgets than agencies? Because we interviewed entrepreneurs who hired third-party SMM specialists and “got burned.” And here’s what we found out.
Flexibility, agility, lack of formality, accessibility and quick response to events - in the eyes of many entrepreneurs, agencies lack these qualities. Therefore, small and micro businesses hire freelancers who write texts, launch advertisements, take photographs, analyze statistics and write promotion plans in one hand.
Anna Gorodetskaya, handmade lingerie company Trusbox .
"An agency will always be less flexible than an individual employee. Working with an agency is good for large, established businesses, but we are young and agile - we need more reaction and less formality."
But can a freelancer's services be of high quality if he has several projects in his work? A freelancer is cheaper than an agency, but he does not have as much capacity and resources as a full-fledged project team. And time - a freelancer cannot fully immerse himself in each client's business, develop individual concepts, non-stop test and implement new tools. Therefore, the results are often very average, and the disappointed entrepreneur again runs social networks independently and periodically takes consultations, or turns to an agency.
Marina Tarasova, freelance SMM specialist:
"Right now I'm running 4 projects at the same time - I'm making content plans and technical specifications for a photographer, writing and publishing posts, launching targeted advertising, and looking for bloggers. I charge 15 thousand for each project. And I can't refuse any of them, because that would immediately cut 15k from my monthly income. Starting from the new year, I'll be looking for some office work, because I'm really tired of working at this pace - I have very little free time, because I still need to manage to study and follow trends and updates on Facebook and Instagram."
Now imagine what your company's social networks will look like if they are run by such a busy Marina. She will not have time to "play" with targeting settings, write detailed portraits of the target audience, make a comparative table of competitors and test new features in social networks. Most likely, this will be a stream of work that will not bring a big increase in sales and the desired influx of new customers.
Not all freelancers work like this — there are cool specialists on the market who manage to manage several clients, give consultations, write courses on texts or promotion in social networks and be aware of all the latest tricks and trends in their field. But such SMM specialists charge at least 2-3 times more and do not do everything manually — instead, they establish cooperation with photographers, graphic designers and targetologists. As a result, a disparate semblance of an agency works for you — the results are already higher, but can we say that in this case each specialist involved is immersed in the project?
The freelancer does not understand the product and works according to a universal scheme
A freelancer applies a standard approach to any company, and does not take into account the specifics of the niche and the needs of the audience, and does not delve into such subtleties as the philosophy or emotional message of the brand. And in the management of social networks, this is a very important story.
In the hands of such a specialist there is a set of universal, well-tested tools that he applies from project to project.
Social networks should bring sales
To do them "for show" means taking away time, finances and human taiyuan telephone number data resources from your business, which you could spend on improving your product, hiring the right specialists or launching a new direction. Not doing them at all means losing potential clients, partners and opportunities for development. Any business needs competent SMM, and you can choose traditional ways:
Agency.
Freelancer.
Self-management + consultations.
Self-management.
From our experience, most often businesses try all the methods - first, they try to manage social networks on their own. If they don't get the results they need, they hire a freelancer, a jack of all trades who manages accounts, launches ads, communicates with potential clients, and works with bloggers on their own. If the freelancer's work doesn't bring satisfactory results, they look for other ways. Let's look at the pros and cons of each method of managing social networks for an entrepreneur, a store, or the service industry.
Hiring an external SMM specialist: simple, cheap, but often leads to a drain on the budget
Why do we claim that freelancers are more likely to “drain” clients’ budgets than agencies? Because we interviewed entrepreneurs who hired third-party SMM specialists and “got burned.” And here’s what we found out.
Flexibility, agility, lack of formality, accessibility and quick response to events - in the eyes of many entrepreneurs, agencies lack these qualities. Therefore, small and micro businesses hire freelancers who write texts, launch advertisements, take photographs, analyze statistics and write promotion plans in one hand.
Anna Gorodetskaya, handmade lingerie company Trusbox .
"An agency will always be less flexible than an individual employee. Working with an agency is good for large, established businesses, but we are young and agile - we need more reaction and less formality."
But can a freelancer's services be of high quality if he has several projects in his work? A freelancer is cheaper than an agency, but he does not have as much capacity and resources as a full-fledged project team. And time - a freelancer cannot fully immerse himself in each client's business, develop individual concepts, non-stop test and implement new tools. Therefore, the results are often very average, and the disappointed entrepreneur again runs social networks independently and periodically takes consultations, or turns to an agency.
Marina Tarasova, freelance SMM specialist:
"Right now I'm running 4 projects at the same time - I'm making content plans and technical specifications for a photographer, writing and publishing posts, launching targeted advertising, and looking for bloggers. I charge 15 thousand for each project. And I can't refuse any of them, because that would immediately cut 15k from my monthly income. Starting from the new year, I'll be looking for some office work, because I'm really tired of working at this pace - I have very little free time, because I still need to manage to study and follow trends and updates on Facebook and Instagram."
Now imagine what your company's social networks will look like if they are run by such a busy Marina. She will not have time to "play" with targeting settings, write detailed portraits of the target audience, make a comparative table of competitors and test new features in social networks. Most likely, this will be a stream of work that will not bring a big increase in sales and the desired influx of new customers.
Not all freelancers work like this — there are cool specialists on the market who manage to manage several clients, give consultations, write courses on texts or promotion in social networks and be aware of all the latest tricks and trends in their field. But such SMM specialists charge at least 2-3 times more and do not do everything manually — instead, they establish cooperation with photographers, graphic designers and targetologists. As a result, a disparate semblance of an agency works for you — the results are already higher, but can we say that in this case each specialist involved is immersed in the project?
The freelancer does not understand the product and works according to a universal scheme
A freelancer applies a standard approach to any company, and does not take into account the specifics of the niche and the needs of the audience, and does not delve into such subtleties as the philosophy or emotional message of the brand. And in the management of social networks, this is a very important story.
In the hands of such a specialist there is a set of universal, well-tested tools that he applies from project to project.