Three Things a Social Media Agency Ought to Handle
Social Media (SM) agencies are generally hybrid companies whose strengths and capabilities range from social media strategy to online public relations. Often, social media marketing and advertising crosses paths with seek, media planning, customer assistance and business development. With these cross-departmental functions, SM has clearly advanced into a necessary marketing and communications component to get a modern business.
Like standard agency models, a agence communication paris will work with clients for a retainer, hourly or undertaking based fee. And, just like when you hire some other agency, you should have an apparent vision of what will you need executed. So I thought I'd write several thoughts down to help you out determine what should be outsourced to a social media agency as contrasted with. your traditional agency involving record.
- Strategy - This is something that should definitely reside which includes a social media agency. You can find too many tools, tactics and new technology available for a traditional agency to stay on top of. Traditional agencies are excellent at providing direction regarding brand voice and crowd segmentation, etc, but in regards to keeping a finger to the pulse of the SM heart, traditional agencies tend to drop the ball. It's not always their fault either, and usually this is simply because they have so many client projects to fulfill, so they tend to be a little behind on this R&D side. Now, some agencies are great at this, but not all of them. So be sure to help ask pointed questions out of your traditional agency regarding a skill packages and especially resources. If you ask me, traditional agencies don't have a large staff dedicated to help SM. In fact, lots of times, they end up appointing a freelancer or social media agency in the long run anyway.
- Community Management - Engaging ones community of friends and followers on the daily if not hourly basis is no small task. It requires full-time resources to research applicable content, publish it and then monitor interaction. Hiring a SM agency to manage this component of your enterprise is a wise switch, simply because they can have far more resources together with experience in community management than most "tactical" dependent traditional agencies. Community supervision requires patience and nurture, something that most traditional agencies tend to fail at due the point that many are campaign powered.
- Monitoring - Playing the conversations taking place about your brand or business are important in shaping the process it engages people. Using monitoring tools and good 'ol fashioned elbow sauces a savvy SM company can decipher the hashtags, likes and shares for the content you produce and translate to your usable resource for developing other marketing campaigns. Sentiment can be a sensible way to discover new keywords for a next PPC or immediate marketing advertising headlines.
There is a challenge however and that is that there are a lot wanna-be social media agencies available. Usually consisting of laid-off former ad executives who are looking to cash-in relating to the hype of SMM. Be sure to sniff these guys available before engaging into any sort of relationship. Remember, you're looking to capitalize on a innovative communication model, and sometimes that requires new, fresh thinking with a partner that focuses purely on one thing and one thing only, social media.