Working with a social media or online marketing consultant shouldn’t automatically mean you turn the reigns over to that consultant to manage all aspects of your small business’ online presence. A good consultant should help you identify what works best for your needs, team, budget, and overall execution.

A good social media consultant can help you create a strategy for all your online marketing, and integrate your online and offline efforts.

A good social media consultant should also offer to train you or your team on things like social media platform best practices, how to understand your analytics, how and where to create and source content, and how to run your own social media ads.

A good social media consultant can even assist you by auditing what you’ve already been doing to specifically identify what’s great, what’s missing, and what needs changing. 

We’ve always been happy to be as hands-on or hands-off as any client needs us to be. We think that just makes sense because no 2 clients are the same. We’ve also always found that our willingness to work in this manner is very attractive to our clients.

If a client wants to manage all of their social media and online marketing in-house, I’m in full support of that. There are plenty of reasons to outsource your social media, as well as plenty of reasons to execute your strategy yourself. Here are reasons why it’s best to keep your social media work in-house.

4 Reasons to Keep your Social Media In-House

• You enjoy the work One of the most common things we hear from clients who want to outsource their social media is that social media isn’t something they like or it isn’t something they understand (and don’t have the desire to learn). When you are running a small business, you have to execute all the same tasks of a larger company, but with an exceptionally small staff (or sometimes only you). Just like some people might love keeping their own books, others wants to outsource all their accounting and payroll because they just don’t like doing it. The same goes for social media. You might enjoy it and therefore prefer to learn more about it in order to do as good of a job with it as you can.
• You have the man or womanpower to do so There are only so many hours in the day, so you can’t do it all. But maybe you have someone on your team who can (and who wants to). If you have a staff member with the time and interest in learning about and managing your online marketing tasks, by all means you should keep those tasks in-house. More on this in my next point.
• It’s easier from an execution standpoint If you outsource your social media, you’ll always have the chore of communicating with your vendor about what’s going on with your business, and making a regular effort to do things like send along photos or videos. There’s also the fact that some social media tasks and platforms are going to be far more difficult or at least far more labor intensive to have someone outside of the company manage for you. For example, a social media consultant can help you strategize on live video content and engagement techniques, and help you determine a good backdrop and lighting, plus the proper tech tools for going live on a platform like Facebook, but that consultant isn’t going to be the person actually going live on your behalf. Live video (clips) are also best for Instagram Stories and Snapchat, even though technically you can use photos for both of those. Even just regular ol’ Instagram is more work from an outsourced standpoint because you as the small business owner would need to send photos or videos to your consultant to post for you.
• You don’t have the budget to outsource Outsourcing is going to cost you more. Period. Keep in mind, too, that you don’t need to be everywhere online. In fact, I recommend to all my clients that doing more with less is far better than stretching yourself too thin. So keep your list of online marketing tasks shorter and simpler, and at a level that’s totally doable for you so you can do a good job with your online marketing and not require outside help.

The bottom line is that you need to do what’s best for you and your small business. There is not only one way to approach your online marketing tasks. For some, outsourcing is what works best, but for others, hiring someone who can train you and who you can check in with for guidance as needed, is a much better answer.