Last month I exchanged a few emails with Brandon J. Mendelson from The Graduate Student Survival Blog . He told me about things that, in his opinion, shouldn’t be outsourced to web service providers, because anyone could learn and do such things by themselves.
I asked him to send me some specific examples. In his reply he mentioned copy editing, WordPress, SEO and… social networking, which is the point I’m bringing up for discussion here.
In Brandon’s words:
If you hire someone to manage your social networking profile, you’re totally missing the point. Your profile is your brand. If it is an intern or freelancer runs your profile people will be confused and not want to follow you since they can’t make that personal connection. So paying people to add friends on MySpace (as I know many musicians do) is a waste of money and provides virtually no benefit. It’s called social networking for a reason.
Many people nowadays offer their services as social media specialists, social networking managers etc. Some will act as consultants, guiding you while you build relationships yourself. Others will do most or all of the work for you, setting up your profile, posting messages, monitoring references to your brand and networking on your name.
What do you think of such services? Should you hire social networking specialists? Or should you do it all by yourself? If you’ve ever hired social media managers, how was the outcome like? I invite you to leave a comment and share your views and experiences.
Disclaimer: Brandon and I aren’t associated in any way. He was kind enough to answer some questions and I’m sharing excerpts of his replies above and on a few future posts, but that’s about it. His opinions don’t necessarily reflect mine. To learn more, please read my general disclaimers.
One Comment
Generalizations are bad for your business, because they can lead to unprofessional decisions that aren’t supported by facts.
My boss did hire a social media specialist to manage the company’s networking efforts. His work generates positive, measurable, concrete results, and that’s what really matters in the business world: results. Better yet when you can repeat and even improve these results for a long time, as in our case.
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