Why You Should NOT Outsource Your Social Media Activities

Social media is a must for any business these days.

It’s a fantastic way to have immediate contact with your customers, interact with them and develop long lasting relationships.

That word, ‘relationships’, is very important, which is why I’m dumbfounded at the number of companies that farm out their social media activities.

As the image above shows, social media is all about interacting, chatting, having a bit of banter and generally conversing with your customers.

Your customers follow you on Twitter and Facebook because they want that immediacy of contact, they want to feel part of your business and they want to be able to talk to you whenever they want.

Granted, social media can be time consuming (if you let it), but that’s no excuse to get someone else to do it for you.

Feeling cheated

If you followed your favourite celebrity on Facebook or Twitter, how would you feel if you posted something and they responded to you?

On top of the world probably.

But how would you feel if you later discovered that the celebrity in question hired someone to write the tweets and updates for him or her? What you thought was a personal message from them was in fact nothing other than a response from a faceless person.

Well that’s how your customers will feel if they knew their messages weren’t being read by you or responded to by you.

Any trust they had in you would be eroded beyond repair.

Immediacy of contact

The whole point of social media is to be able to instantly reach your customers with news, information and updates.

If you hire someone to do that for you they have to phone or email you to find out what’s happening, wait for you to reply, then put out tweets and updates. What’s the point? In the time that took, you could have sent out the update yourself.

A bit of banter

For me, one of the greatest aspects of social media is the way you can show the personality behind your business.

People can get to know you, like you and trust you.

But if you’re not the one sending out the tweets and updates, how can your customers really get to know you?

It’s not your personality that’s coming across so there will be a disconnect between what they read and what they see when they meet you or do business with you.

Stop outsourcing your social media and talk to your customers. It doesn’t have to be time consuming and, assuming you have a smartphone it can be done anywhere.

Rant over.

Sally Ormond – copywriter, tweeter, MD Briar Copywriting Ltd