Of course you do.
So whether you are looking to hire an internal social media manager, a freelancer or an external agency, there some questions you might want to ask before handing over your hard-earned money.
What will be your strategy?
Use this to identify whether they understand your business and your industry and have identified the platforms that are most suited to growing your business. At the end of the day the reason you are hiring them is to boost your bottom line so knowing how they are aiming to achieve this will give you an idea whether they are going to be good for your business.
If they say “I will use Facebook because it is the biggest platform” or “I’ll use Facebook because everyone is on there” you will want to know how you can be successful on there, after all yes there are a lot of people on there but so too are a lot of businesses that have taken this approach and gotten lost in the noise. So, questioning whether your business is better suited to Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or any of the other social media platforms may be a worthwhile step to take.
How much content are you going to put out?
A single tweet. Not going to do much.
A Facebook post a month. Why even bother.
Knowing how many posts they are going to share will give you an idea of how much effort they are going to put into your page.
The average life of a tweet 18 minutes. The life of a Facebook post is around 5 hours. So being able to see a cohesive plan as to how to get your business noticed within all of this is key.
If you hear that people will get fed up of too much of your content. They’re wrong unless you are putting out boring content.
What are you going to do for my business?
Take me from 100 followers to 10,000 in a month. Unrealistic.
While increasing your follower counts is a nice thing to come about from your social media (it means people like what you are doing and want to see more). They are not going to pay the bills.
So, finding out how your social media manager plans on turning followers into paying customers is crucial in identifying whether they are able to help your business grow or just your follower numbers. After all if you are paying them then you should be seeing a return on that investment.
How quickly are you going to respond to enquiries?
Most people want to receive an answer within an hour when they message a brand on social media. If you are paying a social media manager to look after your accounts will they be able to provide quick customer service? Even at weekends?
What can also make a social media manager stand out here is whether they know your industry well enough that they won’t have to message you every time there is an enquiry, after all if they did this you might as well just do it yourself. You might also want to find out how they would handle a crisis, especially if you are giving them autonomy to make decisions on their own.
How will you build relationships?
While there is a place on social media to post sales messages, the first thought of someone managing your social should be to develop a relationship around the brand. Spamming your potential customers on social media is the quickest way for them to not become an advocate of your brand in the future.
This also lets you find out how your manager is going to target groups or are they just going to post content and hope that something sticks.
How will you measure success? Or failure?
If you are paying someone to manage your social media channels you will want to know that the investment is being repaid. They will have a clear plan to measure increase in spending or increase in orders that can be directly attributable to the social media work that they are putting in.
What you don’t want to be hearing is that your social media manager measures success through likes, followers and shares because unfortunately theses don’t always increase the bottom line of a business.
Can you prove it works?
Can they show past successes and more importantly prove them? Identifying what their previous KPIs were and how they measured success against them will help you to understand how they value success.
If you are hiring an external agency or freelancer can they show you testimonials from their previous clients that mention how well, they met the business objectives.
You want to know that they are not just someone who is being opportunistic and trying to make money because they ‘grew up with social media’.
Finding the right person to trust with your social media can be a minefield. At EPR Marketing I’m here to put your mind at ease as one of the top Social Media Marketing Companies in the United Kingdom so why not get in touch.
