How Do Beginners Start Social Media Marketing?

Hi,

As a social media account manager (in an agency) for local businesses, it might wonder you to hear me say what I’m about to say. However, here it goes:

The truth is that for most small businesses, hiring an agency to handle your social media activities is not your best move.

Here’s why:

In most cases, without advertising (a.k.a. investing money) to support your campaigns, social media marketing generally has the lowest and slowest ROI of all digital marketing efforts. Therefore, it costs a lot to do social media marketing through an agency.

Unless you’re a reputed brand, or already have a dedicated customer base, chances are that there are much better ways for you to be allocating your marketing/advertising budget.

Unlike with SEO and digital PR - where it usually makes more sense cost-wise to hire an agency rather than set up an in-house team - it’s totally possible to manage your social media on a DIY level.

This is especially true if you’re able to train internal resources. Plus, the tools that are required to manage and monitor your social media marketing efforts are much less expensive than in the PR or SEO sphere.

The bottom line is, you might not need an agency to manage your social media marketing. Chances are, you just need the right strategy. That’s why I always try to educate and/or train my social media clients especially those who are reasonable.

If you search the internet, you surely find hundreds of free training manual on the social media marketing from the professionals which explain all of the processes and tools that are useful to manage social media accounts, so that you can get the most out of your social media - all while keeping it in-house and on-budget.

But the reality is, you will never come to know -

• How to use social media to expand your reach and grow your audience
• Best practices for each social channel from the nitty-gritty of what to post and when to use advanced techniques for engaging with influencers
• How to use Twitter as a PR tool to get major media coverage
• How to create, manage, and promote hashtags (and when not to use them)
• How to beat the dreaded Facebook algorithm changes with Facebook Groups
• How to manage and harness communities from LinkedIn to Instagram
• The best tools for measuring ROI
• And MANY more!

And unfortunately, the actuality is no one will share their secret sauce with you for free when you are likely to become their competitor on social media. Do a Google search and formulate/follow a strategy for social media is really valueless and can cost you a lot of money.

So the best way to deal with this crisis is by taking the help of a consultant - a professional social media consultant. That’ll help you achieve your business goals by staying within your budget and stipulated time frame. That way you can channelize the good things towards your goal.

Summary for your memory:

• Selfish prejudice feeds the ego. Don’t point fingers at others and fail to learn from failures. If you don’t know anything, take the help of others where it is required. Too much confidence leads to bad decisions.
• Pessimism makes things seem less fruitful than they are. Do positive thinking exercises and start by taking small steps towards the goal. Don’t let opportunities go for unreasonable fear of loss.
• Fundamental outsourcing work-related error causes us to blame others (read as social media account managers) for their mistakes and external factors for our own. Don’t judge, rather find out the reasons behind slipups used by your niche.
• Gambler’s fallacy is when we draw false assumptions from historical data. Beat this by continually updating your expectations and communicating with your social media manager. Keep a sensible standard that holds to reality. Think forward, not backward.

Good luck!

Partha