I love this article because it simply weighs the pros and cons of in house versus hiring an outside agency or consultant for your social media.  Being a social media consultant myself,  I find that this article accurately shows the pros and cons of each:

Sadly there’s no magic rubric for deciding whether an in-house social media workforce, a social media consultant, or an agency will best be able to meet your particular business needs. Like almost every business decision, it depends on your business’s goals, budget and particular situation.

There are, however, definite pros and cons to each approach. We’ve highlighted some of the most important factors to consider for each style of social media team.

If your business has gone through the process of deciding which type of social media team to instate, let us know about the factors you considered and how you came to your final decision in the comments below.

In-House Team

Handling all social media efforts in-house is often the most affordable route for small business owners. Per hour, an agency’s time or a consultant’s time is going to be much more expensive than a full or part-time employee.

But it’s a big job. Jamie Turner, the coauthor of How To Make Money with Social Media recommends that businesses contribute no less than 25% of one full-time employee’s time to social media efforts. There are, however, benefits to making this time investment.

“People inside can move quicker and always have their finger on the pulse of the company, which makes it easier for them to respond [on social media],” Turner says.

Outsourcing your social media presence to an agency, in addition to costing more, can be slow on a day-to-day basis. An agency that is handling a Twitter account might need to correspond with the company before it’s able to answer a question. Or it might need to ask for approval when unsure if an idea is in sync with the company’s overall business strategy.

Social Media Consultant

There isn’t really a narrow definition of “social media consultant.” Some have niche specialties and can help a company’s in-house team accomplish a specific social media task. Some help companies put an overall strategy in place and then leave the execution up to the company. And others are more like off-site community managers who execute the social media tasks for the company for an undetermined amount of time.

One advantage most consultants have over agencies is that they’re less expensive. “Typically you can pay [a consultant up to] $300 to $500 an hour,” says Jason Keath, the founder of social media education business Social Fresh. “If you put that same person inside of an agency, you’re adding a lot of overhead; you’re adding the corporate structure on top of it that has to be paid for as well.” Also on the cost front, consultants often require smaller time commitments than agencies.

Companies that are looking to fill in a specific aspect of their strategy often find hiring a consultant to be the best approach because they can seek a specific person that fits the niche they need help with. “If you have an in-house team, there may be a lot of knowledge there — and let’s say it’s digital PR knowledge,” says Keath, who has been consulting for the past two-and-a-half years. “But let’s say this team has never done blogger outreach before. Obviously bringing in somebody who has done blogger outreach is really going to speed up the process.”

Companies that plan to start their own in-house teams also may benefit from a consultant approach. Social media consultant Mirna Bardsees herself as an educator.

“Although an agency has results in mind, they are typically not the educators and they sometimes only look at the marketing aspect of social media,” she says. “They may also take a tactical instead of a strategic approach. Many times agencies or in-house teams are used mostly for development and execution; they are not meant to be business advisers who make overall business decisions.”

A consultant can help develop a social media strategy in line with your business objectives and play a role in teaching your in-house team how to execute it.

Agency

Most large PR agencies and many advertising agencies now have branches for handling a business’s entire social media presence. This kind of work differs from that of most consultants in that the agencies handle both strategy and execution. Jim Tobin, the president of Ignite Social Media, counts this among an agency’s advantages.

“Since we also execute for our clients, we have a good understanding of what’s realistic,” he says. “If we suggest things, chances are we’re also going to have to implement them.”

Another argument for using an agency is the wide range of experience that they generally have. In-house teams are typically isolated within their own companies and industries. Agencies have experience across multiple industries and may be able to spot a good idea that an in-house team would miss.

“Social media changes so rapidly that when you work with an agency, they’re typically more on the cutting edge of what’s coming down the pike because they’ve got 100 people out there looking around at the new stuff and thinking about the new stuff and sitting in meetings saying ‘hey, have you heard this new use of Foursquare?’ ” explains Turner.

More people who interact with more clients have obvious benefits in keeping up to speed on the latest social media strategies. But many consultants would argue that it’s more important to have a deep understanding in a valuable niche. Both Keath and Bard have done consulting work for agencies that wanted to learn more about social media strategy.

Hybrid Approach

Most companies use some combination of the above three approaches. Turner says he often sees companies who have an in-house person “on the front line” who runs accounts and answers questions via social media, but turn to consultant or agencies for high-level social media strategy.

“It’s a collaborative approach, even if you go with an agency,” explains Tobin, whose agency handles the social media strategy for companies like Microsoft, Disney and Nike. “The client contributes the business objectives and knows what can and can’t be supported…the agency brings the expertise in the space [because it lives] in social media marketing all day. Together those can be really powerful.”

Here is a link to the full article

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  She helps small businesses market themselves online by setting up social media and optimized blogs for small business owners and solopreneurs.  She then trains small business owners to use their blogs and social media to drive traffic and increase interest in their business. 

To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.

Social Media Campaigns That Become Spam

This is a great article because it shows the dangers of social media.  Social media is non-stop.  Social media is always.  Social Media is forever …  with that in mind, think about a campaign that has a beginning, a middle, an end and a budget – could that campaign be hurt when the social media budget is done, when the campaign is over?  Because again, social media is forever.  Read more here.

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  She helps small businesses market themselves online by setting up social media and optimized blogs for small business owners and solopreneurs.  She then trains small business owners to use their blogs and social media to drive traffic and increase interest in their business. 

To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.

When you are writing in social media:  writing tweets, writing facebook updates and adding content to your blog, it is important to spell check and to read what you have written.  Even then, editorial content is easily littered with improper grammar (I read over everything I write, use spell check and read again and I still will find errors – sometimes weeks later.  Did I say how happy I am that I don’t work in print?)  I found this post about how to treat your content in social media marketing and I felt that this is something fresh, not written about often.  Here is the quote, “The editorial management of social media should not be viewed that differently to editing a magazine, newspaper or television program. If you are a large brand with a million followers on Facebook for instance, there is an absolute requirement to keep those fans interested. Brands need to curate and provide interesting content. They need to find a consistent tone of voice. They need to engage effectively with their fans. As with more traditional publishing such as magazines or newspapers, if the content is not hitting the right notes, if it does not respond to what the readers ask for and engage or entertain, it risks losing those readers to a rival. The same is absolutely true in terms of brand’s social media presences.

Just as the traditional publishing world has suffered audience decline through the increased competition offered by a fragmenting media market, the same is rapidly becoming true in the world of social media. If as a brand, you have converted a fan through Facebook for example, you have to nurture that fan and grow your relationship with them or risk losing them to a competitor brand.

With an increasing number of brands building their social media presences, there is an increasing level of choice for consumers. Realistically, consumers are not going to be-friend every brand they vaguely like. They are going to cherry pick the very best, so if as a brand, you want to ensure it is your status updates that are filling your user’s news feeds, you need to quickly recognize that your role is one of publisher.”  Read the entire article here (and can I mention that I corrected a spelling error or two?)  Luckily, with the web, it is so easy to go in and fix. Read the entire post here.

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Unique, Interesting and Great Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.

I recently read an article titled ” The 5 Dangers of a Half-Hearted Social Media Campaign” and I really liked it.  Sometimes, or maybe often actually, businesses will just throw themselves into social media marketing themselves by starting a campaign of some sort but the campaign isn’t adequately planned and the execution is not focused (maybe due to lack of time or staff) and the result is poor results.  Here is a section from the article above regarding social media marketing:

Here are 5 pitfalls you are setting yourself up for by only making a half-hearted foray into social media. 

You can’t respond as fast as you need to
Social media is all about communicating in real-time. And communicating in real-time requires open dialogue and snap decisions – things that the traditional brand – consumer exchange does not involve. If you aren’t ready to have a round-the-clock discussion with your audience, they will take over the conversation, feel like you aren’t interested in participating and either lose interest themselves or become resentful. We see this happen when clients set up a Twitter account and don’t do more than the occasional self-promotional tweet. If you put yourself out there in social media, your audience expects you to have a dialogue with them. Building that expectation and letting them down is worse than never having entered because you’ve damaged your credibility in the process.

Dabbling = obvious lack of enthusiasm
The entire purpose of getting involved in social media is to inspire enthusiastic participation from both your own people and your audience, and half-hearted efforts never inspired anyone. If you have yet to find an enthusiasm for social media that makes you genuinely eager to get out there and meet the people you’re selling things to in cyberspace, and more importantly to really listen to them, you need to do some research and get convinced of how important it is. You’re lack of enthusiasm will only make people feel alienated from you.

You won’t be able to overcome the noise
Your audience is bombarded with messages all day long. Half-way will not get their attention because they tune most brand messaging out and instead focus on listening to each other, not to you. Going in half way will only ensure what resources you do devote to social media come to nothing. If you convinced your boss to give social media a try as a “cheap” option, you’re still expected to show some results at the end of the day, or you can kiss your social media program goodbye. 

It breaks fundamental marketing rules
Deciding to add a little social media to your marketing mix for the sake of doing it is contrary to good marketing. Your basis for all efforts should be solving clients’ problems to create pull, not just to make noise. Start like any other job with all the background research, strategy, targeting and high demands on creative work as you would for any other job. If you’re hearing suggestions that don’t go beyond “let’s start a Twitter account and Facebook fan page,” you should be worried. Start with a need, and from there decide what tools are the best way to solve it. Do not start with Twitter and Facebook and try to figure out how to shoehorn your brand into them. 

Best Buy took the perfect approach with their award winning Twelpforce campaign. They started with their customers’ problem (product support) and found the best way to solve it, which just happened to be Twitter. It ended in happy customers a Cannes Lion.

Failure is an option (when you do it right)
When you’re all in, people are forgiving of mistakes as long as you’re responsive and try to meet them half way.  When you get tyrannical after things don’t go your way, are you ever in for a backlash. Getting into social media means playing by its rules, and those rules do not include conservative policies like censorship and lawsuits. Apple and Nestle have both made costly errors in handling criticism by failing to respect people’s freedom to express themselves through social media. It’s their space, you’re just visiting. Going all in means letting go of control. Or rather, realizing you never had it.  Read The Full Article Here

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Unique, Interesting and Great Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.

You may or may not know that one of the components to successfully growing your network is the quality of your connections – meaning if someone who is a “connector” is following you, chances are he or she is also talking about you or retweeting you or checking in at your location.  Those are your target connections when growing your network.  I found some great tips on social media marketing last Friday, written by the Union Tribune.  Here are the tips:

A step by step guide to grow your network with Twitter (great social media marketing advice):

STEP 1: Complete your Twitter bio. Be sure to include information that will prompt people to follow you, including keywords that appeal to their interests. Don’t forget to display a link to your business’s website, and make the most of your Twitter avatar. It’s a small square shape, so pick a simple, bold image to identify your Tweets.

STEP 2: Use Twitter’s search capabilities

(search.twitter.com) to find, follow and reach out to people already Tweeting on your subject. Twitter’s search function is “real time” so you can find people talking right this instant about where to eat, stay, party, or shop in San Diego and join the conversation.

STEP 3: On Fridays, watch for Tweets containing #FollowFriday (sometimes #FF) for follower recommendations. Check out these recommendations and acknowledge them. Then give some #FollowFriday love to your favorite followers, too.

STEP 4: Search through and list your Twitter handle in directories that organize people’s Twitter accounts by subject area such as beer, clean tech, or running. Examples include

Twellow.com, Twibes.com, TwitterCounter.com, and followfinder.googlelabs.com. Take care to avoid spammy tools that automate the following process as that’s exactly how not to acquire the right kind of followers.

STEP 5: Visit the Twitter profiles of your favorite Tweeps to see if they’ve created any ‘lists’ of their followers that you can poach. Begin building lists of your own.

STEP 6: ReTweet things that you think will be of interest to your followers. ReTweeting is ‘paying it forward’ and the more you give, the more you get in social networks.

STEP 7: Attend a TweetUp or similar event where you can mix with your followers in person to solidify relationships as well as find new connections.

STEP 8: Share your Twitter handle everywhere — in your e-mail signatures, business cards, Linkedin profiles, website, signage, and advertising.

STEP 9: Generate great content.