Digital Wrap-Up

Unveiling the Benefits and Processes of Outsourcing Social Media Management

• Riley Harden

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Ever wondered why your social media presence isn't giving you the business boost you expected? Prepare to have your concerns addressed and questions answered as we pull back the veil on outsourcing social media management. We guide you through the journey of allowing professionals to take the reins of your social media, freeing up your time and maximizing your online potential. The insights we share will illuminate how this process works starting from the contract signing, to understanding your business goals for a tailored strategy, and managing expectations for the best outcomes.

Now, imagine you've decided to hire a marketing firm to spruce up your business's social media persona. We get down to the nitty-gritty of what this entails. It's all about setting realistic expectations, adapting the content as needed and allowing for a buffer period to assess the effectiveness of the partnership. This episode is packed with invaluable insights, whether you're considering outsourcing your social media or you're a marketing firm eager to deliver top-notch service for your clients.

Plus, we have some exciting news on the latest updates on various platforms, including the expansion of Threads to the EU and the introduction of keyword search. Stick around to the end for a thrilling announcement about a new initiative from our team.

Subscribe to the Social Media Six: https://www.socialmedia6.com/subscribe
Contact Harden Digital & Design for help with social media: https://hardendigital.com/social-media-services/

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Riley:

Outsourcing your social media management is a big investment for businesses, and there's a lot of questions out there about what the process is once you actually hire on a marketing firm like ours, and kind of how you get things set up when you actually start creating content. Should you see success right away. There's just all these different things that go into beginning the process of outsourcing your social media, and I'm going to answer some of those questions and talk about the process that we have here at Harden Digital and Design to hopefully clear up some of that for business owners, managers, if you're looking to potentially outsource your social media. Before that, though, we're going to get into this week's social media updates, talk about some platform updates and big news, and then I'm also going to have a big announcement about a new initiative and thing that we're doing here at Harden Digital and Design, so stay tuned for all of that.

Riley:

In the latest episode of the Digital Wrap Up, music Playing. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Welcome back to another episode of the Digital Wrap Up.

Riley:

Just the old TikTok where you have to be under a minute by any means. You can range out and do longer videos. So test it out, see what works best for you and your audience and then go from there. But just always be adapting, always be trying new things and don't just get into one mindset of I have to have 30 second videos or nobody's gonna watch it, because that's obviously not true anymore. Next up, I guess, the next two here for me talking about threads. So this first one is kind of ignorance on my part, because I hadn't really paid attention too closely that threads hasn't even been launched in the EU yet. I just assumed that it was. You know, eu and the US pretty similar in terms of you know, language and different barriers like that to getting the app and platform launched. So I just, you know thought, oh, it's available in the US, that means it's probably available in the EU as well. But that is not true. But recent reports say that it's going to launch in the EU within the next month. So by the end of this year, early next year, threads will be available in Europe, or in the EU specifically. So if I have some European listeners, congratulations, you're going to be getting threads. But it just shows that it's going to be expanding.

Riley:

Threads is on the rise, I think. In general I've been using it more and more, getting a lot of engagement, a lot of interactions, and they're just finding ways to grow like crazy. Right now they're making sure there's a lot more spam and bots that are showing up on the platform. But they're doing. They're finding more specific ways and creative ways to kind of avoid that with some of the features that they're rolling out. But I think they are growing.

Riley:

I know I saw another report that downloads for threads is surpassed Twitter or X, which people are like oh, threads is bigger than growing, faster than Twitter. I would kind of expect that because X and Twitter have been around much longer, not many people are downloading the app new for the first time, whereas people are obviously downloading threads for the first time. So I would kind of expect that to be the case. But people will twist it however. They want to make it seem like threads is better than Twitter, growing faster than Twitter, whatever it may be. So in terms of overall growth, yes, threads is probably growing faster than X because it's still new and more people are trying it out. But in terms of daily users, I'm not sure the difference between X and threads. I would still probably say the X is higher, but I don't have those numbers specifically in front of me.

Riley:

But one of the key platform updates that I think continues to drive more and more people to threads is they released keyword search on the app for every region that threads is available in not the EU, apparently, but everywhere that threads is available. They've now introduced keyword search so you're not just searching for individual users or accounts, you can actually search a topic, which is a feature that people have been asking for from the very beginning. It will help discoverability a whole lot for people posting and want to be engaging on one specific topic or look for a specific topic. This is a huge new feature and I actually just tried it the other day, before I even knew that this was officially out when there's a big news of the Grand Theft Auto game release in the trailer being released on threads and I just searched GTA in the search window and it came up right away and I found it, and I found a bunch of other people posting it, talking about it, whatever it may be. So I think that's going to continue to be a huge deal for them, as this keyword search capabilities continuously rolling out new features new product, not new products, but new features to help grow the app, to make it better, and this is probably one of the bigger ones in a recent while. That will help tremendously.

Riley:

I think more and more people are finding like live conversations about sports or different events or things happening in the now, especially with this new search feature, and I think that's really going to drive conversations on threads even more. So it's not just, you know, random posts that can be responded to at any time, but it's more in the now. People are going there. I think people will start turning more to threads when they know that they can have live in the now conversations about specific things happening at this instant. So that'll be a big one. I know they're planning some few other ones, but I'll you know. This is enough updates for now, so we'll go ahead and move on from there, but that was the last one. I think threads, like I said, is something that I'm using more and more of and actually enjoying it. It's less of the negativity and spammingness of Twitter and actual getting a lot of conversations there. So that'll do it for this week's social media updates.

Riley:

So we're going to go ahead and transition into talking about outsourcing your social media. You know, don't have a guest on, so don't need to have a break in the action, but I do want to introduce something before we get to talking about outsourcing social media, and that's a new newsletter that we are releasing this week. So I'm recording this on December 6th and the newsletter will come out on December 8th for the first time and it's going to be kind of a all-inclusive social media newsletter similar to what we just did on the podcast, but it's going to be a little more, more in depth and offer some different opinions and point of views on social media. It is called the Social Media 6. You can check it out now at socialmediasixcom slash subscribe and that is Social Media 6, the number not spelled out dot com slash subscribe. And if you subscribe before this Friday, december 8th, you will get the very first issue.

Riley:

But, as the 6 would imply, we're going to talk about 6 of the latest news, trends, articles, platform feature updates, tips and tricks. It's just going to be all things social media, where people who struggle to stay up with everything that's happening in the world of social media whether it's trending topics, about, you know, elon Musk telling every, all the advertisers to go f themselves, or whatever it may be talking about some of these update, updates to threads. That's going to be our place where we can really connect with people on a quicker basis than listening to a podcast or, you know, scrolling through our social media to see all these updates of one by one throughout the week. So it'll be once a week, every Friday, every Friday morning, you'll get an email in your inbox just six quick, quick hits. This is what's happening in the world of social media. Read it in, you know, five minutes or less, and then be on your way. But it'll help social media managers, it'll help business owners who are running their own social media, help influencers, creators who need to stay on top of these things but find it hard to do so. All of it will be right in your inbox for you for just a quick read. So, again, that's socialmedia6.com slash subscribe and social media 6, the number 6.com so excited for that one. We're using a new platform to send the newsletter, so we're going to be expanding that as we continue to find new ways to reach new audiences and and grow the business here at Harden Digital and Design.

Riley:

I do want to mention that I have been sick the past couple of days, so I'm sorry if I cough in the middle of this or pause to take a drink, like I'm about to do, but I wanted to get a podcast out this week, so we are suffering through the sore throat. But anyways, on to today's topic what to expect when outsourcing your social media. Like I said in the beginning, this is something that doesn't get talked about as much. You know, we're always talking about the more sales side of things, telling you what we can do, how we do it. You know that side of it. But what happens when we actually okay, you've signed on with an agency whether it's us or somebody else to manage your social media. What happens now?

Riley:

Before I kind of get into the process, I just want to talk generally about outsourcing your social media. Outsourcing is great, usually cheaper than hiring somebody full-time right, you don't have to worry about benefits doing hiring somebody on training them, so it's usually cheaper, quicker to get implemented. You don't have to, hopefully, worry about the work being professional, because we are professionals. I can't speak for other agencies, but when you work specifically with us, you know we're going to be spell checking, we're going to be making sure everything looks great. We're not going to be posting things that are inappropriate or saying inappropriate things. So there's tons of different benefits for outsourcing, and one, I guess one of the bigger ones is it saves you your time, gives you more free time to worry about working on the business.

Riley:

Running the business, you know that's oh, the big reason we work with so many small businesses is they are busy running their business. So, outsourcing, you don't have to worry about your social media, we'll handle it for you, we'll take care of it. And it allows you to focus on the other aspects of running your business without training somebody, without bringing somebody on and doing all the HR and paperwork and all this other stuff. So we sign a contract, we set up all the accounts and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. There's obviously other things you might worry about when we get started, but for the most part it's more carefree and easier for business owners, managers, whoever we're working with.

Riley:

So we've signed the contract, got the first payment. What do we do now? Right? So we typically do three month trial periods. So the first month people were like okay, we've signed the contract, let's start creating content. Wrong, that is not what we do. When we sign the contract and everything's. The first invoice has been paid, which the reason I emphasize that is because we've gone into situations where we've started working before they've paid the invoice and then they end up not paying the invoice for several weeks or a month, and then we've done all this work already and now they're behind. For us, that's not how it works, because we are a small business. Our time is money, our time is very valuable and we don't have tons of overhead capital, right? So we're investing our time. We need to get paid for that. That's just how business runs, and we have gotten screwed on the back end side of things before. So we always wait for that first payment, that first invoice, to be paid and the contract to be signed. Once that's done generally takes us about two weeks from that date to get up and running. Why does it take two weeks? You're like, oh, two weeks, that's already half of the first month and, yes, I understand that.

Riley:

But there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that we have to do to make sure we're ready to start creating content. Things like getting access to all the accounts that can. Depending on how much free time you have, that can take a while. You have to give us either admin permissions on LinkedIn, facebook, or have to give us the login information for X, instagram, threads, tiktok, whatever it may be. Sometimes that's harder than you think because you haven't logged in for a year or more and you don't remember the passwords. So then we have to go through that whole process and sometimes it's great, sometimes it's seamless and you have all that information. Perfect. If you are looking to outsource with somebody and you can gather all that information before, that is extremely helpful and saves a lot of time and back and forth.

Riley:

But then also, on the other side, if you don't have the accounts set up yet, we have to go and create the accounts and create the profiles. Make sure they're filled out right, the cover image is good, the profile image is set up right, all the about information links are there, everything there, so that when people start discovering your profile, it's all done professionally. So logging into current accounts, setting up new accounts, that's the first step. Once we're there, we then work with every client that we onboard. We develop a brand new social media strategy. If you've had one in the past, great, we'll maybe look at it and kind of take some notes. But we start from scratch with every new client. We talk about the audience, the goals, which platforms we're going to use, what strategies we're going to use on the platform, what types of content we're going to create. All this different stuff goes into a strategy that we build out.

Riley:

We build a rough draft first, based on what we know from our consultation and what the business is, what we can find on your website. Then we take that rough draft and we have an hour or two meeting with our clients and we go over it page by page, line by line. This is what our goals are. This is our audience If there's tweaks and say, oh well, no, we're more focused on that, that's perfectly fine. That's what we're meeting there with meeting with them for. We just spend as much time as needed to make sure both sides are on the same page.

Riley:

We want to know as much about your business. You want to know as much about us and our process. There is a learning curve. We don't know everything about every industry. We're the experts in marketing, but we're not the experts in painting or whatever your industry is or whatever your business does. There is some kind of learning time and that strategy is helping us learn more about your business. We review it in person, make changes, lay out the game plan. We're all on the same page.

Riley:

Then we talk about the process of creating content. There's a few different ways to do this. Some clients want to see draft posts so that they can review them and say, yeah, that's how that looks good. Or maybe we don't use this certain phrase or this certain word when talking about our services or our team. We have some clients that have their members. They're called something different than just members or customers or clients or whatever it may be. Getting that exact terminology is always important for us because we want it to be authentic to you. That's what people who are coming in to see you, who work with you, are going to be here in and, knowing so, we want it to be as authentic to you as possible.

Riley:

Not every client that we onboard wants to see drafts. I generally recommend it, at least for the first month or two, so that we just make sure we're all on the same page with language and graphics, images, videos, whatever it may be. That's one part of the process that we have to determine. Again, this is all still before we start creating content. The next thing is what days are we sending the post over for reviews? If we don't hear anything from you, does that mean it's good or should we follow back up? We just want to be on the same page in terms of how we send stuff to you, how you look at it, what's good for us, what's good for you? Should we send it on the Tuesday before the upcoming week, so that you have Wednesday, thursday, friday to look at it? Then we'll schedule it out. All that stuff we just spent some time talking about. That seems like a lot, right? That's why I typically say it takes at least two weeks to get everything up and running before we even create our first piece of content.

Riley:

When people expect, hey, let's go ahead and start creating content, there's nothing more that I would love than to start creating content right off the bat, but I know from experience that it's probably going to be pretty crappy content because I don't know the background, I don't know your story, I don't know all these different things that we need to typically spend time learning about you so that we can make content that's best for you. I could throw stuff together, yes, but it might not be on brand for you or it might not really resonate with your audience, and I don't want to just throw stuff up for the sake of throwing stuff up, because we're already a week and a half into our contract and you haven't thrown up any posts yet. That's just my personal preference. If we're contracted to do three posts a week or five posts a week, we generally make that setup over the life of the contract anyways, because we'll be sharing more and more as we go on. But typically speaking, two weeks at a minimum expect that it'll take to get everything set up before we go. So we've got everything set up. We're finally ready to start creating content.

Riley:

What happens now? First thing I always stress is don't expect instant success. Don't expect to go viral the very first post that we create for you. That's highly unlikely, especially if your accounts are brand new. If we just created your Facebook, we just created your TikTok or Instagram. Your posts aren't going to go viral right away. We'll do some things add hashtags, locations, reply to people all this stuff to help Gain some attraction to your page. Excuse me, but you're not gonna go viral right away. Or if you are, you're extremely lucky and we just create a really good content. But that's not the normal Can't say. I'm not saying it won't happen, but don't have the expectation that you're gonna have thousands of followers overnight and you're gonna have Hundreds of thousands of views. Whatever it may be that your expectations are, lower them for the first couple of weeks. Right, we're still learning. We're still testing, figuring out what content works best when best times the post are. All these different things.

Riley:

We're not just throwing up post to be throwing up post. That's why you hired us. Right, we take the strategy and Build on that behind the scenes. Because if we're just throwing up post to throw up post randomly, without putting any thought into it. You could be doing that right if you have the time, of course. But we really we analyze, we look at things, we track things so that we can start Shifting the content creation, the scheduling, whatever it may be, to start getting More views, more clicks, more shares, more engagement, all that stuff. So it's never just throw stuff up to throw stuff up, and that takes time, especially working with Organic social media solely so, when we're not boosting posts, we're not running ads, we're doing it solely organically, which means I'm just posting without spending any money and Hoping we get some traction right. There's different ways to gain traction by posting organically, but Just keep in mind, if we're not putting money into it a lot of time, the growth is a lot slower and that's just how it is. It's not meaning the content isn't good, we're not doing our jobs correctly, whatever it may be. That's just the nature of working with social media organically.

Riley:

And again, I guess the last point there is we're always testing right. This video Hit or this video didn't hit? Was it because it was at a not peak hour that we posted it? Or the video quality wasn't great, the audio wasn't great, or maybe the sound wasn't on brand, whatever it may be. We're always testing, evaluating, seeing what can work, what we can do to make things better.

Riley:

So that's especially kind of why we do the three-month buffer period on all of our contracts, right. So we go into 90-day contracts because of everything that I just mentioned the testing, trying things out, no instant, not no instant success. But it's harder to get instant success. So we say first three months testing period, trial period. Let's give this a go. Is it working? Is the content resonating? Are people actually engaging? Are we growing the following, all this stuff we kind of look at over the first three months if you're happy, great. If you're not happy, then we're not gonna lock you into a year-long contract and upset you or do anything there. Um, nine times out of ten you're happy, but at least working with the clients we've worked with Humble brag, I guess. But that three-month period just gives us some buffer time to get on the same page. Everybody Start creating content great, I guess.

Riley:

Another thing backtracking real quick to actually creating the con content we need to plan out like, if you're gonna be on video, like, right, we have a chiropractic Client and we record the doctor all the time and some of the staff and what days work best to set you up or to record you and set up b-roll all this different stuff. So that's part of the planning process for creating content as well. But Again back to the three-month thing. Once we do the, the planning, the strategizing and all that, again it's that's like a two-week process and then that would just leave us two weeks of posting. For if we just did one month at a time Right where we locked into one month up front, two weeks is not enough time to gauge whether something's working or if we're growing or if it's successful, whatever it may be. So three months, that's it. After that, no hard feelings, give us 30 days, heads up, we'll move on. We're not gonna hold your accounts hostage. We'll hand them back over to you if you want.

Riley:

We've had people that said, hey, can you just stay on and be an admin on the Facebook page, just in case we have questions as we transition or start posting ourselves, whatever it may be. That three-month period is really time for both sides to evaluate if it's going to work long term and and we've had some clients that don't work for whatever reason sometimes People hire us and they don't want to give up creative freedom to us, right, they want to be more in control and we're sending over draft post and they just, for whatever reason they're like I'm not faulting or blaming anybody. I can completely understand the concept or the feeling. But they change everything and they it's just like sometimes it's just not a natural good fit and that's completely fine. We understand it. We won't hold it against you, but that's why we have that timeframe and don't lock in too long-term contracts. So that was kind of the last point.

Riley:

A lot of it, you know, once we hit that three months, we're pretty much in a really solid groove by that point. We know the process of recording and sending stuff over taking photos, are you sending us stuff, are we coming out on scene or to your office All that gets ironed out in those first three months and then, like I said, by that time we're pretty much cruising and you know we're in a good rhythm of creating content, getting stuff posted. You've seen three months worth of analytics reports and can see if it's working and you know if you've gotten new customers, new clients or people visiting your website based on that. So that's kind of the process and you know the background into what happens when you hire a marketing firm like ours to manage your social media. So I know it's again, it's a big investment. I know that. I understand that.

Riley:

I'm a business owner myself and I'm always nervous to spend money, especially, you know, on a month-by-month basis, for you know the cost of our services. That's a scary thought, especially for smaller businesses. But there is a process to it, there is a reason for it and hopefully this information kind of cleared up some of that and gives you some more insight into what actually happens behind the scenes. When you do work with us at Harden Digital and Design Can't say it's the same for everybody. I will say it's probably generally like that, some type of process like that to onboard clients and things like that. So hopefully that's helpful to you.

Riley:

If you are in a spot where you want to be reaching more people, you want to get the good work that you're doing in front of more people, more eyes, especially moving into 2024, reach out to me. My email is Riley at hardendigitalcom, or you can visit our website, hardendigitalcom to check out all of our services. Talks a little bit about the process. Everything we do, from a social media audit to managing your accounts full time and creating all the content for you. Reach out to us, send us a message on our website, email me directly and I'd be happy to chat with you and discuss ways that we can help your business grow in 2024. So again, email is Riley at hardendigitalcom and I'd be happy to chat. Let's help your business grow in 2024. But I think that will do it for this week's episode of Digital Wrap Up.

Riley:

Again, super excited for the Social Media 6 newsletter to come out this week. Be sure to subscribe Hannah, which she's been on the podcast a few times now. She will be the one actually writing it and I've given her total creative control. It's not going to be a super corporate and formal newsletter. It's going to be fun, conversational. It's supposed to be a resource that people enjoy reading. So really looking forward to that. Again, go to Social Media 6, as in the number 6. Not spelled out S-I-X, but Social Media 6, the number dot com slash. Subscribe, get on the list, check out the first newsletter this week and it'll be in your inbox every Friday morning. So with that we're going to go ahead and wrap up the Digital Wrap Up one of my favorite puns. But until next time, take care and we will see you on the next episode of the Digital Wrap Up. Hello everyone.

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