Outsourcing your social media isn't all or nothing

I just got off the phone with Andrea Howard, president of Social Media Maxima after having reached out to her on behalf of Reputation.com. While I was boning up on what her agency did, I fell in love! Long story short (and this is my analogy) is that Social Media Maxima offers social media hair extensions, hair pieces, and wigs. What I mean to say is that Andrea Howard is all about making your already gorgeous head of hair even fuller and more luxuriant, building the sort of coverage and body that you’ve always wanted and maybe never have had.

Social Media Maxima doesn’t take over all of your social media content creation — unless you really want them to.

What they do do is post relevant, industry-specific content 3 times per week. The content is provided by the client from agreed-upon sources culled by their research experts.

So, what they do, at the very least, is provide relevant, generous, content. Yes, only thrice-a-week, but I see so many Twitter and Facebook platforms that have been forgotten for weeks. While 3 isn’t very many, $150/month isn’t that much either — but three times/week of good, generous, content, is just enough to act as those hair extensions that even out the bald spots of your social media posting and the limited resources you might have on hand — especially when it comes to vacations or unforeseen oversights.

I mean, for only $275/month (not week), you can have a fully-outsourced social media package — and why not?

Even if you, yourself, and your team are super-excited to keep up-to-date with posting, tweeting, blogging, and all of that, what harm would a little more do? As they say in the Episcopal Church, “many hands make light work.”

To misappropriate the Anne-Marie Slaughter controversial article in The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, regular companies that do most of their work and business IRL (in real life) and who have no innate desire to bog down their limited resources with a full-time director of social media or online community manager — they just want a little more juice.

And even if you’re the corner pizza joint or the small place that sells second-hand baby stuff, you cannot ignore your social media footprint — you really still need to control and update your Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ profiles. Why?

Well, because social media has zero-barrier-to-entry and because so many people actually do use Google and social sharing and online chatter to find, discover, retweet, and refer just about everything in their lives, one cannot ignore or avoid social media, social media engagement, social media marketing, and also social media content-creation.

However, if you’re not passionate about any of this stuff — and if you’re not passionate about all of it, you really need to make certain that you’re not relegated to have to do all of this — from Pinterest to Instagram, from your Facebook Profile to your Facebook Pages, from Twitter to Google+ — because you’ll only end up wanting to take out your eyes, smash your various and sundry smart devices, and you’ll surely end up petering out before long, leaving your entire online Kingdom to the ravages of time, the shifting sands, and tumbling tumbleweeds — you’ll end up with a useless ghost town that will surely portray your company, your brand, your storefront, and your practice as zombiefied.

I know, I know: you wonder how a company like Andreas’ ever gets your company pitch-perfect? Get over yourself! I guarantee that a) you’re not that special b) you’re not that unique c) social media’s not a ghost-written autobiography (which everyone does, anyway) d) and, to be honest, a professional writer can do a much better job of emulating your best self than you can do representing your own authentic self. Yes, I said it: a fake communications pro can always be you better than you can ever imagine yourself to be, more consistently, more professionally, and without fail, than you can. That’s why you bloody well hire a PR person and a copywriter and a content guy and a graphic designer and all that other stuff.

And yet, too many of us persist on thinking that we can somehow nail our image, perfectly, forever, on social media, by ourselves.

I didn’t know that Andrea Howard and Social Media Maxima even existed until this afternoon, and I have never met her — and I am not telling her about this; that said, I am impressed with what she’s doing — and especially her price-point and her willingness to not need to take over social media from her clients outright but rather to create a hybrid, allowing her clients to contribute as much content as often as they like, themselves, while still knowing that the entire social media strategy is not dependent only on when the Muses visit but every single week, every single year.

If you’ll indulge me, it’s sort of like landscaping: I love gardening but I don’t like maintaining, feeding, and trimming lawns and hedges. If I am made to do lawn care and hedge-trimming all my myself, I will end up hating it all and will probably abandon gardening as well — and I might move into an apartment since I hate mowing so much; however, if I hire a landscaping service, it doesn’t mean I don’t have a green thumb, it just means I am focusing on doing only the things I love and relinquishing the things I hate to people who are either better at them or more prepared to get them done on your behalf, for whatever reason. In this case, for pay.

So, get over yourself. Take a hybrid approach. Keep the things you like doing on social media, and outsource the rest, be it to Andrea Howard’s Social Media Maxima or someone else. You will surely not lose your soul if you outsource the things that drive you nuts and you hate to someone who does it better than you do and for a living.

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