The benefits of social media and why you need to do it are no longer relevant questions. What matters is how you do it. When companies get started on this, one of the questions I’m most frequently asked is whether social media should be outsourced, or done in-house? There is no one right answer, of course. Instead, understanding the pros and cons of both choices will lead to the best one for you. 

Over the last two years, we’ve had the opportunity to interact with more than 1,500 marketers from 250-plus organisations thanks to our social media workshops. This has been an extremely representative audience—ranging from a one-man company to a mega brand with more than 1,50,000 employees. Through our interactions with them, we’ve learnt that the choice between in-house and outsource is a function of two aspects—the kind of social engagement your company needs, and the company’s understanding of social media. 

As a thumb rule of sorts (mine), social media strategy, customer engagement and responses to conversations for a brand are ideally done in-house.  Social media isn’t a jazzy, new-age initiative. Social media marketing strategy needs to be aligned with organisation’s overall marketing strategy. An external agency or a consultant can productively contribute in this process but key marketing people within the organisation should own the strategy. For example, a global technology company we worked with last year got its formula just right. After attending one of our workshops, they brought us on as consultants. While we helped them refine their social media strategy, their marketing team was the custodian. 

Fundamentally speaking, the ultimate objective of using social media is to build relationships with customers. To do justice to the opportunity, people who understand the nerve of the customer are the best ones to drive conversations with them, even on social media. Your key marketers need to be involved. Also, because customer engagement is a function of both the content (Facebook wall posts, Twitter tweets), and the ability to initiate conversations, the person responsible for driving this engagement must understand the context. Most organisations tend to treat social media as a technology-oriented function, asking their SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) teams to take ownership. But, what a good social media initiative needs is a joint leadership of their marketing and customer relationship management teams. 

Managing your company’s reputation in the online world involves multiple aspects: monitoring, analysing and responding to the activity on various Social Media channels. While monitoring and analysing conversations for a brand can be completely outsourced, responding to conversations especially the sensitive ones must be managed in-house. It’s very difficult for an external entity to respond on your behalf and still maintain your brand voice. Still there are aspects of social media that you can give out, such as developing the applications, media buying and content creation. These are special skills that are difficult to build in-house. For example, when it comes to marketing on Facebook, developing applications is becoming very important. Successful Facebook applications need well-conceived concepts and creatives to be developed and promoted.

A company’s understanding of social media most determines whether they should outsource this skill or not. 

While your company must take an active part in the concept stage, the rest can be owned by a specialised social media agency. Content creation for social media can be specialised. It means using a variety of mediums—videos, pictures, presentations, blog posts and tweets. Videos certainly should be professionally produced to make an impact. Time and again, I see that companies underestimate the effort it takes to build scalable content. They should be urged to remember—social media is free but social media marketing isn’t. For large publishers, integrating social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn into their websites can be another opportunity for driving engagement. This is an even more technology-oriented task and can be outsourced to an external agency. 

Also, there are a number of avenues such as Facebook and LinkedIn advertising where social media can be categorised as a  paid medium. Look at e-commerce companies. They are leveraging Facebook not just for fan acquisition but also for driving potential customers onto their websites. Internet companies constitute around 20 per cent of our workshop participants and we’ve seen a significant increase in their Facebook advertising budgets in the last six months. Some of them are spending as much as Rs2 lakh a day on it. For a leading FMCG brand, while they had their internal team to take care of content and conversations on Facebook, as an agency we helped them acquire around a million fans.

A company’s understanding of social media most determines whether they should outsource this skill or not. Many companies who embark on a social media initiative still don’t have an answer to “why social media”? It seems like an obvious question to have asked before starting out but honestly a large number of these initiatives are still driven by ad-hoc impulses—pressure from a competitor, or orders from a boss who doesn’t want to be left behind.If the benefits of social media are not clearly established internally, commitment from top management to allocate the right resources and appropriate budget will be limited. Moreover, without clear objectives, the company won’t have the right metrics to measure campaign performance. Most of all, creating a social media strategy comes from understanding the medium. If the organisation doesn’t have clarity on that, it makes sense to engage with a specialised agency, preferably one that has served clients in the same industry. The same agency should be given the responsibility for executing the strategy.

Social media is an immediate, constantly iterative process. Companies get flustered with their agencies because they seem to think the strategy is not consistent. You need to be prepared that strategies are likely to change. The key to getting that right is finding the right agency—quite a challenge in itself. Keep in mind the skill you most need when you go scouting for an agency. The understanding of social media channels relevant to your business is vital. Say, if you are looking at leveraging video marketing, expertise in creating and promoting videos becomes critical. Similarly, if an application on Facebook is important for your strategy, the agency should have a strong in-house expertise or partnership with an apps company.Also, an agency’s experience in serving similar brands will be an advantage. For example, if you are a financial institution, an agency that has served brands in the financial services vertical will be sensitive to the dynamics of your industry. Even then, go for agencies which seem to have a well laid-out process for their campaigns. Remember— this isn’t maintenance outsourcing. Make sure you enter into “partnerships” with your agencies. Don’t use them just as vendors. 

Pradeep Chopra is the CEO of Digital Vidya, India’s premier social media training company. He can be reached atpradeep@digitalvidya.com and actively shares his views on LinkedIn and Twitter.