The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Social Media for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate. Between managing daily operations, finances, and staff, social media management might be low on your priority list. However, social media is an essential part of modern marketing and is a powerful tool to help businesses reach their customers. To help you navigate the complex world of social media, consider outsourcing to a social media agency. Here are some benefits:

1. Expertise

Social media agencies employ experts in the field who have a deep understanding of the various platforms, tools, and strategies needed to make a business stand out online. These professionals have experience managing social media accounts for businesses across various industries and can tailor a strategy to fit your specific needs. By outsourcing to an agency, you can rest assured that your social media presence is in the hands of experts who can help your business grow.

1. Time-saving

Managing social media is time-consuming, and as a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate. By outsourcing social media management to an agency, you can free up time and focus on other essential tasks, such as sales and operations. Social media agencies can take over content creation, posting, and engagement, ensuring that your social media channels are active and engaging.

1. Cost-effective

Outsourcing social media management can be more cost-effective than hiring an in-house social media specialist. An agency can provide a range of services that would typically require multiple hires in-house, such as content creation, analytics, and advertising. Outsourcing also provides more flexibility and allows you to scale your social media presence as needed, without the costs associated with hiring and training additional staff.

1. Increased engagement

Social media agencies have access to tools and techniques to increase engagement on your social media channels. They can track and analyze data to determine the best time to post, the most effective type of content, and the optimal frequency of posts. This data-driven approach can help increase engagement and reach new audiences.

1. Brand consistency

Maintaining brand consistency across all social media platforms can be challenging. Social media agencies have experience creating and implementing brand guidelines to ensure your brand's messaging is consistent across all channels. This consistency builds brand recognition and loyalty among your followers.

In conclusion, outsourcing social media management to an agency can provide your small business with expertise, time-saving, cost-effectiveness, increased engagement, and brand consistency. By partnering with a social media agency, you can leverage their experience and resources to grow your social media presence and help your business succeed. If you need help.. reach out anytime at RealtimeOutsource.com

The Impact of Social Media on Doing Business in 2022

Honestly, Social Media is a huge boon to business. Sure, you can use it to contact family and friends, keep up to date with things in your circle of influence, or your community, but where it really shines is in the ability to actually help your business grow. It doesn't matter whether you're starting out or not, Social Media is extremely important to anything that you want to do business-wise.

With that said on just how powerful Social Media can potentially be for any business from small to large, let's at least step into the actual ways Social Media can impact you if done correctly.

The first major impact that Social Media has is, of course, with Branding. Branding a business in this day and age is a great way for a business to outreach further to customers, clients, and instantly get you recognized. Whether it's through a logo, your products or services, or anything like that, it'll help you stick in people's minds a lot easier and can certainly give you a leg up over competitors.

And honestly, what better way to improve your branding is improving engagement through social media where you can reply to people, introduce products and services, run raffles and contests or generally just do things that'll help get eyes on you and traffic to your websites.

This leads to the second major impact; engagement. As mentioned above, you can start to actively engage with an audience who in turn will start to engage back with you. This, of course, has two major effects - especially if it's positive. Not only does it establish a relationship between you and the potential customer/client, but if the interaction is positive this can lead them to either retweeting/reblogging/sharing anything that you post, which will further draw eyes to your Social Media Account.

After all, that's the ENTIRE point of Social Media: To be social with other people. By doing so, you've made someone who will think of you positively and come to you first for their needs if they need something that you offer - which creates Brand Loyalty - and also made them want to share that positive interaction with other people who will see that and also want to come and check you out which further drives up engagement and can potentially help you to reach your targeted demographic a lot easier.

The third major way that Social Media impacts businesses are in feedback. Normally, you don't get instant feedback, and when it comes time to analyze your marketing strategies you often need all sorts of information to see if it was effective or not - and to potentially ask customers directly via surveys and all on what you're doing well, and what you're doing wrong.

Not so with Social Media. If you do something wrong, your audience will immediately let you know, and if you do something good they will also let you know. Often you can tell how well received your posts and all on Social Media are via engagement and immediate feedback via comments and all and that often can tell you exactly what you're doing right, where you're going wrong, and can course-correct any marketing strategy on the fly.

Of course, there are a lot of other ways that Social Media helps businesses with growth and all, but these are at least the three major ways that can help out in amazing, impactful ways. In today's modern business world, not having a Social Media Marketing Strategy can seriously be detrimental.

4 Effective Social Media Tips For 2021

This year marks the first full year after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the globe into digital marketing. Is your business or brand ready to respond to the need for high-performing digital content? Your success may depend on how well you are using your digital presence!

Whether you are an individual running a personal account or you are in charge of digital marketing for a business, follow these tips to supercharge your social media this year!

1. Know Your Platforms & Use Them Strategically

The past few years have seen the rise of social media platforms for nearly every type of user. From image-based social media (Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest) to the video-centric social media platforms (TikTok, YouTube) to news media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), there are more social media platforms than you can keep track of!

Invest time into researching which platforms are best for your needs, and focus your energies on creating engaging content on those channels. This will help avoid social media burnout and see the highest ROI on your time and investment.

2. Invest In Paid Advertising

Social media has quickly grown to become one of the most effective advertising channels.

With so many consumers making purchasing decisions through ads they see on social media, you should be investing marketing money into social media ads. Combine your advertising with high-quality content and watch your traffic soar.

3. Get Creative With Your Content

Social media algorithms reward content that users engage with. With video and photography continuing to lead the way, make sure that your accounts are engaging with users. If you find that a particular post style isn’t seeing any traction, switch it up and try another type of media. Stay consistent, and keep your posts varied.

4. Give Your Social Media A Personality

Have you seen the big brand social media accounts that have gone viral for their funny, snarky responses with users? While there is great danger that comes with going too wild with your social media, don’t be afraid to engage with your users.

Create fun content, and use social media channels such as Instagram Stories and Reels to engage with your audience. Build polls, create giveaways, and encourage conversation on your posts to see your content reach a wider audience.

Don’t Forget To Have Fun With Social Media

There are plenty of ways that you can quickly build an engaged follower base on social media. The tips above are easy ways to see your ROI climb in 2021 and can be done starting today!

While you are at it, remember to have fun. Running social media can feel overwhelming and constant - so don’t forget why it exists in the first place - to bring people together in the digital community.

Keep the positive purpose of your social media in front of you, align your strategy to meet the needs of your audience, and watch your success skyrocket!

Two Most Common Mistakes Businesses make on Social Media

Today were going to be discussing all too common mistakes that appear on businesses social media posts, these mistakes will make your business look less credible and will turn customers away. We will be discussing how to remedy these unfortunate situations.

 1.      Grammar

First, we will be discussing grammar errors in your posts, on your social media pages, or your website. Things such as using the wrong there, their, they’re, or using inappropriate capitalization, makes your page look as if you did not take the time to proofread before posting it. This will make consumers think if you couldn’t even take the time to do a quality inspection on something as small as a post, are you really going to inspect the quality of your products before shipping them? It makes your overall business seem sloppy and not well polished. Ways to cure this, would be using an app such as Grammarly, which helps you to find and correct grammar mistakes while you are creating your posts. Another way would be just to thoroughly go over your posts once or twice, to ensure maximum quality. While a mistake or two will undoubtedly make its way through your defenses one way or another, taking the necessary precautions to prevent this are worthwhile and will be appreciated by your customers.

2.      Having Poor Quality Photos

Second, another common mistake we see on businesses social media pages is poor quality photos. This is very off-putting to consumers and is disappointing to see that you could not take the time to either edit your photos, invest in or pay someone to craft high quality photos for you. It makes your business look very generic, if you have grainy, low resolution photos, but with a little work you can have very nice-looking photos, which is typically synonymous with quality in consumers’ minds. This will get your customers excited to see if the pictures look this good, they can only imagine how great the actual product will be! Ways to fix this common mistake, would be to invest in a decent DSLR camera, doesn’t have to be a top of the line and there are many affordable options to choose from. You could even use some of the newer cell phone cameras as a substitute, the newer models have very capable cameras on them and with some editing can create astounding photos. That brings us to our next solution, which is investing in some good editing software, many of the Adobe Creative Suite programs are excellent options such as Lightroom and Photoshop and are worthwhile investments for any business looking to create high quality photos, logos, and among many other different kinds of marketing material.