Whenever someone asks, "Should I outsource my social media?" I respond, "Well, maybe you shouldn't."Yet, there’s two factors to consider before deciding whether or not you should outsource.
Two Factors To Consider When Deciding Whether or Not to Outsource Social Media

1.) Time
You've got Facebook,Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, and the list goes on and on.

Managing social media is a full-time job because there are so many different social media platforms out there. Leadership or ownership may have a hard time managing the profiles simply due to the lack of time.

I always use the analogy of mowing my lawn. I could do it myself and save myself some money. However, the money I would spend to have someone else mow the lawn is much less than what my time is worth. After looking at my hourly rate, it’s less expensive for me to outsource that task.

You have to determine if a task like social media is a good use of your time. If you just enjoy it, like mowing the lawn, maybe you want to keep it in-house.

2.) Expertise
Maybe you've been managing social media yourself but you're not getting the results you want. You may want to bring on an expert that can help you get those results.

There's a lot more to setting up social media profiles. It’s about so much more than just putting content out there. There's got to be a purpose and a formula to it. Then, there’s analytics and using the data to make smart decisions from a social media perspective.

If you want to be involved in all those different platforms, it's good to have an outsource partner that can navigate each one because each social platform is different. You must speak to each one of those platforms differently. Knowing how to talk to each audience and knowing the etiquette and posting frequency are all a part of managing a social media program.

You want to make sure you have an expert handling it because you can’t stand to lose your audience if you are talking to them on Facebook as you would on Twitter. Not only is there a different dialect, but you also run into character restrictions.