Following on from my post the other day about how to choose a social media consultant, this morning I came across an interesting blog post from Mack Collier about the prices of social media consultants. Mack describes a range of services, fees and charges. (There’s a link to Mack’s story below.)
The price ranges Mack quotes are very wide, so it’s a guide only and mainly applicable to the USA but it’s a useful summary for you to see the types of services you could be buying. Please note, Mack’s list doesn’t include services around social media monitoring and responding to issues. That’s becoming an important component in the mix.
Here’s some of what Mack has included:
Blogs: Launching a blog, content creation, handling responses to comments $1,000-$12,000 a month
Twitter: Launch a new presence on Twitter, outsourcing all content creation and customer interaction – $1,000-$7,500 a month
Facebook: Launch a Facebook Page from the ground-up, outsourcing all content creation and customer interactions – $2,000-$9,000 a month
Social Media Strategy: Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Creation, assuming outsourcing of all content creation through all channels (minimum 2) – $3,000-$20,000 a month
Audit of existing Social Media Strategy Including Recommendations for Improvement – $2,000-$10,000
Social Media Consulting: Hourly rates – $50-$500/Hr
As you’d expect, it all comes down to who you choose, what they can do and what you need or want them to do for you.
But do you really need to out-source this stuff?
Do It Yourself?
Well, you probably will want some help to get started…
An initial audit is always smart so you know the current situation, and having some help with the social media strategy is a great idea for most businesses. If you are getting a Facebook page created for your business, then it can get a bit technical – especially if you want to integrate parts of your website into your Facebook page and vice versa. But it’s generally not a mega expense – unless your requirements are unusually big.
BUT, you probably can do the ongoing stuff yourself.
Even though out-sourcing the ongoing work may seem like a good idea to start with, I believe it’s far better and smarter NOT to out-source it but to learn how to do what needs to be done within your business. And then do it.
Empower yourself and your staff and build the capability within your own business. It’s not hard especially with some guidance and initial training.
Using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn is something to embrace within your company philosophy, culture and activities. You may want to out-source specific casual activities such as making some videos, but frankly you may find that ‘home-made’ videos are just as well received by your customers and other audiences.
And remember not to limit your social media activities just to these most popular online services. Learn about the key peer review and recommendation sites that affect your type of business. See how your business rates in the reviews, respond appropriately and actively work to improve what is being said about you online.
Learning to track what is being said about your business online is important. Search for your own business in Google and use some of the other free monitoring tools we’ve been listing here.
Search for your key customers and your competitors. And search on the keywords you think your customers would use to find your type of business in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Do some research in this area by asking customers and prospects. Check your website server log files to see what search terms people are using to find your website. Develop your key words and track them.
Build a small well-trained team
You can make these tasks a core part of your internal customer relationship marketing strategies rather than thinking it’s something to be managed elsewhere. Taking a longer-term view, you’ll probably find it’s smarter to train people internally within your organization to do a lot of this work, rather than out-source it.
Build a small team of people with your business who know what needs to be done and how to use the best tools. Don’t rely on just one person within your business otherwise you still have risk from a single point of failure. They could get sick, go on vacation or leave you.
You need a small team of people who understand your business, who care about your customers and your business, and who can communicate well. Then get them trained in how to use the best tools.
You will be able to act, react and respond faster and your conversations will be able to be more detailed and more authentic than some out-sourced person will ever be able to provide. Engaging in conversations can be quite time-consuming, but is a critical part of it all. The responses are not just important to you and the other person in the conversation, but also to everybody else observing or listening.
I realize some of my friends in the social media consulting world may see things differently as they have built businesses based on doing this work, but this is how I see it. There are always at least two sides to every story. But don’t think you need to out-source your ongoing social media work. You can do it yourself inside your business. And you and your business will probably be better off if you do.
What do you think? (And here’s the link to the blog post from Mack Collier about the prices of social media consultants. )
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