These days, it seems as though every PR and marketing out there is at the moment doing social media for everything ranging from management of presence in social media and influence outreach to build audiences.
Most of them give assurance that they will truly get you the high number of followers, likes, fans, friends and whatnot. The task of choosing and hiring social media agency should be given the attention that it deserves.
Before you begin searching for the various social media agencies, you must take some very important steps. This is very important especially with regard to the writing up Request for Proposal so that the agencies can bid on.
Do your research:
Just the way you research over the internet and in the offline publications such as magazines and books that your audience is also reading, it is highly recommended that you conduct some preliminary research so as to find out what their habits area exactly.
The research should be aimed at finding out solutions to questions such as; are your attendees, members, customers, etc using the social media? If they are using the social media, where are they exactly? What are members, customers and attendees talking about?
In practice, the social media agency can help you in doing but an independent research on your part will greatly help you in gaining first-hand valuable insights that will help you in establishing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound) goals.
Establish SMART goals
In establishing goals, you should ask yourself and seek and answers to the question why you think your brand needs to use the social media. You should use the findings and results from your preliminary research to the high-level business goals and develop SMART goals for your efforts of marketing on social media.
Some of the goals may be:
- To increase the public awareness of your product or brand
- To establish customer service channel over the social media
- To create real or imagined difference of your product brand from the others
- To increase sales and new leads
- To increase traffic
Evaluate the resources
You may have already made the decision to hire social media agency so that it can help your organization with people-power of running successful programs of social media or additional knowledge. Even in this case, you still need to evaluate the in-house resources that area at your disposal such as who will assist in the implementation of the program, or who will continue the efforts once the social media agency lays the foundational ground work.
Set expectations:
You should ensure that the management and the internal team are very clear on what is to be expected from the social media. Every concerned person must understand that it takes some period of time building traction. Social media is not just set of tools.
A social media strategy that is well defined has content, sales, PR, email, and elements of customer service that are incorporated in to it and every person has to put in effort and invest in time together with those of the social media agency so as to ensure that the whole undertaking works.