To a certain extent I’ve built my own business on social media; more than £150,000 of work quoted for on Twitter inside two years certainly adds weight to that.

So why is it that I’m not clamouring to encourage you to let me manage yours?  It’s certainly something we get asked to do by businesses of all sizes; you feel you don’t have the time to do it or that someone else could do it better for you.

These are incredibly common feelings to have.  We all know there’s only so many hours in the day and making money from social media can seem something of a mystery to many when in reality it needn’t be.

Despite the obvious financial temptation to take on your social media accounts and run them myself, the opinion on the return you get means that I’ve always had the steadfast opinion this simply doesn’t work.

Let me explain why you shouldn’t use someone else to manage your social media accounts….

Your own tone of voice

Social media is about you; it’s about giving your business a voice and that tone of voice needs to be your own.  One thing I’ve learnt since being my own boss is that people buy into passion, and certainly people that are passionate about what they do.

You run your own business, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say you probably like what you do.  People need to feel that through your tweets, your Facebook posts and all of the interactions they have with you (in real life and on that computer screen).

If someone else is doing that for a lot of different clients through vast amounts of social media accounts is your tone of voice really going to be any different to theirs?

I doubt that it will.

How do they know what’s happening?

So a logistical issue; something is happening in your business and you want people to know.  What do you need to do? Tell the person that runs your social media accounts that it’s happening and what it’s all about!

Now the most common reason people tell us they want someone else to run their social media presence is time.  You’re replacing the time you spend posting to social media with time spent telling someone else about what they could be posting.

Does that really make logical sense to anyone?

How do you split your time?

Let’s look at the person running your social media accounts.

They’re going to be running many, so how do they split their time?

No matter man or woman, neither of the sexes can multitask to the point they can run two social media client accounts instantaneously. So if they have ten, or even twenty, when does yours get the loving care and attention it needs?

Social media thrives during different times of the day and days of the week.  You should have prominence through those periods and it shouldn’t just be through a whole load of scheduling (that just wouldn’t be very social would it!).

So being one of many for me just doesn’t sound too attractive at the moment!

What is it you’re getting?

What I commonly see with social media account management is a series of packages, perhaps bronze, silver or even gold!

Now before we get too excited about the gold package, what is it you’re actually getting?

A certain amount of tweets?

A set number of new followers or page likes?

Social media shouldn’t be about arbitrary numbers that make up a return on a monthly fee you pay.  One month you may well need a lot more, others you need a lot less; depends on what you’re doing and even more so on what other people are.  It doesn’t depend on justifying your spend to the account manager.

Understanding your business

You get your business; does someone else to the point they can really add value?

Success on social media is understanding who your clients are, who your targets are, the people you are trying to interact with are…. and the list goes on.

If someone doesn’t know this you’ll not be getting the return you could yourself.  So is your money really better spent elsewhere? I’m not so sure, as you might have guessed by now.

Conclusion

I honestly don’t think outsourcing it works! Now many will come to you and rebuff that by saying they’ve got examples where it definitely has.  Fair enough, good luck to them, but what I will say is that for all of the reasons above you could achieve more yourself if you allowed yourself a little time, and the skills to do it.