Can you delegate social media management to a third party?

I often attend events where the speaker says “Of course you can’t delegate social media management to someone else, you have to do it yourself.”

There seems to be a belief that a third party can’t possibly know your every thought or opinion on what’s going on in the world, so how can they possibly post something on Twitter or Facebook on your behalf?

Another objection is that a third party won’t know all your contacts, so when a friend or business colleague posts a message to you and asks you a question like “so how was the seminar yesterday?”, a third party won’t know how to respond.

Of course, to a certain extent, this is true, and there will always be added value you can add to your own Twitter or Facebook account. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hire a third party to create fresh content, Tweet,  Facebook or LinkedIn it, and implement regular posts to engage with your social media contacts.

If you work closely enough with the right social media agency, you can delegate all the daily slog of thinking of things to post, finding followers, responding to messages, uploading photos or videos, retweeting interesting news items or running competitions. As long as you make sure you also have an admin login for your social media accounts, you can post your own thoughts whenever you feel like it and so your followers will get a good mix of off-the-cuff comment, corporate messages, news and views.

A client example

Let me tell you how we work with one of our clients, who travels around the world a great deal. He gives us regular updates by email when he can get online, then we turn that content into smaller posts, with photos or videos if he has some, or with photos we supply. Occasionally he’ll also post stuff himself and he’ll sometimes reply to the contacts he knows best. Sometimes, we’ll get a question that we can’t possibly know the answer to, “Which hotel did you stay at in Sydney?” In which case, we’ll drop our client a quick email or ask him next time we talk to him, so we can reply on his behalf.

As long as you work closely with a social media agency that can give you a dedicated account manager who understands your business and your objectives for social media, and who also – crucially – has a good feel for your personality and how you’d talk to people on social media channels, there’s no reason why you can’t delegate this marketing activity to someone else.

Share your experience of delegating social media with us, good or bad, we’d like to know your views.

Social media management – where to find out more

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you manage your social media channels, please get in touch.

You can also read about our social media management services on our website.