Ja-Naé Duane

A few months ago, I wrote a post on social media use and asked the question “Should you outsource it?”  Needless to say, the conversation continues to be a hot one. I am of the school of thought that even if you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur, you can outsource small things such as blog writing, video editing, video uploading, and social bookmarking.

Here are what some others had to say on Facebook and the previous post about building a social media team and if you should outsource:

Sherman Mohr
I’m a fan of outsourcing “tasks” not strategies. Once the communication and engagement plan are in place, hiring a contractor to engage, post, escalate responses, and categorize and measure activities is a good way to grow your presence.

Directory submission, Youtube and video posts are not strategic in nature and may be outsourced with great effectiveness.

Thrash on concepts and ideas internally, create a blueprint and then outsource execution, would be the way I would approach it. The other point I would like to add is that – social media works but takes a lot of time to gather that critical mass so outsourcing is a step in the right direction and a lot of companies would be better off if they get over that denial phase.

Social Media can work wonders, but it needs a master at work, I think.  I tried it to do myself for my company but it proved just waste of time. Then I decided to outsource it to one of my friend, Jayesh Khandor. He runs an Internet Marketing company and within 3 months I felt, “WOW! This is the effect of social media people were talking about.” So I am in favor of outsourcing it to specialists.

Thanks for the great read. I would just like to point out that although it would be preferable for companies to maintain conversations in the social media sphere within the company, most of the time, this does not happen. It could be because of lack of time, manpower, etc. Would that then mean that the company can just forget about engaging their community through conversations? It shouldn’t. Social media engagement, although not a primary requirement for a business to function, is also very beneficial. Thus, in cases where companies are not able to manage their own conversations, this is where outsourcing can come in. It is not the idea of outsourcing that would be an issue. Outsourcing to someone several miles away versus someone else with in your company is still not you. What is vital is exercising proper guidelines and maintaining effective communication to ensure that your social media engagement remains effective. For us (we are an outsourcing company: Infinit-O), the question is not whether you should outsource, but who should be your outsourcing partner. That’s just my two cents on that. Kudos!

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