News and Insights
Why work with a social media agency?
May 19, 2022
“Just get the intern to do it.” Social media management has come a long way from this.
Yet, shockingly, some companies still see it as a job to pass off – and leave full control – to someone with no marketing experience! Throughout this article, we’ll discuss what opportunities you could be missing out on with this approach and why working with a social media agency could help you level up your social presence, no matter the size of your business.
A team of talented individuals
Social media management takes an abundance of skills to do properly. Large scale teams may include a variety of:
- Copywriters
- Graphic designers
- Photographers
- Videographers
- Content creators
- Social strategists
- Data analysts
- Community managers
- Brand managers
- Influencer managers
- Paid social specialists
- Social commerce experts
- Along with social media & marketing managers
That’s a lot of roles to put on an intern!
Investing in a social media agency over an individual better allocates your cash by incorporating multiple talents at the right level, instead of relying on just 1 person to have ALL the skills mentioned above. Agencies will work closely with your team to understand your brand, your goals, and your desires on social. From here, they’ll build a bespoke plan to make sure you’re getting exactly what you need from them to reach your goals. And if this needs to shift month-to-month, it can! Minimise the risk from an exceptionally fast-changing industry.
What’s more, the team are used to working seamlessly together. Looping all efforts in a streamlined process with you in the centre.
Save time
Whether you’re passing social management to an intern or struggling to keep your posting frequency consistent, one of the most common issues for small to medium businesses is that you and your team simply don’t have the time to manage it.
Working with a social media agency can be far more cost-effective than hiring a full-time resource and you can rest in the knowledge that they know what they’re doing with years of experience across multiple clients, industries, and social platforms. It’s what they do day in and day out. Now utilising their skills for you too so you can focus your time elsewhere.
Stay up to date on social trends and changes
The social realm changes on a daily basis. Are you keeping up?
In addition to trending content itself changing by the hour, in terms of stories, sounds, and challenges, social platforms are making changes to their feeds, content options, and algorithms constantly.
If you don’t already know about the infamous NFTs now making their way onto Instagram, sharing your services and creating proposals directly through LinkedIn, and the details of the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, the chances are that you’re already missing opportunities.
By working with a social media agency, you have a team of social experts at your fingertips who are reading through hundreds of updates every single month. They do the leg work and update you on the ones that will matter for you and your business, offering recommendations of how best to implement them to your strategy. And then, they’ll do it for you!
Many heads are better than one
Most will know that to do well in social media, you need some great creativity. Many heads are better than one not only for their specific skills base, but their ideas too.
At MintTwist, benefit from creative brainstorms with the wider team to craft hilarious, innovative, engaging content, campaign, and partnership opportunities.
Access to leading social tools
There are countless tools out there which can aid your social game. But, they come at a cost.
What may not be feasible for you to invest in independently can become available through an agency. Below is a list of the types of tools and use cases you could benefit from.
Social scheduling tools
Save time by scheduling your content in bulk with recommended optimal post times, giving your content the best chances of reaching more users and pushing your engagement levels up.
What’s more, MintTwist’s tools allow strict workflow approvals meaning nothing will get published without your final go ahead. Eradicate the risk of mistakes.
Performance analytics
If you’re on social, you probably look at your analytics pages at least from time to time. Social tools allow you to look at everything from one place, so no more hopping between apps on your phone or desktop.
Plus, custom reporting allows you to view data on a much more granular level. Have complete transparency on the formats, topics, imagery and more which are performing best per channel to influence your future content planning.
Central community management feed
Today, 64% of people would rather message than call a business. So, an effective community management system is essential. Pull together your DMs, comments, ad comments, reshares, and mentions from every platform into one inbox stream for a streamlined response system. Even connect your Shopify account to pull up order details for users messaging for updates!
Social listening
Social media isn’t just about talking, it’s about listening too.
Tap into what your customers and target audience are talking about. What do they care about? What do they engage with? How can you solve a problem they’re having or relate to something they feel passionately about to form a stronger connection?
Social listening allows you to tap into relevant conversations and discover these insights. Take a birds-eye view of the industry or narrow it down to answer a very specific hypothesis. Such as in the example above, what hot chocolate flavour combinations are the most discussed and prefered?
However, we’re all aware that data is a highly valuable commodity. And that’s no different when it comes to social data. Leading social listening tools can be a significant investment for businesses and even then you’ll need a skilled data analyst to make sufficient use of the tool. From writing boolean queries, knowing the limitations of each channel you’re researching, optimising your data, and designing bespoke dashboards, such tools offer huge capacity and opportunity, but only if you know how to use them.
Social media agencies use such tools at scale, meaning you can benefit from their economies of scale and have a social listening expert or experts working on your account. Who wouldn’t want to pay less for the same result, right?
Audience insights
Furthermore, social listening can additionally uncover deep insights into your audience segments. Grasp a solid understanding of their personality traits, online usage, buying mindset and much more, to influence not only your social strategy but your entire business strategy too.
Competitor analysis
Lastly, stay on top of your competitor’s efforts. See what’s working for them vs what’s working for you. Perhaps there are certain learnings you can take to test and input into your own strategy? Or, you may merely want to benchmark against the industry to have a better understanding of your own metrics.
How does social media link to your wider business efforts?
Finally, your social media managers should not be considered completely separate from all other teams. There are many ways to incorporate them to ultimately lead you to greater efficiency, improved outputs, and reach your wider business goals.
Utilise content across your marketing teams
Be it a blog, webinar, or social post, content creation takes time. Your social team create vast quantities of content every month. Why not take some of their ideas or adapt creatives to fit other channels?
Throughout the planning stages of the monthly content calendar, MintTwist highlights areas which could work well in other formats. Working in a digital agency means in addition to being social experts we also have solid skills and experience across other digital services and how they can flow together for an integrated marketing approach.
Amplify your business efforts with social
Have hard-working PR teams? Connect them with your social team.
PR teams have the stories and messaging and your social team can help adjust and amplify it across your owned profiles in the most strategic approach.
Our social team are used to working seamlessly with clients’ PR teams, be it internal or external, as well as other design, customer service and other teams.
Utilise social insights across teams
Lastly, the data your social team is using can be shared to provide almost all of your team better insight into your business and your audience. Consistently improve your strategies across the board through greater collaboration.
Conclusion
To summarise, managing a business’s social media presence strategically and creatively requires a vast amount of skill and resources. Working with a social media agency can aid your business in a multitude of ways, but we see the greatest benefits as:
Small businesses: Save time and never miss a post again. Our social experts can take care of everything, leaving you and your team free to get on with your main responsibilities.
Medium businesses: Benefit from multiple talents at the right quantity for you. Mitigate the risk of investing heavily in one area and missing opportunities elsewhere with a flexible plan to make use of designers/data analysis/strategists etc. when and how you need them. Level up your content with deeper data and analysis through our scheduling and analytics tools to see what’s really working for you.
Large businesses: Take advantage of economies of scale and access to leading social and research tools to take not only your social game further, but benefit all other teams in your business too. And, be blown away by creative content, campaigns, and partnerships concepts from a full team of creatives and marketing strategists.
Have we convinced you? Get in touch to see how our social media management and PPC team could help you.