Pros and Cons of Hiring a Social Media Manager

Hiring a social media manager can help save you time, grow your business, and build an online presence. Depending on who you hire, it can be a relatively cost-effective marketing expense. However, with any decision you make as a business owner, there are pros and cons, and you have to make sure every dollar is spent wisely and with intention. 

In this blog article, we will review the pros and cons of hiring a social media manager for your business. If you have any questions, get in touch with our team, and we’ll be happy to help!

The Pros of Hiring a Social Media Manager

1) It will legitimize your business online.

Hiring a social media manager enables your business to appear professional and active on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. Billions of people use social media to interact with friends and favorite brands.

By hiring a social media manager, you will build and maintain a social media presence that will make your business look active and legitimate. One of the worst things you can do is create social media profiles but stop posting for months and years. You don’t want people to think you’re going out of business! Even posting only once per week is enough to give the impression that you’re still active and in business. Hiring a social media manager fixes this problem. 

2) Connect with existing and potential customers.

Study after study suggests that a supermajority of consumers research a business online before making a purchase. By maintaining a presence on various social media platforms, potential customers can learn more about your products or services. Hiring a social media manager will also ensure your existing customers stay connected with your business.

For example, suppose you own an Italian restaurant. By consistently posting appetizing pictures of your best-selling meals on social media, more and more customers will interact with the content, making them more likely to want to return!

3) You will save hours each month.

If you agree that legitimizing your business and connecting with customers online is important, then you really have two options: do it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. As a business owner, we know you are busy. Very, very busy. Building a brand isn’t easy! The time you can save by hiring a social media manager is, in our opinion, one of the greatest “pros.” We have had dozens of clients tell us that the time we have saved them on social media has allowed them to spend more time in other areas of their business. 

Suppose you post only three times per week –  approximately a dozen posts each month. Creating an eye-catching graphic and writing a captivating caption takes a minimum of ten to fifteen minutes. Then, you must remember to publish the post across each channel multiple times per month. You’re looking at four to five hours per month – at the very least! Hiring a professional who creates hundreds of social media posts per month gives you the best of both worlds: high-quality graphics and saved time that you can spend elsewhere.

4) Build a strong, consistent brand.

One of the “soft” benefits of hiring a social media manager is that you will start building a powerful, consistent brand online. By posting content with the same color palette, fonts, style, etc., your followers and customers will begin to recognize your posts and associate them with your brand.

Creating posts with a consistent style and theme requires the experience of a social media manager with graphic design skills. That’s not to say you couldn’t learn graphic design skills yourself – you certainly could. But it takes many months of training and experience to get to a point where you can create a high-quality graphic in under twenty minutes. 

The Cons of Hiring a Social Media Manager

1) It isn’t free!

This is one of the most obvious (but most important!) downsides of hiring a social media manager. They cost money! As we wrote in a previous blog post, social media management services wildly range in pricing and scope. They can range from someone overseas charging $5 to $10 per hour to a full-service marketing agency charging thousands per month. That money could be spent on other aspects of your business, or in different marketing avenues. 

At Two Step Social, our pricing is very open and transparent. We’re not the cheapest, but we’re definitely not the most expensive. However, our pricing is highly competitive for high-quality, US-based social media management services. We pride ourselves on the fact that our clients stay with us an average of three to four times longer than our cheaper competitors. This is because we provide a significantly more premium service without the “pomp and circumstance” of a traditional marketing agency. Some of our clients have been using our service since our founding in early 2021!

2) No one will ever know your business as well as you do.

The reality is that you know your business better than anyone else. Full-stop. The best social media managers in the space will work tirelessly to learn your brand and research your niche, but they aren’t dealing with your customers/industry on a daily basis. Outsourcing the management of your brand to an external party can be nerve-wracking – and it’s perfectly normal to feel that way. 

A robust onboarding process ensures that a social media manager gets the necessary information he/she needs to create social media content that is intentional, relevant, and on-brand. At Two Step Social, we will research your website, Intake Form, and any additional materials you provide. You will also be assigned a social media manager who will be the one creating your content and requesting feedback from you on a monthly basis. This person will learn about your business throughout the course of our relationship. 

3) It can be challenging to find the right person or company.

There are literally thousands of social media management companies and contractors out there. Given the vast quantity of options, a lot of time is invested in trying to find the right person or company for the job. 

When businesses reach out to our team at Two Step Social, they generally fall into one of two buckets: i) they found the right social media management contractor/freelancer, but that person had moved on to a different career or position; ii) they thought they found the right social media manager, but after a month or two of working with them, they found they weren’t getting satisfactory service. In other words, finding a social media manager that is both dependable and professional is not always easy. 

Closing Thoughts

While hiring a social media manager takes time & energy upfront, it is a relatively cost-effective marketing strategy that can help save you time and build an online presence. Yes, you’re looking at a few hundred dollars each month in extra expenses, but you’re also looking at building a brand, getting exposure with your customers, and saving hours each month that could be spent on a different area of your business. 

At Two Step Social, we’re here for the long haul, and we know what we’re doing. Social media is our bread and butter. We have provided top-notch social media management services to over 300 brands. If you want to work with a partner who gets to know their clients’ brands, then you’re in the right place. Connect with our team today to learn more about our service and to see if we would be a good fit.