Comments on: Can social media marketing be performed in-house?

By: Search Engine and Social Media Strategies: How Many Accounts Do You Have? : Performancing

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:55:15 +0000

[...] time in the day to get all the other work done. Where do you draw the line? Personally, I believe it’s better to hire an SMM (Social Media Marketer) who can focus on the promotions side, and possibly use your accounts [...]

By: metafever

metafever — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:01:43 +0000

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By: Salwar Kameez

Salwar Kameez — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:19:55 +0000

As you say its largely about building the profiles and dripping in the links. There are tools that can help with this, but a lot of these sites are already syndicated and they can be hard to break into. I would outsource it, unless you can produce content that actually deserves (and gets) traffic from these sites on merrit… as opposed to spamming.

By: Hannah

Hannah — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:17:12 +0000

Adam, if I understand your point correctly, you’re speaking more about how cost effective it is to deal with Social Media in-house.

Obviously, as you suggest it will take a reasonable amount of time to gain the level of influence that a seasoned blogger, or contributor to a particular social site might have. However, I would suggest that in some ways it’s imperative that a company takes the time and effort to do this themselves in order to truly understand the market.

Much is made of social media, and whilst it undoubtedly has it’s place; the ROI is by it’s very nature unreliable, as some submitted articles will ‘tip’ and become popular, and some will sink without trace.

I would suggest that whilst out-sourcing this type of activity might yield results more quickly, by bringing it in-house the company will have a better understanding of the processes involved; and inherently an individual employed by a company will more committed to a brand than an agency who has multiple clients to look after.

By: Khalid Hajsaleh

Khalid Hajsaleh — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 05:19:36 +0000

Adam, I guess it depends on how you define a power user.

In house work can and does produce the same quality as outside consultants. As matter of a fact, an in house person can generate higher ROI since cost is usually a lot lower.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 05:00:37 +0000

Problem with the inhouse route is that there’s so much other “work related” stuff that can get thrown in your lap on a day to day basis that it can be very hard to knuckle down & get some solid articles / linkbait written.

Stu

By: Lyndon Antcliff

Lyndon Antcliff — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:30:32 +0000

Amen to that.

By: Maria Reyes-McDavis

Maria Reyes-McDavis — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:48:57 +0000

I agree with you on this one. In my experience helping clients outsource/set-up inhouse smm, not only is it more cost-effective (increased ROI) but the timeframe of results tends to be much shorter.

“Connecting” with power-users simply is not enough – you’ve got to have someone at the helm that is an experienced power-user to keep up with many of the competitive niches out there. As more people find “the way” in SMM, that expertise becomes much more valuable.

Great Post! (As Usual)
Maria

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:19:06 +0000

@Matt: thanks for your opinion, it’s not so much that they can’t it’s that it might not be the most productive use of their time, unless you’re thinking about it from high level strategy development point, rather than day-to-day blogging, voting, tagging, networking etc.

@Tad: thanks for the comment and sphinn.

@Khalid: I don’t think you could become a digg power user in two weeks but I could be wrong.

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:10:15 +0000

Hi Adam,

Some of the best search marketers in the industry work in-house and to suggest they can’t do social media is pretty naive.

Matt