Social media has without a doubt changed the marketing landscape. Reaching a new audience and getting recognized has never been easier.
Gone are the days when brands needed huge marketing budgets for TV or newspaper ads. Today, brand awareness can be achieved with a minimal budget.
All it takes is a little diligence and a sound social media strategy.
However, things aren’t as easy as they seem.
Implementing a social media strategy requires time and a tremendous amount of effort. Time which many busy social marketers simply don’t have to spare.
The most effective solution is to delegate some of the lower intensity and less complex work to freelancers.
The problem then becomes knowing which tasks are the best to delegate to a remote freelancer.
1. Facebook group management
Creating a Facebook group is a good way of attracting and engaging like-minded individuals, allowing businesses to get one step closer to converting potential clients.
In fact, research shows that Facebook groups have become reliable alternatives due to Facebook Pages’ decline in engagement.
Managing a Facebook group requires a lot of attention though, which is why delegating this task to a freelancer is more practical.
From moderating comments to coming up with ideas for posts and engaging with members, a freelancer can help increase the group’s membership and give the business a loyal following it could benefit from for years to come.
2. Social content calendar and posting
It takes more than great content for a social media strategy to succeed. Apart from quality, consistency is also required if you want followers to stick around and not go somewhere else.
Buffer’s put together a good guide on what you should be aiming for in terms of posting schedule.
Thing is, generating even 8 engagement inspiring posts per week for Facebook alone is a tall order.
A freelancer handling Facebook for you can help ensure that you have enough high-quality content in your schedule. Setting up a detailed content calendar can be a great way to make sure things keep ticking along.
With a content calendar, you’re assured of continued engagement with your audience because everything’s planned out a week or a month ahead.
Your only real task then is responding to comments and questions as they come in. Something that a well-trained freelancer can take off your hands.
3. Influencer research and outreach
Influencer marketing is a proven social media strategy that grows with each passing year.
It’s been used by some of the biggest brands and generated incredible results.
However, the act of managing campaigns and promotions that are promoted by numerous influencers is a difficult thing to manage. Reaching out to influencers and building a relationship takes a lot of work. Delegating this task to a remote freelancer also makes a lot of sense.
Thing is, building these relationships with influencers takes multiple touches and a prolonged back and forth. You need a few things to get this done well.
- A solid influencer outreach strategy that allows you to scale the process and easily outsource it
- A good freelancer you can not only trust to do the work but who will represent you in the way you want to be represented.
4. Interacting with relevant groups
Spend any time on social and you’ll quickly find that groups are where most engagement happens.
Unlike pages or profiles, group posts are often pushed to the top of their member’s social feeds. Their reach isn’t being impacted and you can get far better visibility on any updates you share.
Thing is, to endure your posts get the engagement you want, you have to be engaged in the group.
That means responding to other’s comments, writing posts, and liking/sharing insightful updates.
If you’re doing this alone, you’ll have your work cut out for you.
A freelancer can help you find groups that are relevant to the business’ niche and interact with these groups’ members in a way that feels like you’re the one engaging. .
This tactic can help put a business in front of more eyes, targeted ones in particular, which is good because it puts the brand in a better position to gain followers who are ready to buy.
5. Creating new content
Content is king. Creating fresh and consistent content keeps audiences engaged and showcases your expertise and authority.
Producing engaging content isn’t the easiest thing to do, however. Finding original ideas requires research, knowledge of the industry, and creativity.
Then there’s the writing of those ideas into high-value content which takes time and a lot of focus.
Outsourcing the content creation process is one of the most established forms of outsourcing.
By allowing freelancers to source ideas and put them into attractive and engaging posts, you’re effectively gaining your audience’s trust and giving them a reason to continue following the brand you’re promoting.
And the longer you work with a single writer, the deeper their understanding of your brand and needs making the work they do of an increasingly higher quality.
6. Community management
Along with the influx of followers comes the responsibility of nurturing them and keeping them engaged. Engagement is a key ingredient for business success and it’s one of the goals social media hopes to accomplish.
Actively interacting with members of the business’ community is a good way to show them that the business cares and that their comments and feedback are valued.
Freelancers can help you maintain a community by answering questions, sharing great content, and commenting on other members’ posts. They can also help you filter the comments so you can only allow appropriate content to be posted and to remove members for bad behavior.
7. Metrics analysis and report generation
What makes social media a pleasure to work on is that it allows you to track your progress.
How can you tell if the social media strategy you implemented is working?
Is it actually producing the results you were expecting?
Is the business hitting its goals because of it?
Having access to insights and analytics gives you the opportunity to fine-tune your tactics according to the data you find there.
A freelancer can help you generate the reports you need and give you the bigger picture. They can give you insights as to how many followers you gained, which age group the majority of them belong to, or which channels they used to find out about the business.
While much of the analysis part may be your responsibility as a marketer, freelancers can help make your job easier by saving you the extra step of generating reports and highlighting data that needs attention. (Although you can hire a freelancer for marketing, too!)
8. Monitor social mentions
Keeping track of brand mentions on a daily basis is essential to progress because it allows you to identify how people perceive the business you promote and it gives you a better idea of how effective your content strategy is.
Social listening gives you the opportunity to monitor the brand’s relevance in real-time. It lets you know if people are still talking about the business and lets you in on the negative comments so you can respond to them appropriately for damage control.
There are plenty of awesome tools out there that can help you monitor the mentions of your brand. However, it’s a task that requires real-time monitoring.
You need someone who can quickly find and respond to mentions. Which is an ideal task to hand-off to your freelancer.
9. Hashtag research
Hashtags have become a huge part of social media marketing over the years, especially on Instagram where it can help brands become more visible.
According to The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Hashtags for 2019 compiled by popular inbound marketing and sales company HubSpot, an Instagram post with at least one hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than one without.
Finding relevant hashtags for a brand can take time, however, which is why delegating this task to a freelancer makes more sense.
By having more time to focus on this particular task, freelancers can dig deep into competitor data so they can identify which hashtags are working for them and which aren’t.
Having millions of followers doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for the brand so letting freelancers assess which hashtag has enough followers is also a good practice.
Proper hashtag selection can do wonders for a business’ Instagram account. If you want the business to stand out on Instagram, getting a freelancer to do hashtag research will definitely help.
10. Image library creation
Most online users have short attention spans. Nowadays, you have less than 15 seconds to convince people to click on your content. Without an accompanying image, that likelihood decreases because the post does not have enough to attract attention.
The good news is, the internet offers a ton of high-quality images through stock photo sites that offer them for a fee or even for free.
You can have a freelancer do the image sourcing on your behalf by giving them the topics or categories you often use for your content. They can then create an image library or repository so anyone who’s in charge of content creation can just pick one from there.
Final Thoughts
Social media presents a lot of possibilities and ways to help a business grow. As a marketer, taking advantage of these possibilities is of utmost priority because successfully implementing a social media strategy usually equates to accomplished business goals.
Because of its wide scope, you’re going to need all the help you can get in applying such a strategy which makes outsourcing tasks to freelancers all the more necessary.
Should social media tasks be delegated to a remote freelancer?
Absolutely, because doing so allows you to get more things done without compromising quality since the person tasked to do them is dedicated to a specific task only. The more focus and time they can allocate for each task, the better the quality work they will produce.
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Author Bio
Connor Gillivan is the CMO and co-owner of FreeeUp.com, a rapidly growing freelance marketplace making hiring online simpler. He has sold over $30 million online, has hired hundreds of freelancers to build his companies, is a published author, and is the owner of ConnorGillivan.com. He currently lives in Denver, CO.