The social media agency relationship

The social media agency relationship

As more and more businesses buy social media services from agencies and consultants, there remains some grey area around exactly what you can outsource, what you can’t – or shouldn’t, and how the whole relationship is supposed to work

I’m a provider of social media consultancy and training, but not so long ago I was in the other side of the agency fence, in the corporate camp.  So with dual hats on, here’s my guide to buying social media services for business.

Whatever you buy, it’s a partnership

Whether you want a full-blown strategy, campaigns, specific training or ongoing coaching in social media, this is a partnership with your provider. A great agency will have to really get under the skin of your organisation and understand what you need to achieve before translating it into social media goals, tactics and measurements.

Sometimes you need to take a step back

If part of social media is to do with engaging your target audience and sharing relevant messages (and of course, there are other uses), you’ll need to be very clear first of all about who that audience is and what your messages are. Before you can start engaging, are you clear about the ‘who’ and ‘what’? A good agency can work that through with you. Clear and consistent messages make your social media efforts impactful and relevant.

Good social media consultancy is about empowerment

The ultimate aim of any agency worth its salt has to be to educate, equip and organise their client brilliantly in their social media endeavours, to the point that the client is empowered to manage at least a good chunk of their social media activity in-house. To be authentic, responsive and to seize the social media initiative, an organisation needs to be actively engaging first-hand with their audiences.

Training has a few different faces

A good agency or consultant will ensure that those involved in social media activity know how to use a whole range of tools for engaging, sharing, listening and monitoring. But more than that, they’ll ensure that those people also understand the bigger picture and the context in which social technologies are used.

The outside-in approach

Assessing an organisation’s scope for using social media can be hard to do from the inside. Internal pressures, barriers and preconceptions can fog the vision and opportunities can be missed. Without a doubt, an external and objective view is valuable. An outside view should bring vision, ideas, creativity and inspiration, but also should apply these to your company’s reality (which could include lack of resource or buy-in) and provide creative solutions.

Agencies should save you time… with added value

A key activity that’s well-worth engaging an agency for is monitoring and listening. We all do that to some extent in any case, in our everyday social media use, through RSS feeds, alerts and Twitter search streams. But agencies can add value by monitoring and listening against some very specific terms, themes and audiences. And the genuine value is when they can take that information, analyse it, and provide you with insightful stats, trends and recommendations as a result.

Agencies should be able to help you be you, but better

Another area where agencies can add value is in providing on-going coaching, to ensure that you have a good grasp of what’s working, what isn’t and where there are additional opportunities to be leveraged. They should be concerned with helping you develop as a socially-engaged business and as individual users of social media. If they are not actively offering that, demand it!

Kate Spiers is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and founder and director of Wisdom London, a creative communications consultancy.

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