"I Will Never Hire a Social Media Expert and Neither Should You." Discuss!

Its all about time, do people really have the time to post say 01 links on say 100 sites? Likely hood is no


Allot of people don

It is a good article but you need to wade through the hype. If you are doing your own online marketing, then you are already using social media. This forum is an example of social media.

The article is relating to bigger businesses and the need to hire specific skill sets, having in house seo and social media. Specialists is out of the reach of most small businesses, but there is still plenty you can do yourself, especially on the social media side.

Remember it's all a balance though, no point spending 4 hours a day on Facebook if your page titles are awful, your contents crap and your site doesnt convert.

Too many people get carried away with the notion of social media, so make sure your house is in order, then have a dabble, if it works great. If you think you need to outsource it or recruit, at least get an idea of the potential yourself so you can remain in charge of your strategy and direction.

Thought the breakdown of seo and social media skills of basic medium and advanced was great. Certainly food for thought!

Great article by the guys at SEOMoz (and a just as interesting article from Peter Shankman).

I sit somewhere in the middle of both arguments and see the basic points from both sides, with headsocial's point about it being a time issue for many businesses being very valid.

However, sjr4x4's point about needing to have your business in order before you start utilizing social media is fantastic and one that every business owner needs to understand - if you're running an offline retail business, you wouldn't start trying to integrate with the local community, investing in target-based advertising, if your shop is only half decorated and you haven't got all of your products labelled correctly.

I strongly believe that people can benefit from hiring an agency or a freelancer to take care of your social media efforts if you don't have the time, knowledge or experience to do so yourself, but you need to ensure that your business is in a position where it's going to benefit from it - you could have the most in-depth social media strategy developed and implemented by an experienced agency, but if your products or services are poor, it's not going to deliver the desired results.

This is interesting really. We have been thinking about getting people to work on our social network pages. I barely have the time to work on these during the day, my workload is amazing most days

What bothers me though, is how do you make sure the person you hire is going to be able to represent your company properly? We've thought about outsourcing, and to be honest it scares me. Giving someone our company reputation on a silver platter, expecting them to do something good with it, scares the crud out of me. My biggest fear is that these people hired to help the company will end up damaging the reputation instead of building it.

Don't get wrong, like Steve said if your on this forum or others that is a form of social media.

On the plus side, Social Media experts make it easier for you to carry on running your everyday business, whilst they take care of the SM side and hopefully bring you in more customers.

So for example if your customer is worth

You pay for what you get at the end of the day so don't just look to pay someone cheap money in India or the Philippines for example.

A true SM Expert will always be in touch with and treat your business like Gold!

Hmmm true. but then there are many "rogue" sm's out there.

For example, I took part in a heated discussion about whether or not people should be allowed to buy likes and tweet followers. I couldn't believe people actually would do that in the first place, so it took me a bit to actually grasp what the person was offering.

For a certain amount of money, they would give you a certain amount of likes or twitter followers.

Can anyone believe this kind of madness?

It