7 Social media activities to outsource

Blogging comes in many forms from corporate blogs with a controlled message to personal blogs with information about that latest weekend retreat with friends. Businesses often find it difficult to provide the necessary resources to blog consistently with a message that is satisfactory to upper management and provide enough value to both marketing and SEO departments. This is where outsourcing can play a role in your blogging strategy.

Using contractors familiar with your industry is a great way to build unique content, open a dialog with your audience, build a community and generally step into the new form of customer communication.

Areas where outsourcing can assist in blogging include:

Blogging ideasMarket researchContent researchGhost writingEditingBlog commenting

Managing your Twitter feed can be a time-consuming project that may seem wasteful to some. Others see the value and rely on its ability to communicate quick bursts of information that don’t require a full blog post. Some ask whether people on Twitter have any attention span or whether the benefits are enough to pursue. With more than one million people joining weekly and billions of tweets happening monthly, it cannot be ignored by any marketer.

Relying on a contractor to provide every tweet to your audience may not be viable but there are other activities that can provide a wealth of benefit to your social media endeavor including:

Friend management Better audience engagementMarket researchPre-scheduling specific tweets (sales, events, etc.)Setup for appropriate feeds to automatically tweet (blog posts, photo uploads, etc.)

Facebook includes more than making friends and tagging friends in pictures. Building out product pages or creating groups around products are two great ways to increase exposure to your audience through fans and friends. Creating Facebook pages and managing communication within your community requires a certain amount of time of expertise to spread the company message without alienating your fans who are visiting Facebook to catch up with friends or arrange the next night out.

Great ways to include contractors within your Facebook strategy are:

Friend/Fan managementCommunity creation and participationGroup creation and managementPhoto uploadsVideo promotionEvent promotionProduct launches

Although many social bookmarking services provide little link building value in SEO, there are perfectly valid human traffic reasons for utilizing bookmarking services online. People still visit and use bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Etc. and the residual effect can be massive if you front page at Digg, Reddit, SERPd, etc.

Creating a personal bookmark, however, is not going to generate any sizable traffic to your site from a single user. But getting the attention of those that use these sites and offering them an easy alternative to bookmark your page and share it with their friends can have exponential effect on click-thrus. To gain the attention of the masses, and potentially land on the front page of a high traffic media site, requires a little seeding and promotion and this can be outsourced to contractors.

Sometimes this requires creative thinking to provide something of considerable value so your audience will be interested enough to take the desired action of bookmarking your site. This is often referred to as linkbait or viral marketing and will provide huge value to your SEO efforts as well as traffic, audience participation, community growth and so on.

When video marketing is discussed by businesses, it often spurs a conversation about the difficulties, costs and quality associated with producing videos for promotional purposes. Truth is that any point-and-shoot camera and a few minutes of idea generation will launch you into video marketing campaign that can captures million of visitors to your site. Think about the Will It Blend video series that was discovered and shot in an afternoon with less than $100 in expenses.

Contractors can be extremely helpful in the following ways:

Idea creationMarket researchDetermining viabilityVideo creationSubmissions (YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, etc.)Social promotion

Every business has more marketing material than they can possible publish and provide customers and prospects at any given time. Sometimes, this information can be easily re-purposed for blog posts, videos, etc. But taken as is, quickly edited to include links to pages on your site, it can be uploaded to several sites such as DocStoc, Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc. where links will flow and the search engines can see the visibility of your brand on social sites that link to you.

Moreover, promoting these documents through other social media avenues can add considerable site mentions to your overall online marketing campaign. It gives you the opportunity to completely dominate your space and brand your name and images to your audience no matter how they find you.

Outsourcing this is so simple and anybody can be trained in a matter of minutes to perform:

Document creationEditing for links based on mapped URLsSubmissions (DocStoc, , Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc.)

Online press releases are one of the greatest forms of social and PR marketing that can assist in brand development, SEO, audience awareness, community positioning and so on. Done right, online PR brings huge dividends by getting picked up by national and international newspapers and news stations. This will not only increase the credibility of your company but it will help you dominate the search engines for primary keywords.

The benefits of online PR extend beyond traditional press because the ability to produce and distribute each release is both easy and affordable and hundreds of news stories are generated out of each release.

The sensitive nature of press releases requires more scrutiny but contractors can help with:

Market researchKeeping up with current affairsStory developmentSocial promotionGathering quotes and product informationEditing

There are other areas of social media and certainly more ways that outsourcing to contractors can benefit your business so please share whatever I missed here today in the comments below. And, if you feel so inclined, give this story a tweet, bookmark, Stumble or whatever promotion tickles your fancy.

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