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Dec 1
Pros and Cons of Hiring a Social Media Person
Posted by kathrynv at 7:20 am in blogging, social networking, writer's life

One of the things that I’ve thought about doing off and on is hiring a social media person. This would be someone who would have the job of doing the social media promotion for all of my work as well as for all of the posts that I do for my clients. It’s a tempting thing to consider doing but in the end I’ve decided that the cons outweigh the pros so I’m not going to do it.

Benefits of Hiring a Social Media Person

There are a lot of good reasons for me to hire a social media person. Doing so could benefit my own blogs as well as increase the traffic that I’m getting for my clients. The core benefits of having someone else do this instead of myself would be:

  • That individual would be sole focused on social media promotion. Social media promotion is only one of the tasks that I perform as a blogger. Things I do as a blogger include defining the content, writing the content, adding images and videos to the posts, scheduling the posts, doing internal and external linking and then promoting the posts through various methods. When time gets tight, it’s hard to focus completely on social media. Hiring someone to do that would guarantee that the time and focus was on that regularly.
  • It would mean I wouldn’t have to do social media stuff. The truth is that I don’t like doing a lot of social media promotion. There are things that I like using Facebook and Twitter for. I am starting to get into LinkedIn for various uses. However I don’t particularly enjoy the promotion of my own posts on these sites. Hiring someone to do it would mean I wouldn’t have to.
  • I’d get an outside opinion on my social media strategy. Working alone means that I end up doing everything on my own and can get really stuck in my own way of doing things. This isn’t as bad with my clients’ blogs because I get their feedback on the social media strategy that I plan out for them. However it can be bad for my own blogs. It would be nice to have that second person giving me suggestions and feedback on how I approach my blog promotion.
Drawbacks of Hiring a Social Media Person
  • Confusion of costs. I would have to pay this person. I’m not sure if I’d want to do that hourly or per post. I’m not sure how I’d keep track of the work that they did for me. I’m not sure that I can reasonably afford this service at all.
  • Would reduce my communication with readers. I do communicate with some of my blog readers through blog comments but most of the ones who contact me do so through Twitter. I wouldn’t be communicating with them as much if someone else was doing my social media stuff. That would be a disappointment to me as well as something I assume would be taken negatively by my readers.
  • It would make the work less “mine”. I think that there are good reasons to hire a social media person, especially for the more routine work of promoting my clients blogs, but in the end I think that doing so would take away from the way that I’m able to insert my own personality into my blog promotion. I don’t really think that this would benefit anyone at this point in time even though I think there are some benefits to this arrangement. It could be something I’ll want to do in some form in the future but it’s not right at this point in time.
Do you do all of your own social media promotion? Would you consider having someone else do it for you? Why or why not?

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