The most common advice regarding outsourcing any business tiask or function is to make sure you know yourself what it is you are outsourcing. Intellectually this is sound advice.  There is a hybrid solution for social media which is what I advocate.

Social Media is a rapidly evolving world. There are new social media sites, social media tools and social media experts emerging every week. Regarding experts, some are people who have an active account, have read a few books and then attached a social media marketing or social media network expert label to their profile.  Anyone we work with knows our numbers, our work ethic and what we know. I openly say and now it is in writing, we are learning something new everyday.  We also continue to grow and are able to reach nearly 1 million people.

The business model of New Digital Media, Inc. is a “do it for you” model.  However, we also teach anyone who works with us all they want to learn including the latest changes.  I advise clients to outsource the more routine tasks.  Some clients prefer we migrate to teaching their staff to do this work. That is fine but usually that is a more costly approach since our processes are fine tuned and we are specialists in this area.

One area where  I recommend company and business owners stay actively involved is content since content. Content includes  Tweets, Status Updates,  Blog Articles,  Autoresponder Messages, YouTube Videos, article marketing, etc.

In summary you do not have to know how to developing a social media network that is built to market your business to get started. Actually I highly recommend getting started as soon as possible because it takes time to build  a meaningful network.  As you start you will know what we are doing and develop your own experience in this area.

 

— Update 2018:

Even though this post is nearly 10 years old, Social Media is still a rapidly evolving world. And we would argue that the question outsource or not still hasn’t been settled. Funny how things change, and then don’t change again.