Outsourcing social media

sillysocks

I was recently made unemployed when the company I worked for closed, and I'm now looking at re-training courses and other job opportunities. I've always loved the thought of working for myself but not really had the opportunity or the push before.
While looking up courses I've seen one at my local college for online business, and using social media as a tool etc.

It started me thinking about an idea of providing a service for small business of managing their social media (facebook, twitter, blogging etc). Be it setting it up or increasing the popularity of their current pages. I know quite a few companies locally who, in my opinion, under-use or incorrectly use their social media.

I would be more than happy to do courses and plenty of training and research before going down the road but I'm wondering if anyone uses a service like this at the moment, or if they would ever even think about using one. I'm guessing a lot of people on boards are probably already fairly computer/social media literate so perhaps it's the wrong place to ask but I'm just looking for any opinions on it.

In my social circle most people would be very social media savvy but I'm sure there must be plenty of businesses out there that are a bit lost when it comes to online marketing. Whether they'd pay someone else to do that or not though is another question!

mneylon

What price point are you aiming at?
What makes you qualified to manage the social media for a 3rd party?

sillysocks

This is only a very basic idea so hadn't even thought of pricing or real detail. I was just wondering if this was something people did or would be interested in doing. Just looking for a general reaction.

In thinking about it longer today I think it might take a bit too long to build up a decent cashflow from it as I presume businesses would want some success stories before putting money into it and that would take time to build. It's something I might keep in the back of my mind though for the future, but at the moment I think I'm going to have to go back into looking for a 'normal' job to keep the cash coming in for the family.

nikinova

Best of luck with your venture!

Buttercake

IMO If a business requires management of their social media they probably don't need it in the first place. When a company pays someone to post on their behalf, its only a matter of time before Mary/John in the company will say "I can do that for free" and take over the posting.

if you post something on facebook, you have to pay for it to appear in users timeline. What will happen if you post something and it says "7 People saw this - Boost Post"? trying to get that company to pay for management and ads or boosting posts on top of that will be a big ask.

One of my clients had 7,200 likes, the only posts his "fans" were interested in or liked were competitions so he closed it and now has a new page with 300 likes that he paid for through targeted ads but now he has better engagement with the 300 than he had with 7,200.

I would offer your services as a consultancy - develop a plan and social media strategy