A recent survey reported that there has been a 128% increase in social media marketers turning to outsourcing to effectively manage their social campaigns.

The Top 5 Reasons This Trend will Continue

1. Time – Social media usage grows, new platforms emerge and there is still only 24 hours in each day. Between monitoring for brand and competitors, engaging with customers and influencers, creating sharable data driven content daily, planning and executing campaigns, measuring and reporting results and the other projects on a marketers plate, there simply is not enough time in a marketers day to accomplish it all.

2. Talent – Social monitoring large volumes of unstructured social media data for brand reputation, strategy insights, competitive intelligence, data to drive content strategies and all the other quality reasons to monitor requires a certain type of professional. That person is not likely to be the same person who excels at customer engagement or content creation. And that person is not likely to be the same person who excels at strategy or live event monitoring. It takes professionals with a diverse skill sets to execute a successful strategy, outsourcing functions can fill in the gaps.

3. Technology – Technological change continues to happen at an astonishing pace. Relying on an outsource partner to keep abreast of such change and provide insight into which platforms can help marketers achieve their objectives makes perfect sense.

4. Best Practices – A social media partner will work with a number of clients and, therefore, develop foresight into what works and what doesn’t work. Leveraging the experience and insight from a partner who works with multiple partners provides marketers with the best opportunity to create and implement campaigns that will achieve the intended result.

5. Cost – Leveraging professionals with multiple skill sets, technology and experience across multiple clients allows outsource partners to provide service most often at a cost lower than acquiring the talent, technology and time to handle all the tasks internally. Outsourcing portions of your social media strategy is not only smart but also cost effective.