If you don’t have time for social media, outsourcing it is a good solution. But there are caveats. You have to do it wisely.

Time. Time is money. We’ve heard it all of our lives. In business we also talk about sweat equity. It’s a real thing. Yes, if you don’t have money, you may have time. But at some point you will have to evaluate how you spend your time.

I wrote extensively about why outsourcing is financially advantageous here. In this post, I’d like to discuss some common misconceptions or thoughts I hear about social.

“My team would be good at social media if they weren’t busy.”

There are a few things wrong with this statement.

Firstly, it presumes that social media is a low-level skill that anyone can learn. In many ways, it can be learned. But more about that later.

Secondly, social media isn’t a team sport. Not to say you don’t work with a team, but committees are where social posts go to die — or never have a chance at life at all.

Thirdly, I absolutely believe that your team could be excellent at some parts of social media. In fact, my preference is to teach social media, rather than do it for you. Why? Because no one knows your business like you.

Great. So now we’ve decided you could be good.

What now?

Either you get training for them to do it or you outsource it to an agency like mine.

If you train your team to do social media, you will be taking them away from their primary duty. Does it make sense for a CEO or Manager to tweet? From a time and cost standpoint, no.

“Social Media is something everyone feels like they can chime in on.”

Yeah. No. So much no. A seven-layer bean dip of no. That’s the snark version.

Seriously, viewing social media as a low-level skill is dismissive at best. It’s not data entry or factory line work. Even those jobs require skills that not everyone can excel at.

When you don’t view a skill as an area of expertise, you don’t respect it as a profession. Sure, everyone has an iPhone, that’s not a qualifier.

Social media isn’t just about posting. It’s about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of posting. It’s about timing. It’s about reading the audience. It’s about discernment. It’s about silence sometimes. It’s closer to comedy in many ways.

Social media requires basic understanding of psychology, tech, marketing, and copyrighting. It’s not for everyone.

“Social Media is a waste of time. It doesn’t work anyway.”

This one. I forget about this one all of the time. I could give example after example of how this isn’t true.

Here are some examples right off the top of my head.

1. Amy Donohue donated her kidney because of a tweet. That was in 2011.
2. Because of a video I created for Riggins Construction, they got a net profit of work from a single client in 2015 that paid for my salary for half a year.
3. In September of 2015, one of our Thought House Franchise Development clients got four (yes, four) first-click leads from Twitter.

And this doesn’t include the people you meet (human ROI) or the knowledge that you learn from consuming content.

Social Media works if you work it.

Relationships are always valuable to business; especially if your business model relies upon referrals.

Being social in any venue, online or off, pays off if you are a kind, generous person. Your brand has an opportunity to present itself online as that person. Why wouldn’t you take that opportunity?

If you don’t have time to do it, outsource it. It’s that simple.