The agency should use its industry expertise and experience to develop and support the in-house team and the strategy co-delivering for optimal results. This also allows the in-house team to pick up and respond faster to creative needs and engagement where possible.
Whilst researching this piece I found an article by an agency that looked at the skills needed to run a social media campaign and talked about the pro’s and cons of hiring a social media agency.
The author goes onto state the pros and cons, listed below:
Pros To Working With A Social Media Marketing Agency
They will have the most advanced tools that can make all the difference in growing and monetizing your audience. These tools are very expensive and the agencies have the scale to afford them.
You will have the right players in the right seats as the social media agency should have a team with the unique skill sets mentioned above. This will make all parts work to their maximum potential.
Your reporting and analytics will be at a higher-level due to the agency’s experience in social data analysis and formalized reporting process.
The agency will be able to provide outside perspective for ways to engage your audience that often gets lost with in-house teams who are so close to the business they can struggle to come up with new outside-the-box ideas or feel they know their audience so well that they don’t truly analyze the evolution of their audience.
They will provide larger cross-channel experience on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, SnapChat and more. They all vary from a content and advertising perspective and many social media marketing agencies have teams with unique skill sets in these various platforms.
They bring experience and learnings from testing strategies across many clients to your brand which often allows for more rapid strategy innovation on your account and less trial and error.
Cons To Working With A Social Media Marketing Agency
There are often times a lot of things that happen inside the doors of your office that they may miss or aren’t able to take advantage of. This is usually more relevant for B2B businesses who use social media for recruitment and credibility and not as relevant for B2C businesses who use it to connect with consumers.
Your agency team’s knowledge and understanding of your brand voice and audience can take some training time and may not be at the level you would like in the early months of your partnership.
There is potential the agency will lack critical industry specific knowledge.
Costs can be higher and you may feel you can have an inhouse team member do parts of this role part time while also fulfilling other roles in your organization.
Response time can be slower on the community management as the resource is usually not fully dedicated to this one account.
You will have to develop a good process for content approvals to be sure you have quality control and all things are on brand.
He talks more about engagement levels but I’ll let you read further if you want to follow that up.