There has been numerous debates on the capabilities of a social media consultant. Why should I hire one? Is it even possible to have an “expert” in social media? Can’t I just learn it myself by going on Facebook. It’s sometimes hard working in an industry where every Gen Y kid thinks they can do your job. Being a Gen Y kid myself I can see where that mis-interpretation comes from – after all that was me at one time. As I’ve studied and immersed myself in the social media world, I realised how different it is and now see the value of hiring someone like me. One important thing that all people involved in social media should have is sound knowledge in business and marketing. I now realise how important my previous experience in putting together profit and loss statements, understanding the financial workings of a business and forecasting and maintaining a marketing budget is to contributing to my skills as a social media consultant. If you have had no prior overall marketing or business experience and you are looking a career in social media, I suggest you do some learning on those topics as well .

Not to toot my horn of course but here are 5 reasons why you should consider hiring a social media consultant before embarking on your social media journey.

1. They can help you evaluate your goals – or set them. If you have started your Facebook page and you haven’t set goals, or planned how you are going to get there, you need to do that. Too often then most companies waste hours of resources just starting their social media accounts and posting on them without any real objective. If you are spending an hour a day on this medium, what are you expecting to achieve out of it? How is it going to give you a positive return as a business? And are your goals realistic? I’ve actually had clients approach me and expect over 300,000 fans for less than a few hundred dollars investment – maybe if they were all robots and what kind of return do you think that will give you?
2. They can help you develop an engaging content strategy. The biggest secret to a successful campaign as I’ve shared with you throughout all my posts is engaging and useful content.You can spend your time shooting in the dark and alienating the fans you’ve spend your time and effort to gain or we can help you come up with a successful content strategy that will ensure your fans stay engaged. Of course their is no guarantees when you deal with human behaviour, but since we’ve been through it a hundred times before - we have a pretty good idea on what is most likely to work for you.
3. Developing your campaigns for you. For some businesses’ it’s just not affordable to hire a new developer, designer and online marketer to deploy your social media campaigns. We are here to help develop your apps, come up with the ideas for creative, write the content and spread the word when it launches. Cash flow wise it may be a much better idea then investing in skills that you may only need once every few months.
4. Training you to do it yourself. If you do have spare resources, instead of letting them fend for themselves and putting your company at risk through mistakes (remember with social media there really is no  real delete button) why not allow one of us to train your employees to be able to do it efficiently and effectively. We can also give you recommendations on tools which allow you to save time and maximise your efficiency.
5. Just plain advice and bench marking. How do you know you are getting a return? Do you have a policy in place to manage risk?  How do you improve on what you are doing? And how is it all going to work in your particular organisation. We can help you answer all these questions by providing a set of metrics that will measure how close you are to your goal, review your strategies according to how your campaign is performing and also do an audit of your company structure and advise you on who is the best people to be on social media. After all, it’s important for all areas of your business to be at least a little bit involved in social media.

I hope this has given you a clearer idea of why and what you would use a social media consultant for. If you have any bad experiences with one please share it with me as I’m always interested in NOT doing that If you have had good experience please also let me know so I can feel warm and fuzzy for a while.