You’ve turned the corner into the new year. You’re fired up and ready to get your business flourishing! Naturally, you turn to social media marketing. However, if you’ve been hittin’ Google and Pinterest hard for DIY social media marketing tips, it’s time to power down and regroup.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but DIY social media marketing tips tend to turn out like the other DIY fails you find on Pinterest. Even worse to say, they can take an extensive amount of time to remedy if gone wrong.

Because social media platforms are accessible and used by nearly eighty-one percent of the U.S. population, it’s assumed that social media marketing is a job that anyone could do in their spare time. 

However, social media marketing for small business isn’t as easy is it sounds. The amount of strategy that goes into a social marketing plan is so overlooked that its professional value is often misconstrued.

DIY social media marketing can wreak havoc on your business. When delegating social media marketing to an internal employee, more often than not, their sole focus is not on social media. Juggling more than one position at a time only leads to little blunders that add up.

Additionally, when treating social media as an add-on to an employee’s responsibilities, the original initiatives they possess are placed higher on the priority list. Because of that, your DIY social media marketing doesn’t have a chance.

Dramatic? Maybe. But in our experience, it’s true.

Social media marketing for small business takes a ton of research, social listening and dedicated time. As great as it would be to “set it and forget it”, that’s not the way it works. A good social media strategy takes just that. Strategy.

When you outsource your social media management, your business is making a conscious choice to have a social media plan executed. Where as a DIY approach welcomes endless excuses to not execute your plan. We don’t know about you guys, but we hate excuses.

Believe it or not, by hiring a professional social media manager, you have the potential to save money. We get it. This sounds like something every social media business everywhere would say to make a sale. But it’s true!

When hiring a professional, you’re decreasing the downtime from your employees and the other tasks they need to complete to make your operation run. Downtime costs money. Moreover, a digital agency doesn’t request vacation time, benefits or extra office space. All things that cost your business money.

Foregoing the DIY social media for a professional gives your business access to experts who know the ins and outs of platforms, trends, formats and algorithms. As Alex Trebek once said, “We are all experts in our own little niches.”

Our advice regarding DIY social media in 2019? Skip it. Hire a professional.