By Chris Belmore

There is a lot of debate about the role of agencies in social media: should they help set up the strategy, consult on a more regular basis, or manage and execute everything? Some commentators are pretty adamant that agencies shouldn’t handle the day-to-day social media stuff.  Sweeping statements like this strike me as overly simplistic. As we’re finding out, each case is different.

For some clients we produce all of the content and manage the daily outlets.  For others, we help them set up an action plan, but don’t pretend that we know their audience or their content better than them. The trick is to work with a client to decide what strategy is best for them.  Some questions that spring to mind:

• Do they realistically have enough time to commit to manning the social media outlets?
• Do they have enough money to pay an agency to do a good enough job?
• Does the agency manage any/all other communications for this client?
• Does the agency have enough knowledge about the subject matter?

And agencies shouldn’t fall into the trap of reeling off a list of ‘good ideas’ and expecting the client to pick the strategy, that’s not what your client is looking for.

One project we’ve worked on for nearly 5 years is msdev.com, a site giving free training, resources, and support to anyone interested in developing on Microsoft products. Social media was such an obvious fit for this website, and although we were very familiar with the site and content given our years working on the project, we’re by no means the experts – they are the producers.

We therefore recommended that the clients run the Twitter and Facebook accounts instead of outsourcing, and that they are very up front about the fact that several people manage them. We also helped set up a framework covering things such as the types of content, regularity of output, and deadlines for responses, to ensure consistency across all outputs.

It’s going really well: two thirds of all msdev posts on Facebook provoke a response from one or more people. Suffice to say the client is chuffed with how it’s performing. Important to remember that they’re the ones doing the day-to-day work, and having great content is what matters.