Building up a social presence... a question on hiring.

[t2van]

Part of 2026 plans is to turn around our social media accounts they are drab, boring, we get all excited and put effort in and then it soon fizzles out.

No more.

Part of my plan for next year is to actually get these turned around and build up a genuine and authentic audience that actually takes part in posts and the community. So I'm going to suck it up and just outsource the job.

Would you go for a VA to just post things who has experience in that kind of thing?

OR would I be better suited outsourcing it to a "expert" in that case WTF do these people call them selfs? Just social media expert or something? Has to be more to it than that.

Id also like that same person to build up niche community pages away from the brand where emails can be collected and then fed back to the business. Is that a whole other skill set totally?

I'm pretty much anti social media but I need to suck it up and do something about it and getting someone in is the first task I think.

Advice from anyone who does this for a living would be welcomed

 

[roydan]

OR would I be better suited outsourcing it to a "expert" in that case WTF do these people call them selfs? Just social media expert or something? Has to be more to it than that.

Social media managers. Some of them are experts. Might as well hire an agency.

Id also like that same person to build up niche community pages away from the brand where emails can be collected and then fed back to the business. Is that a whole other skill set totally?

I really doubt a social media manager can pull this off.

Maybe you should hire an inhouse intern to do these. You'll pay about the same and you'll have their entire attention.

Some things are better outsourced, but this, I believe should be an inhouse job.

 

[Octavia]

Always do building pages in-house( full control), general posting and content creation outsource.



Where my gf worked they had 1 socialmedia girl just out of college. With degree and all.


---example why letting in-house intern make content sucks ---

She was supposed to set the company online, well daily posts on Instagram, doing holiday promotions but views were minimal like ~200 views range max.

Followers hard stuck below 1k.

She just wasn't suited for the job. Not to day she didn't put any effort into it, but even I could do a better job using canva making her creatives..

 

[t2van]

Thanks for the reply @roydan

Yes I don't really want to outsource anything, I like to try and hire or acquire and bring it all in house. We used to do all of our printing externally then bought some printers from a company that went bust and do it all internally it's cheaper and we got more control over times and what we need produced qty wise.

So I'm very much pro in house.


@Octavia thanks for the reply also.

Yeah I was looking around this afternoon at social media manager type jobs and lots seem to target the out of uni or intern type person.

I don't think I want that, I can get a VA I think to fill in that kind of roll and off load other things to them between the social posting.


I'm just not sure what I should be looking for and what I need to be advertising really.

I do need generic posting online products, things of the month to draw focus on the brand, mental health week and so on, as well as a few other posts. We did create a pile of content ideas just nothing gets done, I've gone so lean in terms of how things operate other areas now like social are paying the price.

Moving aside from the generic posting as mentioned then finding someone who has experience building up groups and niches I think will be the tough one, I don't want to just buy something off the shelf or something someone has build as I need the audience to be location specific and so on.

I'm just stuck on knowing what I need and what I want to look for, it does not help I hate social as I said, and looking at local job ads for similar things it all seems boring as heck