Engagement
Brands are conscious of the “tone of voice” and response times on social media. With platforms providing the tools for communities to immediately reward or punish them, this is for most the most important factor in the social media management.
So, who manages this in-house?
Campaign wrote a piece in November 2014 looking at this and reported brands like Kellogg, Unilever and Kimberley-Clark have internal media buying desks whilst Nike and Starbucks go it alone in social Media. This is a clear indicator of the importance of social for brands but also how early brands looked at who is best suited to manage it.
That’s not to say agencies haven’t played a part in strategy or that brands aren’t recruiting Social Media Managers from agencies to come and run in-house teams.
The Drum went on to talk about brands that are setting up in-house studios like CNN who state that what can be done in-house will be, but they still collaborate where they don’t have the skillset or capability on different forms of media like Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality.
Business to community also wrote a good article on this subject and I’m including this as another perspective to look at when considering your options.
I personally look at the tech that is available out there today and wonder why from an engagement perspective social isn’t fully managed in-house. Audience building tools like Social quant for twitter and engagement tools like Popomatic for Instagram can support activities like following and liking posts from the communities allowing the brand to focus on content and response.
Couple that with the correct data analysis skillset and you really can start to look mainly in-house for the management of social media.
68% say that they feel agencies take too long to turn around briefs
Reporting and Data
When looking at data, the first thing that springs to mind is how much does the brand want to share its data with an external agency?
If the data and the manipulation of that for reporting is managed in-house, then doesn’t the brand get an opportunity to react quicker and assess the productivity of the agency independently? Not saying that an agency can’t also react in the same way, but could there be a desire to prove the set strategy is correct and persevere rather than change course mid campaign? Reflective assessment of a failed campaign ultimately is a failed campaign!!