5 Effective Ways to Work With an Outsourced Social Media Manager

The contract is signed, the first posts are scheduled, and now the part nobody briefs you on begins: your half of the job.

We have been on both ends of this: we run marketing teams for European SMEs, and we have been the client who went quiet for three weeks and then wondered why the output had gone bland. When this fails, it is rarely because the person on the other end cannot write. It is because nobody gave them anything to write about.

Five habits that decide how this goes

1. Feed them the raw material only you have

A good remote team can research your sector and write clean copy in your market’s language. What they cannot do from ten thousand kilometres away is walk onto your site and photograph the thing you finished on Thursday. They cannot overhear the objection your sales manager fielded three times this week. Or know that the customer who signed on Tuesday chose you because your quote explained the delay instead of hiding it. That is the material that makes a feed specific to you. Everything else is interchangeable, and readers can tell.

Supplying it is not a writing task, which is where most owners go wrong. Photos straight off your phone, unedited, are fine. A two-minute voice note on the drive home — what went wrong on the Antwerp job and how we sorted it — beats a page of written brief, because it carries the words you actually use. One shared folder is enough.

2. Approve in batches, on a fixed day

This is the one that quietly kills more accounts than anything else. Approving ad hoc feels lighter, but it means every post depends on catching you at a good moment. Some weeks you are on site, on holiday, or dealing with something that matters more. The queue stops. The account goes silent for eleven days. Nobody decided that; it just happened.

Fix it with a calendar entry. Thirty minutes, the same slot every week or fortnight, and approve the whole batch in one sitting. It is faster than fourteen interruptions and it produces better decisions, because you see the run as a run.

Two additions make it robust. Name a deputy who can approve when you cannot. And agree an auto-publish rule: if nothing comes back within 48 hours, it goes out. That sounds reckless at first. It is less reckless than an empty feed, and it puts the cost of your silence where it belongs.

One practical detail: our team sits in the Philippines, six hours ahead of Belgium and the Netherlands in summer, seven in winter. Feedback sent at the end of your afternoon lands at the start of their next day. Feedback held until Friday evening costs you Monday.

3. Say what good sounds like — and spend longer on what bad sounds like

Everyone sends the brand guide. Almost nobody sends examples. A brand guide gives the hex code; it does not settle whether “Let’s talk” is too casual for your market, or whether an emoji belongs near a post about a delayed delivery.

Send six links instead. Three posts you would be pleased to have published, and three that would make you wince. One sentence on each. The negative examples do more work, because “clear, professional, human” describes every company in Europe, whereas “never this: no inspirational quotes, and we never call clients partners” is actionable in ten seconds.

Keep doing it through the first month of real output. When you reject a draft, name the part and the reason: too salesy in the closing line, or that is a claim we cannot support. “Doesn’t feel like us” is the most expensive feedback in this business — five seconds to type, impossible to act on.

The brief you send in month one shapes the outcome more than the person you hired to execute it.

— Ben Van Aken, Co-Founder & CTO

4. Pick one number and review it monthly, not post by post

Reacting to individual posts distorts everything. One gets four likes and you conclude the strategy is broken. The next gets three hundred because it was funny, and everybody wants more of that — though not one of those three hundred will ever buy from you.

Decide up front which single number you are managing to, and choose the one closest to money. For most SMEs that is enquiries which mention having seen you online, or messages from people who look like actual customers, or clicks through to one specific page. Follower count is the weakest option; use it only if you genuinely have nothing better.

Look at it once a month, on a fixed date, against the month before. Trend, not snapshot. This is where most SMEs lose their nerve: in our experience an account that starts producing in month four looks identical in month two to one that never will.

5. Brief them on the business, not just on the content

The default version of this relationship is transactional. You send requirements, they send posts. It works the way a vending machine works, and it never produces the person who notices your busiest quarter is starting and says so first.

Treat them as staff who happen to sit somewhere else. Fifteen minutes a month covers it: what you are quoting on, what is selling, what a customer complained about last week. Add them to the channel where the real work gets discussed. And tell them when something goes wrong — a botched delivery, a bad review — before they find out by posting something cheerful directly above it.

It solves a retention problem too. People who understand a business stay and get better at it. People who receive tickets move on, and you pay for the ramp-up again.

Where this actually goes wrong

It would be convenient to say outsourcing fails when the contractor is weak. Sometimes it does, and then you replace them. But in our experience most failures trace back to the client side, and to three things in particular.

• A starved brief. No photos, no context, no answers to questions — so the team writes from your website, the output comes out generic, and the client concludes outsourcing does not work. It was never given the chance to.
• An absent approver. A batch sits in a folder for two weeks because the only person who can sign it off is busy. The work was finished on time. Nobody looked at it.
• Shifting goalposts. Month one it is brand awareness. Month two it is why are we not getting leads. Month three a competitor’s video arrives with can we do that. Every switch resets the clock.

None of that is comfortable reading when you are the one paying the invoice. Read it anyway: all three are cheap to fix, and not one of them can be fixed by the person you hired.

What your side costs, in hours

Roughly: thirty minutes a fortnight approving a batch, fifteen minutes a month on a call, and photos and voice notes dropped into a folder as things happen. Under two hours a month — and it decides whether the rest is worth what you pay.

If you are still deciding rather than already committed: our packages run from €595 to €2,295 a month depending on how much you want covered, and €1 a day — €30 a month — buys one post a day on one platform if you would rather watch the cadence work first. The five habits above cost nothing and will move your result further than the tier you choose.

See what each package includes

Start with the folder. Take a photo tomorrow, before you have decided whether it is any good, and send it over. That single change fixes more outsourced accounts than any brief we have been handed.