Social media is conversation and collaboration with your stakeholders. Then, why would you want to outsource these engagement services? Social media efforts can be a huge waste of time and you’ll get nothing in return, unless you know the best strategies for sharing content. The bulk of the work is research, optimization, content creation and monitoring, which can be outsourced to a team of social media experts, including designers, developers, writers of content and researchers experienced in social media support activities. You then will be able to maintain successful results with a lean in-house social media coordination team to help keep your costs down. Your people must be skilled and trained at integrating social media engagement with branding, employee relations, hiring, public relations, marketing, customer services, reputation management and product development. If they aren’t, these are other areas that can be supported by and outsourced to experienced social media experts.