How to Hire Someone to Write Your Tweets for You
In the constant quest to automate, outsource, and generally minimize the amount of work you have to do to maintain and grow a social media profile, you’ve probably wondered: can you just hire someone to handle Twitter for you? After all, it’s a skill of it’s own. Learning the Twitter culture, getting the atmosphere right, learning Twitter tools; it’s all just so much time and effort you could spend on chasing new leads, developing new products, or providing better service.
There are a handful of different ways you can pay someone to manage Twitter for you. Let’s cover them all.
Paying for Content Writing
This is the lowest level of paying for social media content, and it’s very simple. All you need to do is know what you want to be posting on Twitter, and know where you can buy content online. Here are a few possibilities:
- Fiverr. There are people on the popular $5 and up site that will, for $5, or $10, or $20, write a pack of tweets on a subject you want. One guy does 12 tweets for $10. Another gal does 15 for $10, or $35 for 20. You just give them a topic and they write the content for you.
- Writer Access. One of many content mills, Writer Access is on the higher end of them. You can hire five or six star writers to create tweets for you. The link I’ve provided features those who have put Twitter as a specialty, though you can freely browse writer profiles at your leisure.
- Zerys. A smaller content mill with a disparate selection of writers, it’s at least free to register and set up assignments. I make no guarantees about the quality of the content you’ll get from them, though.
- Textbroker. One of the primary content mills, if you’re paying for anything less than 5-star content, you’re probably getting crap. Thankfully, since you pay by the word, tweets aren’t going to cost you very much to buy in bulk.
You get the idea. There are all sorts of places you can pay for content, and since most of these sites charge by the word, tweets are going to be cheap individually. You can buy packs of them in bulk, all written by the same user, to make sure they have a consistent tone and theme.
If you go this route, I suggest that you start small. Buy five or ten tweets from a source and verify that they produce content that is reasonable for your brand. Don’t go all-in with your budget until you’re certain that a specific writer has a bead on the kind of content you want to publish. An exclusive deal with a specific writer might cost you more, but the consistency will be worth more in the long run.
There are a few downsides to this method, unfortunately. For one thing, you certainly get what you pay for, which in this case is just content. You still have to post the content or schedule it yourself. You need to learn how to manage Twitter Analytics and learn what works and what doesn’t. All of the responses, notifications, and so forth are your responsibility. You COULD copy replies, paste them in a new assignment to a writer, and pay for responses, but that’s an expensive and roundabout way to engage with your fans. It’s also slow, with a multi-day turnaround time in most cases, so it won’t win you any favors with the fast-paced world of Twitter.
Additionally, it’s not a scalable or sustainable project. Writers come and go; they might have their hands full for a month and won’t be able to get to your assignment, or they might decide they want to raise their rates to something more than you want to pay. Switching writers means inconsistent voice and potential duplication, as well.
Paying for Freelance or Intern Management
The second option, then, is to hire someone explicitly for managing your Twitter. You can pay a freelancer to do it, or you can hire an intern to work for your company as an actual employee, albeit a remote one. Depending on your requirements, it might not be that expensive, all things considered.
What requirements might you want out of a social media manager for your Twitter account?
- Producing text content. This is the bare minimum; the person you hire needs to be able to create compelling, amusing, and effective tweets. It doesn’t necessarily matter how clever their messages are if they don’t get you any business.
- Creating graphics and media. You might want to hire someone with the graphic design experience necessary to make media for you. Alternatively, you should hire a separate graphic designer and funnel their content to your social media manager. Always make sure any media posted on your Twitter account is media you have permission to use! You don’t want to have a freelance Twitter manager open you up to legal hassles.
- Appropriately retweeting content. Retweeting and curating content is just as important as tweeting your own content. You need someone who knows what kinds of content should and should not be retweeted in a business setting and in your niche. It doesn’t matter how clever the new Wendy’s post is, it’s probably not the right kind of content for your feed.
- Performing hashtag research. Hashtags are just as important for content as the content itself. You can do research yourself and give the freelancer a list of approved tags to use, but it’s better if they have an understanding of what makes a tag good or bad, and when to use tags appropriately.
- Analyzing and reporting on campaign success. A good Twitter manager has a good grasp of your overall goals with your Twitter campaign. They also will have an understanding of Twitter Insights, and will be able to look in and generate reports to show you how your account is growing, how their job is doing in terms of performance, and areas where there is room for improvement.
- Managing Twitter ads. You’re going to want to run Twitter ads eventually, since paid promotion – especially social promotion – is so important with the modern internet. You either need to be able to run them yourself in conjunction with your freelancer, or you need to be able to trust them with your ads system, which in turn means financial information and the ability to make potentially large purchases on behalf of your company. That’s a lot of trust, especially for a freelancer.
- Managing multiple Twitter accounts. Some brands benefit from having more than one Twitter account, and they all need to be kept alive and active. A primary account, an account for customer service, and even a third account for branch matters or news can all be useful. It can be a lot of work, though, especially customer service. Either hire more than one freelancer for a team, or keep your accounts to a minimum.
- Networking with influencers and other marketers. Influencer marketing is huge, and you’re wasting a lot of opportunities if you’re not partaking in it. That means whoever you have running your Twitter account needs to have an awareness of your industry and who the bloggers are that are open to networking. It does no good to only target the big names, and you don’t want them to accidentally pitch a competitor.
- Hosting or moderating a Twitter Chat. Twitter chats can be a great way to grow your presence in your industry, though they are one of the more optional items on this list. Still, having someone that knows what they are and how to moderate one can go a long way towards building your brand presence.
- Following appropriate accounts. Knowing who they can follow for benefit on Twitter is huge for an account manager. You can’t just set them and let them go wild; you might end up running afoul of Twitter’s rules against follower churn.
- Filtering new followers to minimize fakes. Bots follow accounts all the time based on keyword or hashtag usage. Scrapping those follows may seem like it stunts your growth, but a smaller and more engaged audience is better than a big audience of cardboard cutouts any day.
In short, there are a ton of possible responsibilities for a Twitter manager. You can’t just pick up a writer from a freelance portal like Upwork and hope they do the job. You need someone who is trained on Twitter and knows what they’re doing.
Whenever you’re thinking of hiring someone, look at that list of requirements and add your own. Figure out what you want them to do and what you can handle yourself. Determine whether you want them to work alone or as part of a team, and whether they’ll be an employee or a contract worker. Draw up the appropriate contracts, then start looking for people.
Only talk to people who can give you examples of their prior work, and whose work you like. Talk to people in your industry and ask for a referral if necessary. Heck, you can try to poach the social media manager of a competitor if you want, though they aren’t always going to be open to the thought.
It also helps if you know enough about Twitter to know what success or failure looks like, and thus you can judge what your hire is doing before it gets out of control.
Paying for a Social Media Manager
As you might imagine, hiring someone directly is pretty expensive, but then so is the alternative: hiring an agency.
Agencies will easily be able to handle all of the above responsibilities without issue. They’ll have professionals on staff trained explicitly to do all of that, and they’ll have contracts that specify such. They’ll be relatively trustworthy with your financials for the purposes of running ads as well, though generally agencies use their own resources and just bill you later.
The perk of contracting an agency comes in knowledge, experience, and success rates. These companies know what they’re doing, and consequently they’ll make it look like you know what you’re doing on Twitter. And, of course, they’ll make you look good on other social networks as well. Many agencies and professionals will set up a comprehensive social media plan for Facebook, Twitter, and another 2-3 social networks depending on which ones you want to use.
On the other hand, they’re probably going to need plenty of resources from you. This means money, but it also means graphic design or products they can use to make the graphics. It means discussions about your short and long term goals. It’s definitely not going to be entirely hands-off, though it’ll probably be less work than shepherding a freelancer or two around.
It’s also dangerous hiring an agency if you think you might need to drop them later. If your budget drops and you need to drop an agency, suddenly you’re left managing 2-5 social networks on your own, and without the skill or resources they had. You end up leaving abandoned profiles littering the digital wasteland, and that’s not a good look.
Pricing does depend on where you’re looking. There are people who claim to be social media experts who will sell their services for something like $30 a week. There are also agencies that have pricing so high the only companies even willing to look at them are on the scale of Nike, Coke, Nestle, or Google. Though, of course, many of these companies simply have their own internal departments dedicated to the work.
Which route you take at the end of the day depends entirely on your budget and your needs. Think carefully, and try to find someone who can do what you need.