Why Outsourcing Social Media Is Working for Businesses

Many large companies worldwide are facing a conundrum when it comes to using social media to help generate new business.

On the one hand, firms of all stripes are pouring large sums of money into using paid media to do outreach to consumers on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — and are allocating larger slices of their digital ad pies for that purpose.

In the United States alone, advertisers will spend $9.59 billion on social ads this year, according to the market research firm eMarketer. This represents a 31 percent surge from the 2014 outlays on social media, and more than double what was put into this segment in 2013.

By 2017, U.S. advertisers will boost their social ad outlays to $14.4 billion, eMarketer projects. By that point, social ads are expected to consume nearly $1 out of every $5 in U.S. advertisers' budgets.

This year, social will account for 15.9 percent of North American ad budgets — up from 10.5 percent just two years ago. But while eMarketer has estimated that nearly 90 percent of companies with 100-plus employees did social marketing last year, many firms are also having trouble achieving their goals in that realm.

A study that Ascend2 published in December 2014 discovered that 43 percent of respondents found a lack of in-house resources and skills as their most challenging obstacle to success from social media marketing. Another 42 percent complained about an inability to measure return on investment, and 39 percent cited a lack of effective strategy.

These results suggest that for many companies it may make sense to outsource the job of social outreach to prospective customers (something that the Ascend2 study found 53 percent of respondents were doing, in whole or in part).

However, as companies worldwide learned during the great outsourcing boom of the previous two decades, farming out important jobs carries risk.