Why The Public Sector Need To In-source Social Media

In this blog I'm going to share with you why you need to in-source your story and in-source your social media. 

Many organisations outsource social media management, content creation and social media advertising, and that's absolutely okay. 

I get it. 

You don't have the skills. 

You don't have the capacity. 

But you possibly have the budget. 

However I have a different view. 

Let me flip that strategy on its head and just for a couple of minutes hear me out. 

When you're explaining what the public want and the story that you have to tell to somebody else, sometimes it gets lost in translation. 

Maybe they miss tone, they miss policy or political nuances and maybe they miss the impact of what the people will receive on the other side of that content. 

I really believe that if you want to tell stories that resonate on social media to increase your engagement rate, you need to in-source your storytelling. 

All of the other challenges that you're facing can be easily overcome. 

When I'm working with my students and my clients, I always say you have 90% of what you need to create and to publish a great story. 

I simply am giving you that other 10%.

That 10% is creating your social media strategy, giving you the tactics that'll work, how to test content, how to analyse your metrics. 

Then I get them to do an exercise where I give them two minutes and I get them to write down 12 topics that matter to the public and that they are going to talk about over the next year. 

More often than not they always get those 12 topics down within the two minutes, and why?

Because they know the stories that matter, I ask them to tell me that story, tell me the story with impact, start at the beginning, give me a middle and then end that story up and wrap it up for me. 

And they absolutely can. 

In my book Public Sector Marketing Pro, I have a line in chapter seven and it says; 

“Don't sack your best people in favour of taking somebody else in from the private sector”

Because more often than not what I'm finding is that public sector agencies are hiring from the outside, outsourcing their social media, their digital content creation because they believe that somebody can tell their story better. 

But I believe, and I've worked with public sector marketing pros who have been in public sector and government for many many years, and that intuitiveness to the nuances, to the policy, to the politics, they have it in bucket loads. 

I believe scaling digital communications and social media skills within your organisation, investing time and training, creating your own digital and social media academy can serve you better in the long term. 

Then your stories are more authentic, they're more believable and they're coming from you, the source, and it's built into policy and decision making at every level of the organisation and then you get those better engagement rates. 

So get over the challenge of not knowing how to, get over the challenge of not having enough time and in source social media, upscale your team, scale around the organisation and I promise you you will see better results.

Joanne Sweeney

Public Sector Marketing Institute