What's a Sprout Social freelancer?

A Sprout Social freelancer is a digital marketing professional providing social media management services using Sprout Social as their main platform.

They can set up your social media accounts, optimize your brand's social profiles, schedule posts, monitor your social accounts, analyze social platform performance, provide content creation services, and help you develop a social media marketing plan.

What can a Sprout Social expert do for your business?

When you have a Sprout Social expert on your marketing team, you can use their knowledge in navigating social media management tools and social channels to increase brand awareness and audience engagement. Here are the things a Sprout Social expert can do for your business:

• Set up and configure your social media channel profiles on Sprout Social 
• Create different content types (text, images, videos, etc.) for your social channels 
• Create custom content and manage your content library
• Manage your social media calendar and get social posts up at optimal times
• Monitor your social media profiles to keep business information up to date 
• Respond to customer reviews and customer inquiries received through social media platforms
• Engage with your audience by interacting with social post comments and brand mentions
• Track your brand's social media performance using Sprout Social's analytics tools
• Identifying top-performing content and doubling the efforts 
• Help your social team develop data-driven social media marketing campaigns
• Performing content curation and selecting pieces for the content calendar plan

On top of being responsible for your brand's social media presence, a Sprout Social freelancer can also assist in content creation, community management, and influencer marketing.

Why use Sprout Social over another tool?

There are a lot of other social media management tools you can use for your business's social media advertising needs, so why should you go for Sprout Social?

• You can't go wrong with its easy-to-use interface.
• It offers a wide variety of useful features for content scheduling, performance analytics, and other useful social media tools.
• You can use its advanced social listening capabilities to measure your brand's performance against competitors on multiple social media platforms and respond to conversations that mention your brand.
• The tool lets you customize reports to focus on key metrics that'll help you find areas that need improvement and capitalize on top-performing content.
• If you work with more than one social media consultant, you can use Sprout Social's collaborative tools to allow them to manage your social media accounts efficiently.

How much does a Sprout Social specialist cost?

A Sprout Social specialist can cost you anywhere between $200 to $10,000 per month. Some specialists may charge more, especially if you want them to design visual content for your channels and they have specific social platform expertise. If a promising Sprout Social expert's rates are over your budget but have a track record of helping brands get social media marketing ROI, they should be worth the business expense.

How to hire the perfect Sprout Social freelancer

Here are the things you need to do to hire the perfect Sprout Social freelancer:

1. Decide on your goals

Before hiring a professional to manage your brand's socials, you need to set clear goals and business objectives for your social media marketing strategy. Do you want to increase your social media presence? Increase post engagement? Lead social media users to your website?

Moreover, you need to set an appropriate social media marketing budget. Remember to factor in content development costs, advertising, hiring people, influencer marketing, social tools, etc.

By establishing your goals and your social media management budget, you'll spend less time looking for an expert to help you achieve them. That means more time spent on ramping up your social media marketing efforts.

Here are a few things you should decide on: 

• What's your budget? What's your price range?
• Which social media sites should your freelancer specialize in? 
• Which pricing model do you want to work with (hourly, salary, per post/project)
• Would they be part of your in-house team or fully remote?

2. Write down a job description

After deciding on what you want to achieve, it's time to summarize the social media management skills you're looking for. For example, you want to increase brand awareness or reach a new audience segment. Make sure to emphasize that and express that you're looking to hire a specialist with experience in social media advertising and look for proof of their past work.

You'll also want to include the social media marketing tools you'll require them to have knowledge of, such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, and other similar social media management tools. Different social media freelancers specialize in various social media tools, and you want someone that knows their way around the ones you want to use for your brand.

You should also mention which channels you're looking to grow whether that's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or Google My Business.

Skills you should be looking for: 

• Graphic design - make sure your specialist has the ability to design their own posts (images and/or videos)
• Analytics - they need to be very analytical and look at what's working, improve what's not working, and optimize and A/B test.
• Content creation - they need to create content that resonates with your target audience and gets you traffic and conversions
• Social content management - they need to be a pro at all the latest strategies and up to date with the latest algorithm changes

3. Post your job

With a job description ready, it's time to put up hiring posts. You can use UpWork, Fiverr, and other freelancing platforms to reach social media marketers across the globe or post a job opening on LinkedIn, Indeed, and similar platforms.

If your brand already has social media profiles set up, you can also post under your brand's name for wider reach. Who knows? You might come across a Sprout Social specialist who's also a customer!

4. Ask your network

Aside from posting on freelancing platforms, professional social media profiles, and job boards to find freelancers, utilizing your industry contacts, such as other business owners, is also a great way to connect with the perfect Sprout Social freelancer.

In addition, you can also reach out to other freelancers you've worked with in the past to ask if they can connect you with the experts you need to execute your brand's social media campaign.

If you work with a digital marketing agency or two for your business' other marketing efforts, they're also good contacts to tap when looking for freelancers.

5. Work with Mayple

You don't want to waste resources working with a specialist that doesn't understand your social media marketing goals or has the right experience level to achieve them. By working with Mayple, you can find the perfect Sprout Social freelancer, with the relevant project and industry background to execute your social media marketing plans.

We'll match you with the expert, present a marketing plan for your approval, and get to work.

Questions to ask your Sprout Social expert:

• How many clients have you managed through Sprout Social? 
• Have you worked with similar brands in our industry/niche?
• Do you have experience with graphic design? 
• Are you part of a team? Will there be additional users on the account? 
• Which other social publishing tools have you used in the past? 
• How much growth have your clients experienced (in terms of social presence, engagement, and traffic)
• What is your most successful campaign as a social media manager?
• Do you have an example of a time when you increased a company's social media presence using Sprout Social? 
• Other than Sprout Social, what other social media management platforms do you prefer?

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