One advantage of social media management is that it helps the account owner with impulse control. If this is an issue that you need to address, there’s no shame in it. The vast majority of people have a lack of impulse control online. It’s become fairly standard practice to post whatever’s on your mind at a given moment, often without a second thought. But that can be professionally damaging, and if you think you’re in danger of careless posting, it might be worthwhile to engage a web services company to handle social media management for you.
There are a number of ways of approaching this sort of relationship. Some of them involve a mutual agreement on the identity of your personal brand, which it then becomes the company’s sole responsibility to promote. But other options allow you to retain a high level of control over what you’re saying online, so your accounts still reflect your true identity. It’s not necessary that professional social media management robs you of a personality just to protect you.
Sometimes, when people are keen to guard their online reputation, they do so by keeping one or more of their social media accounts protected so they are viewable only by close friends and family. This certainly helps to avoid scrutiny from potential employers and anyone else who might have a reason to examine the owner’s personal life and opinions. But it also creates a wall between that person and an audience they might want to reach. Fortunately, the owner can choose to drill strategic holes in that wall.
A free-wheeling but protected account can easily become the basis for curated content in the hands of a professional social media management team. By giving them access to your personal account and then letting them control a separate account that is open to the public, that team can duplicate the content you post, but filter out anything that might one day present a liability if it became part of your permanent record on the public internet.
At the same time, this form of social media management allows professional marketers or public relations professionals to keep watch over your private account for anything that could pose a similar danger. It’s important to keep in mind that nothing is completely private these days, and there’s always the possibility of someone capturing a screen shot of questionable personal communication and using it as a weapon.
This shouldn’t discourage you from communicating freely with people you trust, but it should make you wary of relinquishing your impulse control altogether. Professional social media management can help you to remember the importance of that control, regardless of how much actual control you give them over your content.