Take out a pen and paper, please — or just your laptop. It’s time to do a quick inventory on all the things your social media company does for you. Or, if you’re doing it yourself, write down how you’re managing your social media presence.

But first, an analogy. (It’s food-based, of course, because we care deeply about our snacks at Rallio.) Here goes.

When you pour yourself a bowl of cereal, you put milk on top, right? It might be regular milk, oat milk, almond milk or whatever type of milk you prefer — but you probably don’t serve your milk on the side. 

That is, eating your cereal and milk together makes perfect sense. If you were to take a bite of cereal and then take a sip of milk, well, that would just be weird. Someone would have to make a Netflix miniseries about you.

It’s like peanut butter and jelly. Spaghetti with spaghetti sauce. French fries and ketchup (or your dipping sauce of choice). 

Is anyone else hungry?

Now Think About Your Social Media Company

How does this analogy apply to your social media company? The thing is, you want your social media company to do more than just social media posting. For purposes of this article, we’re discussing why you need your social media company to handle your directory listings, too. 

Why is this important? Let’s break it down!

Why You Need a Directory Listings Service

Now more than ever, people are searching for your business or businesses like yours. Somewhere on your list of social media to-dos, you need to make sure that your business listing is correct so they’re able to find you.

With a directory listings service, you can make sure all your information is correct across the web wherever it appears. 

This is especially important right now during the COVID-19 crisis as people search for the most up-to-date information about your business. If you have temporarily modified your hours, for instance, you can update your hours using the directory listings service.

Without this type of service, you would need to manually update your information across the web wherever it appears. And that’s assuming you’re even aware of all the places it appears. Nobody’s got time for that!

Why You Need a Social Media Company

Now let’s consider why you need a social media company. Managing your social media presence requires hours of time, effort and resources. 

As we point out in our article How to Manage Your Social Media Expectations Vs. Reality, social media management cannot be accomplished in one or two hours a week. Your pages require constant daily attention, and it’s not generally something most business owners have time to manage.

That’s because for a page to be successful — and by successful, we’re referring to certain social media metrics you should be tracking for ROI — your list of social media to-dos should include the following:

• Posting and boosting hyper-local content that’s non-promotional and specific to your business
• Creating and boosting events
• Running page promotions, offers, like campaigns and other promotions
• Building relationships with your followers by engaging with them, asking them questions and getting to know them like you would in real life
• Responding to comments, questions and direct messages on your page
• Responding to reviews

Does that sound like anything you have time to do? Or would that time be better spent focusing on running your business?

By outsourcing your social media, you can lean on experts who eat, sleep and breathe social media on a daily basis. They’re always up-to-date on the latest technology, the trends in social media and any upcoming changes you might need to know about.

Basically, they’re going to stay on top of all aspects of your social media — one of the most important elements of your overall marketing strategy.

Learn more: Should I Outsource My Social Media? 6 Questions to Ask Yourself

Why You Need One Vendor for Both Directory Listings and Social Media

Last but not least, we ponder the question, why do you need one vendor for both directory listings and social media? Here’s where we get back to that bowl of cereal.

If your directory listings and social media services are separate, it creates a disconnect. Although your listings service might update your information online, it’s not going to convey that information for you via social media. 

Let’s say you change your hours. You update that information through your listings service. However, your social media posts don’t communicate to your audience that you’ve made the change, why you’ve made the change and how long this change will last. 

When your listings service and social media company are in the same “cereal bowl,” so to speak, they work together on your behalf to make sure your audience has the most current information.

If you adjusted your hours due to COVID-19, for example, maybe now you’re getting back to regular business hours. You would want to not only update your hours across the web, but also tell your followers. With a combined directory listings and social media provider, that’s all handled for you.

With Rallio’s services, you actually can be everywhere at once. You can manage your directory listings and social media from one simple dashboard:

• Your hours, physical address, phone number and other details about your business can be easily updated on over 40 directory listings sites, in just a few clicks. 
• Using that same dashboard, you can create a post for all your social platforms about your changed hours — maybe a photo of you as the business owner holding an “Open” sign, with a caption that reads, “We’re back! We have resumed our regular business hours and made a few adjustments in-house to account for social distancing and proper cleaning and disinfection.”
• Another benefit is the ease of maintaining information across platforms. Instead of franchisees having to log in to six or seven different platforms to update their information, they have one simple login and one dashboard to handle it all — streamlining the process and preventing errors. 

Boom. You just updated everyone and, at the same time, gave them the confidence they needed to feel safe returning to your establishment. 

With your directory listings and social media management under one roof, you have all elements of your online presence working together on your behalf. And just like that, your cereal and milk are working together!

Ask yourself, how many logins does it take to run my franchise? The answer should be one. Schedule a demo with us, and we’ll give you a glimpse of what we can do for your business.