When you have a personal account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another popular social media website, it’s okay to let it languish when you don’t have time to groom it. Business accounts are an entire matter altogether, however. Leaving your brand’s social channels unattended can be the kiss of death for your marketing strategy. Fortunately, there’s an easy answer. Get a team of professionals to tackle the job! The problem About 46 percent of online users rely on social media when making a purchasing decision. Sometimes consumers ask the opinion of friends and followers but a high percentage also check out the company’s own social channels as well. Dormant, dead, or dying accounts give the appearance that your brand is sinking. At best, it looks like you’re too busy to bother with customers; at worst, it could look like you’ve given up. The end goal of your sales and marketing plans are to drive new and repeat customers to your product or service. It’s important to make sure that anyone looking for you on social media finds a vibrant, active community of enthusiastic customers and an engaged brand. The trouble is, maintaining social media accounts takes a lot of time -- especially when you have multiple channels to manage. Business owners are already pulled in a million directions so who’s got the time to post on Twitter, “like” fan pictures on Instagram, and chime in on conversations on your Facebook fan page? The solution There’s no need to go it alone! It takes a village -- or in this case, a team -- of social media pros to optimize your brand’s social accounts and maximize their potential. Here’s why: ● A team divides and conquers. Social media marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts. There are pictures to take or acquire, tweets to dream up, videos to shoot, infographics to build, and on it goes. Teams can split up to make quick work of pulling together all the components you need for a good social presence. ● A team knows each others’ strengths. No single person excels at every skill needed to run a strong social media campaign, but teamwork means being able to use everyone’s strengths to their advantage. One person might be great at coming up with clever picture captions and another excels at writing captivating Tweets, while a third loves to chat with customers on Facebook. Put them all together and you have an unbeatable group. ● A team means 24/7 attention. Conversations on social networks speed by in the blink of an eye and customers love to ask questions at all hours of the day or night. Teamwork means there’s always someone monitoring your accounts, ready to jump in when people talk to or about your brand. Studies show that 42 percent of customers who reach out to companies on social media expect a response within 60 minutes.