Social media business

[stender]

Hi All,
My youngest starts school this week and so it's also time for the wife to find something to do. Unfortunately there are not many jobs that are 9:30 til 2:30 and give you all the school holidays off so im trying to come up with a home business idea for her.
I've thought of online stores but not found anything new or cheap enough to buy so was thinking social media management would be something she would be good at, with a view to her also learning seo eventually.

She used to work for a media company (9 years ago) as a operations manager. Very well organised and was very good at dealing with other companies in various guises.

Does anyone have any dealings with running companies social media or can offer any advice, tips, uselful links?
Opinions welcome too or any other suggestions.

 

[Blossom]

It will be hard without demonstrable experience. Her own personal accounts will have to be active, thoughtfully populated and she'll need a full working knowledge of Facebook page and brand guidelines, Twitter guidelines etc.

She'll need to create her own brand for it because she'll be pitching to fair sized businesses - smaller ones don't tend to pay for someone to do social media. The problem there is that most prefer to have in-house staff or hire big agencies. The only other way round it really is to offer it in blocks of a few hours or days fairly cheaply to smallish businesses at least to start with to get the experience, or perhaps even offer some work for free to bigger names to prove worth/get experience.

Another thing is that it's absolutely not a 9:30 to 2:30 job, especially if you're dealing with a lot of people. It ends up taking over your life 24/7 if you let it. It's not as simple as just replying to people - you need to brainstorm and create marketing campaigns (or apply existing ones to social media), work with designers and product managers, know the industry and products as well as the salespeople and customer services reps do, analyse stats, understand the psychographic profiling and a million other things. Plus have the qualities - timing, ideas, general creativity, general marketing skills, thinking on your feet, language skills, negotiation, dealing with difficult people...list is endless really.

 

[stender]

Thanks for the reply blossom. Much appreciated. I agree with your points. The aim to start with will be to do some freebie/cheap work for businesses I know with a view to using those as portfolios/examples. She's not looking to build it too big, just to have a limited amount of clients .
I can't think of anything else to do, even having money to invest!

Regards

 

[Edwin]

If she has a strong passion about something and the ability to write well, she could try blogging about it and get a bit of a revenue stream going that way. Especially if it's something that lends itself to videos as well, and if she'd be up for being on camera (that way, she can be gaining traffic from Youtube as well as via the more usual channels).

 

[stender]

I don't think she'd be interested in blogging tbh. Having been a housewife for the past 9-10 years she's not had time to have any hobbies, especially as neither of my kids tend to sleep!. I personally don't think it's easy to make any decent money blogging either, but thanks for the suggestion.