Build a Better Social Media Team

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Any business owner, small or large, can tell you how vital it is to have a social media presence in the 2020s. Social media has entirely taken the place of the corporate website for many companies, serving as a conduit for customer service, marketing, and communicating with the outside world at large.

But social media takes a lot of time, work, and energy to maintain, especially across multiple platforms. That's why many businesses, small or large, don't have just one intern or employee working on the social media front — they have entire teams.

But building a team isn't just a matter of hiring a handful of freelancers and calling it good — you need a plan and a cohesive strategy for getting the most out of your social media department.

How to Build the Most Effective Social Media Team

The most popular social media sites all work very differently, because they serve different purposes and demographics: TikTok appeals to younger audiences, while Facebook is the destination for older customers. Posting a photo on Instagram may have a very different effect than posting it elsewhere.

That's why you need a team of people with diverse talents and specialties. But we'll get to that a little later.

Assess your current situation.

Your social media presence may have been laying fallow for months or even years, but it's not too late to change all that.

Take stock of where you are in terms of social media. Do you have any presence at all? (If not, get one!) Are you on every popular platform? Are your accounts active and engaged, or do you have one tweet from 2013 that got no views?

Most of all, determine where you want to focus your energies (marketing, customer service, etc.) and start working on a budget. This will help inform how big your team will be later on.

Determine Your Goals

Running Twitter for a business is much different than having a personal account. While some brands have a strategy that makes them look like just another user, even that is a product of a calculated strategy.

You should also further shape your strategy when it comes to how you'll use social media. There are a number of strategies to focus on:

●     Using social media to increase brand awareness and get your name out there (this one is more or less assumed)

●     Generate leads

●     Drive traffic to your website, blog, or app

●     Use your social media presence as a recruiting tool

●     Listen to customers to better understand your market and determine what customers (or potential customers) want.

●     Use social media as a customer service tool, to answer questions and solve problems.

●     Engage with your audience, cultivate brand ambassadors, and build your audience and customer base.

Decide how you want your social media to align with your company's brand, reputation, and online image. Will you present yourself as a more traditional brand, or take a more unorthodox route?

Find the right tools.

One of the things you'll want to be diligent about in expanding your social media presence is presenting a consistent vision across a variety of platforms. The larger and more sophisticated your social media strategy gets (and the larger your team), the more you'll need the right tools — digital management software, all-in-one suites, and organizational software to keep it all straight.

Decide on roles.

Now that you have a solid strategy and approach, it's time to figure out how you'll implement it. Before you get as far as the hiring process, decide on what kind of roles you want your social media managers to play. Will you have one person concentrate on marketing while another does customer service DMs on Twitter? The bigger your business and the more platforms you choose to embrace, the greater the need to have roles with clearly drawn boundaries, so no one gets confused.

Assemble Your Team

Now that you've completed the important step of determining exactly what you want from your social media, it's time to start hiring. Decide whether you're going to assign people in-house, bring in new hires from outside, work with freelancers, or a combination of all three. Obviously, you should look for the most qualified, educated social media managers you can, and if your needs are large and diverse enough, hire one or more specialists with extra experience in specific platforms.

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics

In business, there's no better way to determine how well you're doing than with hard data. Fortunately, the nature of social media makes it easy to collect a lot of data about engagement with your content, audience demographics, and more. It will be important to set aside something in your budget to analyze those metrics and put them to use in your future strategies.

 

Massive Facebook Outage Topples Gaming Sector.

The Facebook outage has taken social media users' world by storm. The world has got an alternative reality where the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, played sports in college; we have also got to know that how much of our lives are entangled in social media, especially the Facebook empire. When it comes to gaming, the gamers were unable to log into their Facebook gaming account.

Facebook is facing an unequivocally enormous outage today, with every feature of its business currently offline. Also, Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp are all unavailable, and people worldwide are clueless and are noticing the sunshine for the first time in years. This extreme outage has also impacted the games and gaming sector as players who use Facebook account to log in were unable to do it.

One of the most renowned game designing companies, FIFA Mobile, tweeted that this outage was unexpected and hoped the company would resolve this issue soon. Also, Niantic, the maker of Pokémon Go, tweeted, saying it was looking into reports of errors due to the sudden outage and stated that Facebook should figure out the reason behind the outage soon.

 

How Do Social Media Apps Make Money?

Are you confused about whether you should create your own social network app or not? Not sure if it will be worth the time or effort? If yes, then don’t come to a decision before you go through this article. Because, over the course of this piece, we’ll tell you how the big-name social networks –  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – out there are making money, so you can also apply their methods. Let’s get started –

How Social Networks Actually Make Money

Social network sites are making money in various ways. Let’s break them down below –

Ads

Generally, if you aren’t paying for the social media app, then you are the payment. Yes, you’re the end consumer and advertisers are the source of money for social networks. By using these platforms, you’re selling them your time and attention, which advertisers are taking a cut off.

While you may think that’s an unethical way of raking in money, but it’s only fair for them to make money through ads as they’ve spent so much time building up their user base.

Online advertising is still a rising market. And because of the attention, these apps are holding, advertisers are willing to open their wallets further to get an ad there. The more the advertisers pay, the more prospects would see the ad.

Creative Products

Since monetizing a social media subtly ain’t a cakewalk, webmasters devise creative ways to make their revenue. One such creative way is Facebook Gifts. It lets you send virtual gifts to your friends that show up on your profile. They cost $1 and you can also personalize your message on them.

Premium Subscriptions

Would you pay money to use Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Probably not. Even if you decide yes, most people out there won’t. The only successful subscription social networks are the entertainment, media, and dating networks.  Free apps attract average users because there’s nothing to lose for them.

While most social networks are completely free, some offer premium versions to make some money in exchange for extra features. LinkedIn, for instance. They offer a premium subscription for job seekers. YouTube has also recently come up with their premium subscription, where they reduce hassle for the user.

But in all honesty, it’s hard to monetize social networks for the time being. Especially because there’s the risk of harming the user experience. Social networks that add applications and services into the community can make more revenue by charging a developer fee.

Venture Capital – If Everything Else Fails

Majority of the social networks start out with venture capital funds. Investors often take risks on companies if they see potential in them. So they write the check in hopes of getting a big return over the course of time.

Facebook is a prime example of this. They started out with venture capital. Same case for Twitter. They both had raised several million dollars as venture capital. The aim is to either monetize the network or sell it off to some large corporation to make a killing.

Last Words

Seeing from a consumer’s point of view, ads mainly were a way to enjoy the application at a far less cost. Without them, magazines and newspapers would have to double and triple their prices just to avoid losses. And the price increase would certainly reduce the number of pieces sold. Same applies for social networks. Doing so will make people quit social media. Because let’s face it – none of us would want to pay for it without having a taste of it first. It’s super crucial to make access easy, effortless, and free if social networks want to keep their growing up.