Build a Better Social Media Team
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.
