Do You Have The Right Social Media People?

Recruiting the right people for social media marketing is a common pursuit for many companies today. However, my advise for the first task is to look at the roles that the team need to have.

Over the years I have identified 3 essential roles.

• Community Manager
• Strategist
• Analyst

The number of people with these roles varies due to the circumstances. For example, the number of accounts and the size and activity of the followers are key factors. Some situations can be served by two people and the 3 roles spread around them. If you have someone with exceptional skills and experience they might be dominate in one role and be able to do parts of one of the other two roles. However once you scale up you need at least 2 people to cover 3 roles. Then scale up again; 3 people doing 3 roles and so on.

Here is a one minute video that explores the key aspects of these 3 roles.

Community Managers

Are your community managers people friendly and do they have the skills and experience to spot business leads, discover influencers and manage crisis situations?

Community Managers

I have always said that “angry short tempered staff members do not often make good community managers”. It sounds funny but think about it.

Here is an example when a sense of humor in a community manager can really work well when the moment presents itself. I encourage my current set of community managers about this, and I always use this example. So build up a good set of character traits that you want in your team as well as suitable experience and system skills.

Nice side:

Generosity
Integrity
Loyalty
Devotion
Loving
Kindness
Sincerity
Self-control
Peacefulness
Faithfulness
Patience
Determination
Persistence
Adventurous
Fairness
Cooperation
Tolerance
Optimism
Spirituality

Dark Side:

No one is perfect and we all have a darker side. Some character traits that have negative connotations include:

Dishonesty
Disloyalty
Unkindness
Meanness
Rudeness
Disrespectfulness
Impatience
Greed
Abrasiveness
Pessimism
Cruelty
Unmercifulness
Narcissism
Obnoxious
Malicious
Pettiness
Quarrelsome
Caustic
Selfishness
Unforgiving

(Taken from Your dictionary article about character traits)

Social Media Analyst

The second role I am highlighting is that of the social media analyst. Analysts who can conduct evaluations and work out the impact of your campaigns are not so easy to come by. Do they know the difference between metrics and key performance indicators and know how to do end to end campaign tracking?

Analysts in your team must be able to use web analysis tools to track the attribution of your social media campaigns to your web site call to action buttons, forms etc. Do you have enterprise tools that combine data from many different platforms and do they have the capability to create visualizations of the paths and the journeys that your customers take including social media? Social media analysts need to have the skills to use these tools.

Lastly, knowledge of social media marketing techniques is important. Plus all the recent related topics like the cookie consent issues that limit the amount of data that can be tracked. Therefore it is a lot to demand of this role, I know that. These people are rare that have all of these skills and suitable experience.

Social Media Strategist

Do you have a social media strategist? A person who can devise strategy and tactical plans for your campaigns and activities?

One of the aspects I like about my current job is doing the crucial task of mapping the business goal(s) to a social media objective(s) and then onto one or more qualified KPIs with supporting metrics. The social media processes I created have these steps at the very start. Over the years I have many proof points that if this mapping is wrong it can miss-represent the real impact of the campaign.

Lastly, presenting and storytelling are key aspects for a social media strategist, whether that be 1-1, in large groups, or with a command center.

Conclusion

It is not too late no matter how small or big your company size. Get the right people for these essential social media roles into your company today.

It is not 2006. Social media marketing is the fastest way to get messages out to your customers for most companies. If your company deploys inbound message tagging then the data becomes a rich source of product life-cycle and sentiment for a company’s services etc.

Do you really want this kind of power in the hands of a junior or intern?

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