Putting together a team to champion your brand on social media is not always straightforward. You have to build a social media team with the right skills, experience levels, and attitudes to ensure that they gel effectively.
This becomes simpler if you plan carefully and get some guidance before you get started, so here are some tips to help you build the social media team of your dreams.
Set the parameters
Before you get started, take some time to figure out exactly what skills are required. If the candidate is going to be using social media channels for themselves, then they will require certain soft skills that other members of your team may not have. Also consider which roles best suit these attributes: Community Manager? Specialist Brand Influencer?
Before you do anything else, you need to look at two main things; what you want your social media specialists to achieve, and how much money you can commit to the team.
If your budget is limited, then you clearly need to adjust your hiring strategy accordingly. If you have more flexibility, then your aims and ambitions can hold more sway over how you go about recruiting new talent.
For example, if you are a small but growing business and you only want to gain traction on Twitter and Instagram, you could reasonably expect to do so with one or perhaps two employees.
Conversely, if your company is large or you need to be present across many more platforms, then budgeting for a bigger team makes sense.
Also read: How to become a social media consultant
Embrace appropriate tools
Your team has to be armed with the tools they need to work productively and to the best of their abilities. As such, you must consider social media management tools is crucial to the success of your fledgling team. For example, you should ensure that your employees all have access to the social media management tools they need to do their work.
This way everyone is on the same page and no one falls through the cracks as a result of not having been made aware of someone else’s efforts.
There is a cavalcade of capable software solutions out there to streamline social media management. The top options allow you to not only schedule posts so that they are published at the best time to gain traction but also coordinate your content strategy across multiple platforms.
The lesson here is that even long-time social media professionals expect to have tools available to them, so you must supply them or else face upset.
Also read: Six Mistakes That Will Crash Your Digital Marketing Business in 2021
Establish roles
Recruiting a team is not just about hiring the right people, but also making sure that they have clear roles and responsibilities within your business. Ensure that everyone knows what their duties are so there’s no confusion over who is responsible for what tasks.
Teams only work well if each member knows what is expected of them. This is very true in the social media sphere since you want to avoid unnecessary overlap both for the sake of efficiency and to avoid conflict.
Start off by establishing a manager who can oversee the social media team and liaise with other departments. Then assign tasks to your specialists, such as content creation or paid ads management.
If your brand is particularly well known, you will also need a community manager to engage with and respond to customers and other social media users.
This lets you steer the way your business is discussed and snuff out issues proactively. Finally, using analytics from platforms in this space, you can monitor your team’s performance and event hire after assessing their weaknesses.
Also read: A Guide On Team Building Activities For Diverse Remote Teams
Analyze the data
As your team begins to grow and you start seeing results, you need to make sure that every step of the way is gated by data. If something isn’t working as well as expected then it can be changed before more resources are dedicated towards a strategy that has little chance of success. This will allow for greater ROI on what does work and will allow you to properly track the efficacy of your team.
Also, be sure to use social media analytics software as a way to gauge things like post effectiveness across different platforms, or how far posts travel after being published. You should also review metrics such as likes or shares per post so that you know which types of content resonate most with your audience.
Your team must be aware of what is and isn’t working in terms of your social media presence if you want to see positive results from it, so make sure that data analysis becomes integral to the process as soon as possible.
Building a dream squad for your company’s social media campaign will prove fruitful only if all members are equipped with the tools they need. By putting a lot of thought into which software to use you can ensure that every team member is working efficiently and effectively, while also giving yourself a platform from which to gauge data so as to stay informed about what will work best for your brand moving forward.
Also read: How to measure productivity at work in 2021? | Awesome tips to boost work outputs
Look in-house for talent
While it is possible to hire externally, you might find that some of your existing employees make for great social media specialists.
This means taking some time out during the hiring process to assess whether an individual already on staff could perform this role; not only will they be familiar with internal systems and processes, but also their background knowledge in your business may be more thorough.
If you are unsure, you could even try training up an existing employee or two for this role; it is cheaper than hiring someone new and the rewards could be huge if they take to social media like fish to water. It can also help employees feel more valued in their roles when given responsibility for a specific department such as social media, which is a key source of company value.
They say you cannot manage what you do not understand. This is as true in social media as it is anywhere else, so assessing your current employees’ knowledge and gauging their potential will be a huge boon to the success of your team.
Also read: How to organize an indulgent employee orientation program in 2021?
Conclusion
Every business needs to put its own spin on building a social media team, because goals and budget will always be different.
Even so, the key consideration is that not having experts on hand to take charge of your social presence is unthinkable today.
You could always outsource this to a freelancer or an agency if you do not have the resources to hire social media professionals permanently. But whatever you do, never underestimate the impact that a well managed social presence can have on your business.
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