No one can argue that a creative, dedicated social media team can make a difference between successful business promotion and a failed one. Here, the emphasis is on ‘team’ because creating an engaging social media strategy is about team effort. Depending on your business’s size and needs, it can be a large team or even a set of smaller teams, each responsible for its social media platform/promotion goals. Still, before you even start thinking over your brand’s social media strategy, let’s take a look at how you can build an efficient social media team.
Define your marketing needs
Today, when individuals and businesses alike have social media profiles, it is easy to get lost as to the end goal of one’s social presence. Any business should have a clear objective as to why they promote themselves on social media. For this, you should first consider what results you are trying to achieve. Are you going to grow your business? Attract new customers? Engage the existing ones? A truly engaging social media strategy is often the combination of several goals, so it is absolutely ok if you cannot define just one.
While researching your target audience, you may want to explore established company structures on platforms like the Allied Universal employees page or see how teams are formed in industries like entertainment via the Casting Call company overview. This can help you identify what kinds of roles are relevant to your niche.
However, even when you have several marketing needs in mind, you should still define each of them and create compelling content that would suit its defined purpose. As you define your social media objective, you should also consider the budget for each goal. The budget includes not only salaries you’re going to pay but also costs you’re willing to allocate to social media advertising.
Social media team members to consider
Depending on your marketing needs, you will need different experts for the job. Social media marketing is a very vast concept, and your team hierarchy will largely depend on your company size, the number of social channels covered, and overall strategy. Below, you will see a list of top social media experts and their professional responsibilities. Any of them can become a part of your team once you define your marketing goals and budget.
Head of social
In a big marketing division, the head of social (aka social media manager or specialist) is an expert responsible for long-term social marketing strategy. This is the person who creates campaigns, sets objectives and deadlines. This is your top manager, responsible for brand image and awareness. This person should generate leads and make sure all social divisions (if there are several) are on the same page, and everyone is doing their job right. In a small company or a startup, social media manager can, in fact, be the only representative of the team — at least, for some time. So, a social media manager can also be responsible for all of the roles and functions described below. Obviously, having just one social media manager responsible for all other duties is always a temporary solution. Still, any social team starts with an expert who can plan long-term and have a clear vision of how all planned objectives should be executed.
To understand how experienced marketing teams are structured across industries, you can take a look at team insights from companies like AT&T or Buffalo Wild Wings, especially if you want to scale your team later.
Social media content curator
Content curator or creator is the main creative muscle of your social media department. Often, a company will need more than just one content creator. This way, your brand will have more than one voice, which means you’ll have higher chances of engaging different audience segments. Obviously, the content curator’s main responsibility is to create content. This, however, calls for more than strong copywriting skills. A high-asset curator should:
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- Always stay on top of industry news
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- Have strong research and analytical skills
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- Communicate one’s ideas to the designers
- Have a thorough understanding of the target audience and their needs
When researching your audience or sourcing influencers, it’s useful to know how to find social media accounts with just a few clicks, making the outreach process more targeted and efficient.
Social community manager
This position is essential for large, established brands. Community managers engage in any conversations that mention the brand they represent. They respond to feedback (especially negative one), acting as the main advocates for the brand in question. Often, their activity happens from personal social media accounts rather than corporate ones. In a small, not yet established company, a content curator or a social media manager is usually responsible for these duties.
Social media advertiser
Advertisers should, first of all, analyze ad budgets on most social networks. So, this position calls for careful analytical skills and the ability to adapt to the target audience’s needs. Once again, a small company can (temporarily) assign this role to someone else’s on the social team. Still, social media advertisers should focus on ads and ads alone when promoting a large brand and dealing with several social networks. Today, when so many businesses are promoting themselves online, social media strategies depend on ad campaigns. Advertisers should have some content creation skills because they will be working with both content curators and image designers (if available). Simply put, advertisers should stay on the same page as people behind content creation.
Exploring how successful businesses like BNSF Railway allocate advertising and communication roles can give insight into structuring your team for performance marketing.
Social media analyst
Many business owners do not understand why they need an analyst if they already have a head of social, responsible for all the planning and strategy execution. Can these two positions be combined? Well, yes and now. On the whole, everything depends on the size of your business. Top managers create a long-term strategy and set objectives. Media analysts act as ‘quality control’ for these strategies’ execution. They monitor results, see how quickly brand awareness grows, create reports, and offer suggestions on boosting sales. Like most positions described above, some analysts’ duties can be allocated to managers or content curators. But, with large enterprises, you will need a separate person for the job.
Looking at how airline companies like Alaska Airlines build their analytical teams can be especially helpful if you’re in a fast-paced industry with heavy brand monitoring needs.
Graphic designer
High-quality social media campaigns rely on visuals. Unless you are ready to use stock images with your posts, you will need a social media graphic designer. People who are good with words are usually not so good with imagery; the reverse is equally true. As a temporary solution, you may have your content creator and your existing designer work as a team. Still, as your business grows, you may need to hire a graphic designer and a video editor specifically for your social media campaigns.
Social media influencer manager
This is the final position on your social team list and the creme de la creme of any company. This person will be in charge of reaching out to influencers — bloggers, celebrities, established industry leaders, etc. — trying to get them to support your brand. You should not consider hiring this team member (or even planning an influencer outreach strategy) before your business has at least some presence and reputation online. Sure, you still need to build trust with bloggers in your niche, but a thought-through influencer strategy is the social Everest that calls for some prep hikes before climbing.
If you’re building an outreach strategy from scratch, don’t miss helpful reads like 9 ways to find an email by phone number, which can be instrumental in your influencer discovery process.
How to Manage Your Social Media Team: Top Tips
Finding the right professionals for the job is challenging enough, but this is only half of the deal. Like any other division, your social team (including your very top social media manager) needs managing. The first thing any business owner has to understand is that social media marketing is a creative job. So, it is going to be very hard to set specific timeframes for separate tasks. On the other hand, you still need to set deadlines for larger milestones in your brand promotion. This will help keep all of your team members on track and offer additional motivation.
Another suggestion while managing your social media team is to communicate your goals and your vision clearly. These people will be responsible for building your brand’s reputation online, so they must understand the value your business brings to its audience.
One final suggestion is to offer your team members some flexibility. Most social media representatives do not and cannot work a standard nine-to-five business day. This is often a 24/7 job, especially for community managers who quickly respond to customer feedback. So, as long as your team copes with their responsibilities, it is not about when they work, but about how successful they are in what they do.
Image source: pixabay.com
