Social media is a powerful tool for employers and companies who don’t have a large marketing budget. You can use social media to monitor competitors, learn about potential clients, connect with your audience, assist in customer service and tell your brand’s story. However, even with all the potential and benefits of using social media for business, many companies still choose to assign interns or the office Millennial to post on the company’s social media profiles. While this may be a short-term fix, it should not be a long term strategy if you really want to leverage social media in your content marketing plans. Find out three things you should consider before adding a social media manager to your team.
The Cost of Hiring a Social Media Manager
Many companies add social media management to a list of duties for interns to complete or to a current employee’s already full workload in order to save money. While this may seem like the most cost-effective way to manage social media, it could actually hurt your company brand. It’s important to have the right person in charge of the tone and voice of your brand, and it can become inconsistent when passing these duties from intern to intern. On the other hand, paying a full-time, experienced social media manager $50-$70k a year is not a very attractive option for growing companies or businesses just starting to use social media. However, there is a third option. Hiring marketers on a contract basis gives you access to experienced and skilled social media managers without paying a costly full-time salary. For example, you can hire a social media manager for 2 hours a week a month, and even have the flexibility to increase the hours as you run more campaigns and contests, and decrease the hours as you need.
Qualifications and Experience
Since most social media candidates don’t have degrees specializing in social media management, it can be difficult to determine who is qualified and who isn’t. One way to differentiate successful social media managers is to ask candidates for previous work samples and references. Make sure to talk to references who are knowledgeable about a candidate’s work and have seen results. Also, being able to see a candidate’s past work samples can help you determine their writing, editing and judgment skills. And since social media management needs a broad range of skill sets, look for candidates who also have business, PR, and customer service skills.
Measuring Results
Another reason most companies don’t invest a lot of money into social media is because they don’t see the immediate and tangible benefits of social media. Companies need to know that it can take time to build up your brand and your community and that the best thing you can do is to get started sooner than later. However, that doesn’t you won’t ever see results. Great social media managers are able to analyze data and use all the latest
tools to report results and make changes as necessary. Make sure to ask candidates to explain how social media makes an exact impact on businesses. They should be able to describe how to find the amount of web traffic that comes from social, how much revenue can be attributed to social, and how many email sign ups and conversions come from social.
Social media can make a big impact on your business if executed correctly. As a business owner, you need to decide if you’re willing to make the investment to hire an experienced social media manager, or leave the task up to an intern. If you do decide your company needs a social media manager, there are affordable ways to hire someone with experience, ways you can determine if the candidate is qualified, and even ways to measure whether your investment is paying off.
