- There comes a time in every business' life
whether you are a one person band,
or whether you are a large organisation
with a whole marketing department,
when you need to ask the question,
should I hire someone to manage my social media?
How do you know?
And what are the signs that you need to
hire a social media manager?
And once you've made the decision, how do you prepare
that social media to become a member of your team?
That's what we're going to talk about in this video,
let's start with what are the signs
that you need to hire a social media manager?
And tell me how many of these sound familiar to you?
You spend time on social media every single day
but you know, you are not devoting enough time
to doing it well,
you're creating your own content
and you are learning how to do it
but it either takes you ages to do it,
or you are pretty sure it could be better, a lot better.
You're trying to do all the socials,
but that means that actually,
you're not doing any of them very well.
Hashtags, they're either an afterthought,
or it takes you forever to do your hashtag research
and find the right ones for the right platforms.
You do have goals for your social media, but you find
that you are juggling so many things that you
are constantly missing them.
You know, it is important to be consistent,
but you often fail to stay on top of your posting schedule.
Social media platforms just keep changing.
And it's so hard to keep on top
of what you need to do on each one.
If you answered yes to more than one of those,
it could well be time for you to hire a social media manager
and a good social media manager will free up your time,
so that you can get a other marketing tasks
and non-marketing tasks done.
Be an expert in the social media platforms
that you use, have content creation skills,
focus on your social media tasks without getting distracted
with all the other things that are going on in your business
or your marketing department,
be responsible for getting you results
from your social media.
All skills that are totally worth paying for, right?
But unless you prepare your social media manager
and have some systems in place,
it's going to be difficult for them to be successful.
So what should you prepare in advance?
They need a strategy.
Although your social media manager will be able to work
through your social media strategy with you.
You need to make sure,
that it fits into your overall marketing strategy.
Having this in place will help your social media
manager work towards your goals.
And if you need a little hand getting started
with your digital marketing strategy,
I've got a workbook that you can download,
which I have put a link to in the description below,
which brings me onto goals.
You need to set goals for social that will fit
into your overall business goals and your marketing goals.
And you know what?
Your social media manager will love you for setting goals,
because it will help them focus
on what they need to work towards.
Make sure you consult
with them when you're setting these goals,
to make sure that they are challenging,
but ultimately achievable.
Measurement because yes, setting goals is important,
but unless you are measuring,
you'll never know if you are going to meet them.
So decide what it is that you'll measure
and how often you are going to measure that,
which leads to reporting.
How often do you want to receive a report
from your social media manager,
and what do you want to go into them?
Too often I find that businesses don't look
at the reports they get because they're too complex
and they don't understand the information they've got.
So if you're very clear with this upfront,
what you want to see, that should help.
And also if there's stuff there that you don't understand,
ask your social media manager to explain it.
Brand guidelines, what you are doing on social media
shouldn't look different
to everything else that you are doing in marketing.
So put together a style guide for your brand.
That includes things like the hex codes
for your brand colours, your logo, and how it should
and shouldn't be used or displayed in graphics and videos.
The style of images that you would like to get used.
So things like, should it be filtered or unfiltered,
should it be bright or dark?
Your brand personality and your tone of voice,
and any branded hashtags that you want people to use,
and any specific emojis that you like to be used
in your marketing plus, anything else that is important
to your brand should go in this document.
I would also include some examples
of how your brand should look on social media,
and maybe some examples of the sort
of thing that wouldn't fit in.
Your ideal customer,
because unless your social media manager
knows who you want to reach,
they're going to spend way too much time
trying to reach everyone.
And there's 4.66 billion people
on the internet in the world.
It's gonna take them ages to reach all those people.
So construct a customer persona.
You don't need to go into too much detail
but it should include things like, where do they live?
What is their rough income level?
What type of language do they use?
What are their interests?
And most importantly,
what are the problems that your company solves for them?
This is gonna help your social media manager
create content that is going to attract the right people.
And it also means they can spend time engaging
with the right people on social media.
Your competitors, so these could be your direct competitors,
but also other people who are competing for the attention
of your audience,
and for your direct competitors,
see if you can figure out what are their strengths
and what are their weaknesses and how you are different.
How do you stand out from them?
Your budget, how much cash are you going
to give your social media manager for running ads on social,
working with influencers, promoting campaigns,
work with your social media manager to set this budget.
You don't always have to go for their suggestion,
but I definitely take a recommendation from them.
Communication, there are so many you ways
for us to communicate these days.
We've got the phone,
you can send someone a letter, apparently,
there's email,
there's all the social media platforms,
have their own messaging.
You've also got WhatsApp and telegram,
and all the other messaging platforms, Slack,
and there's others too.
Choose one single way that you want your social
media manager to communicate with you and stick with it.
That means that you don't have to be constantly
checking all those different platforms for messages.
And then there's meetings.
It's important to have a longer, but not long,
meeting with your social media manager
at least once a month.
And you can use this to review progress,
to discuss new content ideas,
and to air any issues that either they are having
or that you are having.
Somewhere to share your content.
I know that one of the biggest problems
that social media managers have is getting content
from their clients.
You will need to share things like images,
behind the scenes stuff, videos,
you need to let people know what's going on
with the business on a day to day basis.
You need to create some sort of shared folder for this,
that both you and the social media manager have access to.
And it's also important to put some sort of
file system in here so that it's easy for you
to identify where you need to share that content.
And it's easy for the social media manager
to know what that is.
So that could be setting up folders
within the folder for each week or each month,
or it could be naming your files in a specific way.
So it's very easy for them to identify exactly
the right thing at the right time.
That's gonna save both you and the social media manager
loads of time.
A review process.
Do you want to review and approve every single piece
of social media content before it goes out?
Maybe at the beginning when you're working
with a social media manager?
Yes you do, but don't be too picky.
You have hired this person 'cause they know social media.
So really, your job here is just to check
that it is on brand and it is a sort of thing
that you expected to come from them.
Over time, you might relax this approval stage
and give your social media manager more autonomy.
Contracts, always get a contract
with your social media manager.
Even if you trust them 100%.
Why?
Well, very easy to make sure
that both you and the person that you're working with
has it completely laid out,
what is expected of them and what the job is.
But it's also really important
for GDPR as you are giving them access
to your social accounts.
But don't worry, you don't have to hire a solicitor.
There's a website called Koffee Klatch,
which I will put a link for below,
that has lots of template contracts.
And there is one there for a social media manager,
that you can purchase and adapt to your own needs.
Now you are ready to hire a social media manager
and you know the processes that you need to put in place
to make sure that relationship works perfectly.
Have I missed any?
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
So do leave me a comment and let me know what you think.