Building a pro social media team can be harder than it looks. Not only are there a thousand and one “social media gurus” out there (with less experience building a following than your gran), the whole industry is relatively fresh and untested. If you don’t know what to look for, you run the risk of building a team who, at best, won’t do a particularly good job and, at worst, could damage your brand online.
We’ve put together five actionable tips (and a bonus) to help you build a team of loyal, passionate and competent marketers to ensure your brand’s social success.
1. Learn the lingo – as with any fledgling industry, “buzz” words and jargon abound. It might feel like you have to hire someone to help you understand how it all works, but just taking a few hours to familiarize yourself with some of the key terms within the industry will really help you ask the right questions when you start recruiting your team.
2. Bandwagons are dangerous – if you’re looking to recruit a social media team because that’s what everyone else is doing, you’ll hurt your business. Before you even begin to put together a job description, get a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve from this new marketing channel and then ascribe some roles and responsibilities. This will help your recruitment tremendously. For example, if you’re trying to improve your customer service, you’ll need to hire someone who is good with people. If you want to grow sales, you’ll probably need someone who really understands your brand.
3. Internal recruitment – depending on the size and nature of your business, you might already have your perfect social media team within the building. However, don’t recruit just anyone that raises his hand, and don’t just add ‘Twitter and Facebook’ to someone’s job description. Instead, use the same process as step 2 – clear objectives will lead you to the right person for the job.
4. Your customers – a big part of social media is about thinking differently about your customers. You can apply that philosophy to your team’s recruitment. Depending on your brand, you might have a few advocates ready to leap at the chance of representing the company they love full time.
5. Get the balance right – when you build a team of social media marketers, it can be tempting to start small. Too small. Although you obviously shouldn’t invest the next five years’ marketing budget to build an all-star social media team, neither should you “test the waters” by starting so small that your efforts never stand a hope of succeeding. Set realistic ROI goals and, as you reach them, grow your team.
Follow these tips and you stand a much greater chance of building a social media team that will help rather than hinder the growth of your brand online. A final tip: be wary of old-school offline marketers unless they can prove their worth. They’re often accustomed to “soap box” marketing – shouting as loudly as possible at potential customers to attract sales and might simply reapply those rules to your online presence. Instead, hire someone who uses social media personally and understands what it means to build worthwhile online relationships.
