Do you have a dedicated social media manager?
"People spend all day, every day" on social media platforms. But too many companies still treat organic social like a hobby, instead of a pillar of digital marketing.
While social media does fall within the category of digital marketing, it is its own beast — and expert social media managers are worth their weight in gold.
“While they seem more expensive,” MarketerHire creative director Dani Marom explained, “the turnaround they can bring from their experience ends up saving you so much time, money and error.”
That’s because running successful social media accounts for a business requires constant quick, expert judgment calls.
Social media managers need to know how a given channel works — at a given moment! — and they need to be able to hop on social media trends before they turn uncool.
They need to create a wide variety of timely social media content, and speak fluently in the brand voice — so they can reply to followers promptly.
They also need a professional network of influencers, and the ability to manage a disparate team of freelancers including graphic designers, content marketers and more.
Sure, if they’re lucky, your current marketing team could make a one-off splash on social — but hiring a social media manager who really knows what they're doing will help you build an engaged audience that lasts.
How to know you need to hire a social media manager – freelance or full-time
It can be difficult to know if your business needs a social media manager. What are the telltale signs it’s time to hire? We asked the following social media experts:
- Dani Marom, head of brand at MarketerHire
- Jen Hartmann, director of social media and PR at John Deere
- Yi Chen, a superstar MarketerHire social media manager
You are struggling to prioritize social media.
An effective social media strategy is unlike any other business plan — it can’t simply be lumped together with your other marketing efforts.
If you're a small business owner or a startup co-founder whose in-house marketing team has less than four FTEs, chances are they don't have the resources to prioritize social media.
Or if they do focus on it, they’ll be letting other, important things slide.
“I see a lot of business managers spending five, eight hours a day trying to figure out social media,” Chen said, “and they don’t have the time to focus on more high-level things.”
You aren’t sure how to measure and benchmark each channel (or aren’t measuring channel performance at all).
A successful online presence needs to be monitored. Metrics play a crucial role in refining your social media marketing strategy.
Social media metrics are unlike other types of digital marketing metrics. If you aren’t experienced with social media marketing, you may be confused about which metrics matter on which channel, and what strong performance looks like.
You may not be The Ordinary on TikTok — but does that mean you should abandon organic TikTok all together? Stay the course? Try something new?
A great social media manager will be able to not just collect social performance data, but also “digest those analytics into something actionable,” Marom said.
You don’t know which social media channels will work best for your brand.
While you may think Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook are the only social media channels that really matter, think again.
Back in 2016, Small Business Trends published a list of 40 social media channels that can be useful for businesses — and that list is growing and changing every year.
Instead of spreading your resources too thin, especially at the beginning of your social media journey, you should be focusing on a few key channels, Chen advises. But which ones?
If you don’t have the time or the experience to evaluate new social media channels and decide which are likely to suit your brand’s target audience, consider hiring a social media manager.
You aren’t able to commit to consistency on any one channel.
The ideal social media post frequency depends on the channel.
For instance, Social Bakers found that businesses should tweet between roughly three times a day. On Instagram, Union Metrics reports that on average, brands post once or twice a day.
Really, what matters more than frequency is consistency. “If you make a habit of posting several times a day and then transition to only a few times a week, you will start to lose followers and generate less engagement per post,” Neil Patel wrote in Forbes.
Brands that don’t have an in-house social media manager struggle with consistency, Marom explained. And even when they post frequently, their posts don’t add up to any kind of strategy.
“Reposting anything that came out in the newsletter…. is not a strategy,” they joked.
If you don’t have the time to create an ongoing marketing plan and commit to consistency, chances are, your social media channels won’t see much growth or engagement.
You want to build a loyal community around your brand.
A vibrant community gives brands an edge in today’s economy. Anyone can drop-ship a product, copy a feature from a competitor, or even guarantee two-day shipping — but a social media fandom is hard to copy overnight.
It can be a recipe for customer loyalty. And churn is expensive.
But no one follows a brand, let alone comments on its posts, if its social media profiles are just reposting corporate blog posts.
“When an organization recognizes that social is more than posting content, they can take their program to the next level — engagement, social care, two-way conversations,” Hartmann says. “If you want to build a community, you need to have someone dedicated to it.”
That person is usually a social media manager.
