Social media team-building

Jonnie Jensen, founder of Live+Social, explains the secrets to creating a successful social media team within your business

What exactly is a social media manager? It is a job title that sprang up over the last five years to fulfil the task of looking after your business’ social media. The problem with job titles that never previously existed is that no-one really knows what that person should do or how you should measure their effectiveness. This is especially the case in organisations that barely had a grasp on their website strategy or online marketing. The net result is the wrong people being tasked with the job internally or worse, the wrong people have been employed.

The UK Business Digital Index 2015 highlighted that businesses with a high level of digital skills competence are one-in-three more likely to have seen an increase in turnover in the past two years compared to those that are not well skilled. This shouldn’t come as a surprise and anyone who thinks digital is irrelevant to their business – frighteningly 26% in the study did – will find themselves quickly failing.

While working with a business coach recently, I was encouraged to realise that if I hired a sales person without having any confidence in my own ability to sell our products and services then I would forever be in bind to that person. It is the same for recruiting and managing people responsible for your digital marketing. Too often I see marketing personnel being given the role and told ‘you can do our social media’ when clearly they cannot.

Who should be managing your social media presence?
I have never been a big fan of the term social media, so it should come as no surprise then that I don’t really advocate the role of social media manager. Social media does not need managing. Digital campaigns and content needs to be managed. Communities need managing. Likewise your social customer service needs responsibly looking after. While it would be easy to get into an argument about semantics I believe the job title ‘social media manager’ creates the wrong attitudes within your business.

The function of social media management commonly falls to the marketing team. It probably makes most sense there but that does not mean they should be working in isolation from HR, sales or customer services. If you have these distinct teams in your business then they should all have some level of input or responsibility, as ultimately they could benefit or be impacted by what happens on your website and social channels. The benefits of social media marketing as identified by the Social Media Examiners 2015 report backs this point up.

Depending on the size of your business there are either three roles or three areas of responsibility that you need:
• Digital communications manager
• Community manager
• Social customer services manager

Each has its own objectives and areas of responsibility. Get this right and you will be able to plan, execute and measure the success of your online activity more effectively than ever before.

Across these three roles there are some prerequisites that should be asked of anyone representing your business online. It is not about being able to use Twitter or set up a Facebook page – you can learn this on YouTube. Most of these are natural abilities and core interests that you cannot really teach. If the person you want to represent your business online does not fit this profile then they are not the right person for the job. They need competence and skills in:
• Regular use of the social web
• Highly eff ective communicator
• Good understanding of SEO, website design and Google Analytics
• Creative, basic knowledge of image/video editing software
• Proactive results orientated self-learner
• Attention to detail and committed to customer service
• Analytical and able to base actions based on results

The three functions of an effective social media team
Whether you are structuring your team or working out your goals and objectives you should be looking at traffic, community and loyalty.

You generate awareness to fill your sales funnels, you create leads and convert your traffic, and then you provide great service to ensure they buy again. However you look at it, these are the tenets of online marketing success and why you need to structure your team accordingly. Here are three roles that are all responsible for these things, in their own ways with different focuses and agendas.

Digital communications manager
This person is responsible for raising awareness and driving traffic. Their responsibilities cover content and campaign management across your blog, email and social media. This person’s understanding of how the web can be leveraged to your company’s advantage should be greater than anyone else’s in your business. In every project or team meeting they will spot opportunities to create content that will benefit your company. They will also understand how to
create that content and optimise it.

They will have the ability to manage projects, which is important in this role as the person will be ensuring that content is produced in a timely manner. Great content that reflects the values and skills of your business will not be written by just one person. The final skill in this person’s armoury is campaign management. Understanding the basics of running a Google AdWords campaign and setting up social advertising on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn have become vital to any organisation.

Community manager
Being the host of a party or leader of a networking event is not a natural role for everyone. So it is with a community manager;
and not every marketing person is good at this. You need this person to have a confident personality and you need to let them express this – as your business – online.

Across your social media channels, your contacts should be considered a community. They need to be acknowledged, looked aſter and carefully led to do what you want them to do. It is vital that the right people are attracted into the community or all efforts will be wasted. Alongside the content that is being created the community manager should be curating (finding and sharing) other people’s content and using that as a platform to engage industry influencers and prospects.

The social media updates that get posted need to be planned out and consciously constructed so that they get noticed and engaged with. A community manager will understand the tools and methods to best get engagement. They will also be responsible for brand awareness, engagement and reach across the social web, each of which can be measured in your social media analytics.

Social customer services manager
In a world where there are few differentiators between price and product, a company’s quality of service becomes vital if you want to stand out. Such an attention to customer service can be distilled out of your company’s values and ethos so it is important that you first start with why you do what you do for your customers.

By way of a recent personal experience I needed a replacement set of instructions for an Argos bed that I had bought. The Argos website is great, its mobile app is great, its prices are great and even the delivery was pretty smooth. After phoning and waiting on hold for more than 20 minutes three times in a row and getting no response to tweets I sent to its Twitter account, all trust was lost. Worse, the tweets were very public and now all my contacts have the same feeling about Argos. Oh and now you do too… sorry Argos!

It takes an appreciation of how the social web works, a good understanding of customer service principles and a depth of experience and maturity around representing your business. This is clearly not a task for the intern or office junior. You can learn how to use Twitter in a day. You can’t assimilate business experience in the same time.

Getting management support
The final cog in resourcing your social media activities appropriately is making sure those responsible for them are allowed to do their job properly. It amazes me when management expects their social activity to deliver results without appropriate budget or ring-fencing time. On a practical level, anyone looking after a company’s social presence is going to need at least an hour a day plus time to be creating content and managing campaigns.

If that company has a large customer base and is working on its social presence then that should come with an expectation that customers will contact it on these channels. You need people ready to respond and systems in place to handle
problems. Failure to manage this appropriately can be disastrous.

Social media as a function in your business is about five to six years old now. There could be justification up to this time for working on your processes and making mistakes along the way. As we head into 2016 there is no longer the scope for such errors. Understanding these channels and how to leverage them can quite literally make or break your business. If you need help with your social media team, then of course, you can find me on Twitter.