Is a Part-Time Social Media Manager Enough?

Can you use a part-time social media manager to achieve your online marketing goals? Will hiring a part-time social media manager be enough to achieve your goals? Isn’t social media marketing simply making announcements to a network of people who have signed on to receive your news and tidbits? Isn’t it simply sharing links, images, and videos you find interesting or inspirational? Or is it all about building relationships and finding ways to engage with your prospects and customers? These things are definitely part of social media marketing, but they don’t tell the whole story.

There is much more to social media than just being social, and doing this type of marketing well requires more than a part-time effort. It requires a strategy, measurement, and constant nurturing. Too often, marketing directors think of social media as a part-time endeavor–something to do whenever time allows, a marketing tool to use whenever inspiration happens to strike, or worst of all, a task that is only performed as an afterthought. When their efforts fail to bring the desired results, they are forced to face one important reality—social media isn’t part time.

What Can an Agency Do that a Part-Time Social Media Manager Can’t?

Our agency dedicates between 30 to 50 hours a week per client, between all of our “hands,” to social media. This includes strategy, consulting, curating content, customer service, campaigns, reporting and more. To ensure that our clients enjoy measurable results, we put in a full-time effort. As with most things that really matter and make a difference in life, you can expect to get out of social media what you take the time to put into it.

Not many brands have an extra 30 to 50 hours worth of internal bandwidth to dedicate to social media marketing. Many companies outsource their social media, and you can too. But first, you have to understand what it really takes to be successful in this arena. Here are just a few things that our agency does for our clients:

Set social media clear goals and objectives

Without careful, thoughtful goals and objectives, you’re not prepared to go anywhere. Why? Because you have no idea where you really want to go. Sure, you know that you need social media marketing, but you don’t have a clear idea of what you want it to do for you. We work with brands to determine what they need and then evaluate how social media can help meet those needs. Some possible goals can include increasing brand awareness and improving customer loyalty. Next, we set objectives for moving from an unrealized goal to a goal met. All of our objectives are:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time Bound

That’s right! Make they are SMART!

Figure out who your ideal customer is

How? We develop buyer personas to ensure that when we are helping your brand, we are targeting the right people. We try to learn the following about your brand’s ideal customer:

Age
Occupation
Income level
Hobbies and interests
Challenges
Habits
Motivations

Choose the right social media platform

We help our clients work smarter, not harder. Avoid help them avoid spreading themselves too thin by attempting to have a presence on every social media network. This will waste valuable time. Instead, we use the buyer personas to figure out where your audience spends most of its time. Then, select a primary and secondary network on which to focus most of our efforts. We keep it simple and smart, making sure your brand is where your ideal customer is.

Develop a social media and content marketing strategy

Save the willy nilly posting for your personal social media accounts. For your business, we create a carefully considered strategy for the type of content (text, images, video, links, funny, serious, inspirational, etc.), a schedule for posting and strategies to drive engagement, encourage new followers, and keep your current followers happy and interested.

An on-point social media manager

CMOs and CEOs are typically far too busy with to spend the time needed to follow up on the follow through of a social media manager. Rather than proceed with far less than what you really need, a solution is to utlize an agency that understands not only the social media landscape and your business but also has the staff and bandwidth to nurture your brand’s community and online presence. All good social media manager should have the following character traits:

Curious: A good social media manager will be interested in how things work, why they work that way, what your audience needs, how to provide it, how to fix issues, and how to do it all better.

Teachable and adaptable: Things are constantly changing in the social media arena. New platforms come into play, certain strategies become more effective, your audience changes, or your competitors change the game. You need a social media manager who is eager to learn and willing to not only roll with changes but also lead the way in some respects.

Experience and skills: While it’s not critical that a social media manager knows everything (it is okay to learn more as he or she goes), you do want someone with skills in multimedia (including images, video, graphics). It’s also critical that a social media manager has experience with, and commitment to, exceptional customer service. Likewise, an understanding of analytics and analytic tools is important. This should include the ability to analyze data beyond basics, such as the number of likes or followers you have or how many times a post has been shared.

As you can see, social media success requires a great deal of time, effort, knowledge, and enthusiasm. The good news is you don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) go it alone. Working with an agency can help augment your existing marking team and ensure that your brand’s social media, content and influencer marketing efforts are getting “all hands on deck,” freeing you mind other aspects of your brand marketing.