Should I Hire Someone To Manage My Social Media? – Plus What You Need Before You Do

there comes a time in every business's life whether you are a one-person band or whether you are a large organization 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're not devoting enough time to doing it well you're creating your own content and you're learning how to do it but it either takes you ages to do it or you're 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're juggling so many things that you're 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 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 on to goals you need to set goals for your 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're going to meet them so decide what it is that you'll measure and how often you're 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're doing on social media shouldn't look different to everything else that you're doing in marketing so put together a style guide for your brand that includes things like the hex codes for your brand colors 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 of the internet in the world it's going to 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 going to 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 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 going to 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 because they know social media so really your job here is just to check that it is on brand and it is the 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 one hundred percent why well it's 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 coffee clutch 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

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