Should you hire a social media manager

Why should I hire a social media marketing manager or consultant?

Well to that I say number one, social media marketing is quickly replacing traditional marketing methods such as you know billboards, television, radio advertising, yellow pages. So, it’s a very important method of marketing but it’s something that is somewhat new and with any cutting-edge technology you’re not going to have a vast number of people out there who understand it.

When I started my business there are not  many solutions. Many places to go if you need help with your social media marketing. In your online presence you only have a couple options. So, you can either try to hire an agency to come and take photos for you. Maybe develop an advertising campaign do some media buys build some content take videos. That is really expensive. You can try to do it yourself though. One of the problems that we had with that or one of the problems that I had with that it’s very hard to run your business and do your social media at same time.

You’re always kind of behind the eight ball. What I mean what does Confucius say “A man who chases two rabbits ends up with none”. Basically it’s very hard to to run your business and be a marketer.  Just like It’s very hard to own a restaurant and be a good social media marketer at the same time.

Your other option is to try to sub out some of the work to people that are already in your organization. Even if you don’t have a full-time marketer you might have somebody that is really good on Instagram, post photos and write some copy. If you want to get an actual return on your investment you need a broader strategy. Your online presence needs to constantly communicate back to the tonality of your all your other marketing efforts.

It’s very hard for somebody to do that people that are very good at developing social media funnels.  Good at taking photos, writing copy, posting and engaging. To do it correctly you want to have somebody be a project manager of that has experience generating sales and leads through online platforms. A lot of small businesses don’t have the resources or the knowledge to really pull that off.

Basically, the art of marketing is getting your message in your product in front of the people that are ready and willing to buy.  If you’re doing that you’re winning. You don’t have to be Joe cool in order to have a strong social media presence.

When to Hire social media manager

A lot of business owners find themselves in a spot where they don’t really know when it’s the right time to outsource or delegate these social media tasks. So, I want to give you five reasons or five signs you can see that tell you that it’s time to hire a social media manager whether in-house or outsource a firm like ourselves.

Time Factor

Number one, you just don’t have the time to do it.  What I mean is social media takes consistency and daily posting. Replying back to comments, retweeting other articles of interest, sharing other people’s content and so. If you have the time to do it a couple of times a month and most savvy business owners know that is not enough time to be able to do it effectively and actually achieve results. So, if you don’t have enough time to do it there would be a reason to hire someone to do it for you.

Spend your time on what you are interested about

Number two, is simply you don’t like doing it there’s a lot of business owners out there to understand the value of having an online presence in a social media presence they just don’t like to do it. They don’t like to get on Facebook or twitter or these other platforms. They would much rather be doing what they do best which is their craft and their business.

Always need to be alert for updates

Number three, is it kind of falls in line with number one. You can’t keep up with all of the changes the first part of my day consists of going and looking at blogs. Looking at articles in researching what has changed what changed with Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest all these different platforms. If you’ve ever been on Facebook for two seconds you understand that the time that it took me to make this post something has already changed with Facebook.  So, you may get into a rhythm of posting. If you don’t keep up with the changes then you’re going to be left behind.

You do what you do best

number four, you find that “yes” you do have the time but you’re better served in your particular business to have your time allocated somewhere else.  Take for instance a dentist may have the time to get a side and do a social media update. They’re better served working with patients working with their staff or furthering their education as well

Let the expert do it for you

number five, the last sign that it may be time to hire social media expert is you want an expert to handle it. I’ll give you an example. I do not do anything with my cars I barely know how to put gas in it. I barely know how to jump. So. I take it to an expert to have my old change have it worked on. I’m sure I can go somewhere and find one of these online tax services.  Have a great CPA that does my taxes my accounting all those kinds of things. I want to expert handling those types of things.  So, that be another reason to outsource.

What a Social Media Manager should do

Lets talk about the checklist of what a social media manager should do daily, weekly and monthly. Some of it was good some of it

Handle Negative Feedback

The number one thing that you should do is go into your social media profiles and look for mentions look for people that are talking about us or talking about our brand if it’s negative damage-control do it quick. If it’s not you want to just reply back to those people and acknowledge that there’s someone on that channel listening to them.

Start Engaging

Then the second thing is we want to go out and create conversations with advocates. Someone who has shared a link to your brand that you’re representing they went out and shared a link why not reply to them on Twitter and just say thanks.  Maybe someone just followed you on Twitter, reply back to them. Ask them a question about their profile and start engaging with them.  Someone mentions you I reply back, someone follows me or likes my page I engage with them. I ask them a question and open any question that they can reply to. To start building a conversation with them and doing the same thing for customers. We also know posting stuff to social media is a lot of work and a big deal.

 

The Facebook Page Trick

Another trick I’ve been using that works great is to find popular Facebook pages in their market and Facebook will tell you the most popular posts they did in that week.  If you take a post from someone and this post already had a thousand shares that’s the kind of thing you want to post for them. So, you want to take the best content that people have already liked and shared and go find that stuff.

You want to keep their channel full and keep posting to it their tools to do that. One of them is called buffer app just finding good stuff to post to their channel. It’s called content curation it’s going to be a big part of your job but the good news is, once you’re good at it, it doesn’t take very long to do it all. You can do it like in an hour and cue up a whole week’s worth of stuff for people. It’s kind of a ninja trick, provides a lot of value on the other end. So, posting content is another big piece of what you’re going to do.

The third and last thing about on a daily basis is writing blog posts so that would be a pretty big job for a social media manager.

So, the three things a social media manager is going to do

break down to damage control,

engaging with outliers people,

and then the third thing is curating good content. To post on these people site sort of channels active and then the last one if you want to do it is creating your own content.

That’s the kind of work that’s involved not rocket science. Does involve some creativity, does involve some outreach but it could be a really fun job.

Advanced Social Media Management, Grow followers. Grow business