So you have a new product coming out or your company just launched a new division and you need to hire a Social Media Professional to handle your online community.
What should you look out for?
What skills should the person have?
What platforms should they skilled at?
There are so many questions that might cross your mind but there are 3 key things that are very critical in your search for a skilled social media professional to handle your social channels.
1.Great Content Curator
Skilled social media professionals understand that great content leads to great engagement levels which opens the mind of the prospect to whatever it is that your selling. Not only are they skilled at curating content, but they also know how to plan and apply the same message in different forms on different social media platforms.
E.g. - A social media professional who writes a blog post on the company's blog on how customers can benefit from what the company is offering should cascade that to other networks by creating simple and straight to the point slides which will be posted on Slideshare (helps SEO) and on LinkedIn (boosts visibility). The professional would be expected to go a step further by taking those images and posting them in bits on Instagram (changes the URL of the company's profile on Instagram to a Short URL to the blog post) and creates a "question post" on Facebook to drive both organic and paid traffic to the website.
2. Understands Budgeting and Community Building
Your social media community would involve a lot of building at the initial stage before it goes to the stage of maintenance. You need to know if they understand what it takes to build a community across different social media channels. Building a community is more than "getting likes" or "RT's", it goes way deeper than that and it’s not something you can get immediately. You have to grow it gradually.
Your community would need promotion also to get new members, promote products or create awareness for your website/blog. This is one area where people miss it because they don't do budgeting the right way. Your social media manager needs to be clear on the number of clicks, engagements, conversions you want per day/week/month. Once this is known, you also need to know what it would cost you per action and its cumulative figure to have a broader view of the benefits and the cost.
3. Can Make Lemonades Out Of Data
Every professional social media marketer is very metrics driven and curious, as they always want to find out what's working and what's not. But you can't make a decision in marketing without checking the data from your marketing efforts and making sense out of it.
Data itself varies and could mean a host of different things. To the uninitiated, marketing data is like a person you can't see unless your social media manager introduces him to you :)
What does it mean when men aged 20-22years respond favorably to your post about Chris Brown and those within the ages of 26-28 don't show much enthusiasm?
What does it mean when you spend more dollars to get fewer clicks?
What happens when your content gets RT's on Wednesdays at around 5-6pm and a similar content posted on Thursday has fewer engagements?
Each of those questions above are laden with meanings, but if you don't know what they mean or what the cause is, you won't be able to optimize your marketing efforts and you end up spending more money trying to fix the wrong problem. The data is out there but you need someone who can make sense of your data to make better decisions for your business.
Ready to hire a social media professional for your business? Start by searching for the keywords that relate to such professionals like "online marketing", "social media", "seo", "digital marketing"
All the best :)
No comments:
Post a Comment