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- Social Media Marketing
6 Steps to Building and Managing
A Successful Social Media
Marketing Team
6 Steps to Building and Managing A
Successful Social Media Marketing Team
from Awareness, Inc | Creators of the Social Marketing Hub
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
So you’ve decided it’s time to get serious about social media, and you’re excited to begin building a strategy and a social
media team. Whether your team is diving in for the first time, or restructuring an existing strategy so that it becomes more
effective, you should aim to answer the following questions for your team.
1. Why are we engaging in social media?
2. Who should be part of our social media team?
3. Where should our team focus our efforts in social media?
4. What social media content should we monitor and create?
5. How should our team produce content?
6. When and how often should we produce content?
This whitepaper aims to help marketing decision makers develop a strategy as it relates to team workflow. It also includes
tips for maintaining and evaluating your strategy.
T oday, 22% of companies report they are “just getting
started” in social media, 31% say they’ve been “doing this
for a few years”, and 43% have been doing social media for
just a few months. The majority (86%) of companies say they do
not plan to outsource their social media efforts. Two-thirds of
them spend 6 to 15 hours per week managing social media.
- Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com
1. Why are we engaging in social media?
The answer to this question will drive your team’s strategy and help you to identify the appropriate team members to
execute it. Some goals might include:
• Increase brand awareness and buzz
• Increase sales numbers and leads
• Resolve customer service issues through social channels
• Gain followers and fans
• Communicate more effectively with users about your brand
• Learn more about what users think of your brand
Once you have a list of goals, you can begin to identify the best people to help you accomplish them. Be aware that this list
may result in objectives that touch multiple departments and job functions.
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- I
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
n a recent poll of Fortune 500 companies, over 40% say
increasing brand awareness is a top goal for their social media
team. Increasing leads (15%) and driving an increase in sales
(13.8%) come next. Only 7.2% say their main goal is to learn more
about user behavior.
- Source: Flowtown
2. Who should join our social media team?
Anyone, from the CEO to the intern, can potentially be involved in your social media strategy. However, there are three
common places to recruit talent for a social media team:
• The marketing department: This is the obvious first stop for social media. If your company has an in-
house marketing staff, they should already be abreast of the latest social media trends, and be given the
resources to execute sound strategies for engaging with consumers and creating quality content.
• The call center: If your company already has a team that handles customer complaints and questions,
they should continue to perform this duty, with additional social media training. They should also be
encouraged to help the company develop new ways of serving customers using social media. Your call
center team may also be motivated to participate by the fact that social media that allows companies to
post useful info and for customers to help each other solve their problems—which actually decreases call
center workload.
• An outside public relations firm or agency: Companies big and small often bring in additional help to gain
expertise and access to relationships their company does not currently have.
“ There’s quite a few ways to measure “return” - but
investment is just what you put in.”
- Mark Goodman, Editor-in-Chief, Go2 Media
Once you’ve built your team, you should pick a team “captain.” Industry experts agree that most social media initiatives
should have a single manager who acts as the gatekeeper for all social media communication, though he or she may have
other duties within your company. He or she may manage multiple team members who execute your social media strategy.
There may also be more than one team manager in each company: for example, one for each brand, industry or geographic
location. The popular site Yelp.com uses this model to great effect, retaining a community manager in each city who
monitors and responds to the ongoing conversation around its brand, engages with users on message boards when
appropriate, and promotes events using messaging and newsletter features, so that both the website and the real-time
events it organizes are always buzzing with engaged users.
“ Don’t leave it up to the intern! Nobody’s too old
to learn social media skills. It’s great when it’s
collaborative inside and out.”
- Anne Holub, Web Communications Specialist, Chicago Metropolitan
Agency for Planning
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
3. Where should our team focus our efforts in social media?
You’ve likely heard the answer to this one before: it’s wherever your audience is already talking. This may be in more than one place:
today, people spend their days having business-to-business conversations on LinkedIn, planning their social schedules on Facebook
and raving (or complaining) about their consumer products on Twitter.
So how can your team monitor this decentralized, world-wide conversation as a team? You can split up the work in a few different
ways:
• By industry: If your marketing team already specializes in covering a few different industries, they should monitor
the influential blogs and Twitter users in those fields.
• By brand: Companies with multiple brands should assign dedicated social media team members to those brands
• By competitor: Companies should monitor specific competitors and identify trends in how they are acting/reacting.
• By social media network: If your team has a diverse range of ages or interests, some may be more familiar with
one networking site than another. For example, some employees may unfamiliar with the conventions of LinkedIn
or YouTube, but are already experts at using Facebook or Flickr. Save time and training resources by assigning tasks
“
accordingly.
Never spread yourself thin. Find out which social
networking sites make sense for your company or client,
and then figure out the best way to integrate.”
- Jessica Frank, Digital and New Media Strategist, Antler Agency
Your team’s goal should be to stay abreast of what users are saying about your brand, and to begin to look for ways to join the
conversation in a useful way. Social marketing software can be useful in this regard, as it allows for keyword searching, comment
tracking and other monitoring tasks across multiple platforms.
Once you begin listening carefully to the conversation, ideas will likely naturally present themselves to your team members. The
team leader should regularly solicit, collect and vet these ideas. Which brings us to our next question.
“ One of the most important things for any entity entering
social media is to look at how their brand or category is
being discussed already. Without a listening strategy, you
can’t contribute in a meaningful way or add value.”
- Richard Cherecwich, Account Executive, WIT Strategy
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
4. What social media content should we monitor and create?
Your team will need to brainstorm ideas that will help, entertain and engage your users, not just push new deals or products. Ideas
for content may come from every corner of the company, from the CEO to the folks in the call center. Your team’s task will be to
discuss and decide which ideas suit your strategy.
Questions to ask when vetting ideas
It’s unlikely that every great idea you have is possible for your team to execute. Your team should look at the following for each idea
before beginning a project:
• Does this accomplish one of the primary goals we set in the beginning of this project?
• Do we possess the time, talent and money now to create and promote this content, without a hitch? (Or do we
have the option to hire outside help if needed?)
• Will it be possible to measure user response to this project in a way that proves ROI?
Once you have a list of ideas that meet the above criteria, it’s time to discuss the nuts and bolts of content creation.
5. How should our team produce content?
Your team must develop a workflow process that allows your
team to stick to its goals, create great content and measure the
results of that content.
Every company’s workflow will be different, but all successful
workflow processes will designate the person (or people)
responsible for:
• Conceptualizing ideas
• Assigning content
• Creating content
• Editing content for accuracy and tone
• Approving content for publication
• Uploading and publishing content
• Ensuring content is being published as assigned
• Promoting content across multiple channels
• Responding to user feedback on content
• If necessary, mediating conversations between users on content
• Measuring user response to content
Your team leader should play a vital role in all of the above, but it may not be realistic to expect him or her to do it all. It may work
best to split up the task list by department, and charge the team leader with keeping each department informed of the others’
efforts.
Some examples of task distribution might be:
• You charge your marketing team with monitoring brand-based conversations and creating blog posts, which
are approved by the COO, while you leave responding to customers up to the customer service team, and meet
regularly with the team leader to discuss each department’s progress
• You assign the content creation to the creative department, charge the team leader with editing and posting all
content, ask the engineering department to handle gathering metrics on user response, and share all information
by email
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
• You require that every member of the team log in to social media daily and generate a memo on their area of
expertise and possible content assignments, which will be circulated, assigned and approved by the team leader
Of course, in some small companies, there may be one person doing all the work. Using a social media tracking program is very
helpful in this regard; if you’re an art-school grad being charged to deliver analytics from three different social media networks, smart
software beats a messy Excel sheet.
What if we’ve never created content before?
You may also have some initial issues to consider besides your task list. These might include:
• Establishing a company voice: The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone both report on politics, but they do so
quite differently. What does your team want to sound like? Once your collective voice is established, how will your
team leader maintain consistency between multiple writers? Discuss this with your team.
• Creating levels of permissions for different users and departments: If you are using sensitive company
information, it may be necessary to create different levels of permissions for your team. For example, your social
media strategy may require the help of outside freelancers who should not see company data, or have the ability
to respond to comments. Or you may use interns who should not have administrative abilities. Many social media
software programs allow for different user settings to solve these issues.
• Establishing a company social media policy: Where does your social media strategy begin and end? How much
social media use on company time is appropriate? Is your team familiar with the social media norms of each
network and how they differ? Do they know who’s responsible for responding to a comment, a question directed
at a top stakeholder or an irate customer? After all, as Rich Cherecwich of WIT Strategy notes, “The last thing you
want is for an employee to argue on behalf of your brand and have that scuffle make the news.” Developing a
policy for your team that addresses these issues is imperative.
• Discussing troubleshooting strategies for worst-case scenarios: This relates to the above. Many marketers fear
social media because it is more difficult to predict and control than traditional media. How will your team handle
worst case scenarios, such as customers who post negative or profane content on your site, security breaches,
errors in your content, budget cuts or sudden turnover within your creative team? Make sure that your team knows
the answers to these questions before the first post goes live.
• Balancing social media duties with other duties within the company: Unless you have a company with dedicated
social media staff, it’s likely that your employees have other things to do besides create social media content.
Discussing the role it will play in their daily triage of tasks will help each employee to get the job done. This relates
to our next question, which is...
“ Not all experienced [employees] will possess social media
savvy … even the most terrific ‘Tweeters’ and proficient
‘Facebookers’ among your staff will need to be trained on
your corporate social media strategy. [Companies should] also
review social media norms, and the specific culture and rules of
each social media site in which agents will be interacting with
customers.”
- Greg Levin, International Customer Management Institute
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
6. When and how often should we produce content?
After you have decided on a workflow that distributes tasks
appropriately among team members, you should aim to create a
content calendar, with deadlines and tasks outlined for each project.
Your team’s overall goal should be to produce great content as often
as you can, with the resources you currently have. That said, the
social media world is always changing. So resist the urge to cling to a
six-month old strategy that’s not working, or conversely, to abandon
ship on a social media project that has not yet existed long enough to
gather useful metrics on user response and ROI.
Instead, aim for a middle ground, in which your team develops a social
media strategy that has:
• Deadlines that will challenge your staff and keep content timely, without making unreasonable demands on their
time or energy
• A workflow that allows enough time to properly complete each step of the process
• Regular meetings to review upcoming projects and user response to past projects
• A set beginning and end date for your strategy, after which your team will evaluate ROI and make any necessary
changes to workflow and calendar
Here’s an example of a how a content calendar might address workflow. Say your company’s working on a new promotional video.
Your content calendar will outline:
• Who will create the video from beginning to end
• Who will post about the video on Facebook and Twitter
• Who will respond to comments about the video
• Who will generate reports about the traffic and response to the video
• Deadlines for each task
Testing, testing...
Once your team has settled on a suitable task list and workflow process, it is recommended that you create several pieces of
test content using your new system, place them in mockups as they will appear to users, and critique them with your company
stakeholders and social media team. Not only does this ensure you’ll find the leaks in the system, but it will also help you to create
a content stable to pull from in the future, when news may be slow. For this reason, you should choose topics that will always be
relevant to users. News editors call this evergreen content. Examples of evergreen content might be lists of tips or resources that may
be useful to your users, engaging interviews or profiles.
As you test your content, your team should consider these questions:
• Does our workflow allow plenty of time for each person to do their best work?
• Is every person comfortable with his or her assigned role in the process?
• Does our content have a unified tone and voice that is engaging and in line with the company brand?
• Can we consistently create content with the same quality and tone?
• Are we creating content that we or our friends would like to read and share?
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
After the launch: maintaining your strategy
After you launch your social media strategy, you and your team will still have important work to do. You will need to monitor the
following:
• Is your team staying on-message and true to the goals of the project?
• Is your social media team too small to execute these goals? Too big?
• Are the outlets you’ve chosen the right places for this content, based on user response?
• Is the content you’re creating consistently getting done, to the best of your team’s abilities?
• Is your workflow sustainable?
• Are you producing content frequently enough to make a timely impact on the social media conversation around
your brand?
Gathering information about the above across multiple social media platforms can be difficult. A software program may help you to
obtain solid numbers so you can make adjustments and evaluate progress.
Note: During this time, your team should focus on executing and monitoring, rather than dramatically tweaking, your strategy. And
again, don’t stop before you’ve finished testing! Social media is always changing, but any time your team invests in acquiring new
skills and engaging with customers will be time well spent. Inevitably, your team will experience some hitches along the way; your
team leader should collect and save any ideas for improvement for the final evaluation.
Evaluate your social media strategy
So now, it’s been a few months and your team has (hopefully) been having fun exploring the world of social media. You’ve
encountered some new information sources that have deepened your understanding of what your company has to offer, and in
turn, your team has added some valuable content and perspective to the social media space. It’s time for your team to evaluate your
strategy.
Your team should reassess the issues you discussed in the beginning:
• Did your team stay on-message and true to the goals of the project?
• Is it time to make changes to your team roster?
• Should (and could) you expand your listening and content creation strategies to include new social media outlets?
• What was the overall response to your content? Did users like it? Interact with it? How could it be improved?
• Did everyone understand their roles in the project? Did work get completed?
• In the future, could you post more frequently? Respond more quickly?
Again, you will want to come to this conversation armed with hard numbers and keep the focus on specific goals accomplished and
ideas for refinement. Social media is still in its infancy, but thanks to constant improvements in technology and user savvy, this new
frontier is quickly becoming an established and measurable method for increasing business, buzz, and even job satisfaction. In fact,
you may be surprised at the creativity, flexibility and enthusiasm of your team when it comes to executing your social media strategy.
Now, all you have to do is keep the momentum going.
www.awarenessnetworks.com
- 6 Steps to Building and Managing A Successful Social Media
Contact Information
Awareness, Inc. About Awareness
25 Corporate Drive, Suite 390
Burlington, MA 02451 Awareness is the leading provider of enterprise-class, on-demand social marketing management
software (SMMS) for marketers to publish and manage social content, engage with their audience
United States and measure the effectiveness their social media activities across multiple social media channels. The
Tel: 1 781-270-2400 Awareness Social Marketing Hub is built upon Awareness’ expertise with some of the world’s leading
brands and marketing agencies including MLB, Sony Pictures, Comcast, Likeable Media, Associated
Awareness Canada Press, Cox Communications, Mindjumpers and American Cancer Society.
5050 South Service Road, Suite 100 http://www.awarenessnetworks.com
Burlington, ON L7L 5Y7
Canada
Tel: 1 866 487 5623
Fax: 1 905 632 4922 ©2011 AWARENESS, INC.
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