With the meteoric rise of social media networks, companies have struggled to identify how to best manage their presence across social media channels. Some are tackling the challenge by hiring a dedicated expert to focus on social media management; others simply add a new level of responsibilities for existing employees, asking them to engage with their brands in a different way.
Neither route is necessarily better than the other. But no matter who you designate as your social stars, you'll need to make sure you have the right person for the job and make a plan for optimizing their efforts on your brand's behalf.
So first, let's define the skills that a social media star (SMS) should have, and then outline their most appropriate regular tasks.
Key social media skills
Whether you are hiring a social media specialist or selecting one from your existing resources, keep a few key requirements in mind:
Written communication skills. A big chunk of social media tasks lie within the community management sphere. So it is important that your social media specialist knows how to communicate in post form, in response to inquiries, and, at times, in 140 characters or less. When hiring, make sure that the SMS is able to express himself/herself in a clear, concise, and on-point manner and can easily adjust to the language used by your community.
Intimate understanding of your brand. Your SMS will be tasked with representing your brand's presence in the social space, so make sure that he or she has a comprehensive understanding of your overall brand identity, as well as its business goals and its social objectives. Unless there's a clear exchange of brand information flowing between the brand management team and the SMS, you risk having your brand get misrepresented within the social media sphere.
Knowledge of and passion for the medium. Knowledge about the way communication/marketing works on Facebook and other social networks is a must. Your SMS must by truly passionate about the platforms being used, and have knowledge on how to best market on them. Keeping in mind that social media is a relatively new phenomenon -- experience might not be as important here as a desire to learn and ability to conduct individual research to stay on top of the latest social developments.
Analytical skills and creativity. The most important skill your SMS must have is the ability to think analytically, which will allow him/her to identify the best social media solutions for your brand. Beginning with the ability to identify the networks on which your brand should be officially represented, moving through the development of engagement tactics, and ending with establishing creative and targeted social media strategies, such person must be able to make the right choices.
After you are lucky enough to find such a person within your company -- or if you decide to hire them from outside -- here is a list of tasks that will keep them busy.
Key social media tasks
Community management. The first task of a social media person at any company is to engage directly with its consumers across the social networks.
The different tasks within this category might include:
- Monitoring conversations and online buzz about your brand. This can be conducted via manual search or through social media listening tools. These can be free such as Twitalyzer, Topsy, etc., or paid such as Radian6 or ScoutLabs. The social media person should conduct daily buzz snapshots informing you about the types of user conversations happening on the social media networks regarding your brand. Ideally, based on the trends within the buzz, they will also offer analytical insights and strategic direction suggestions.
- Engaging in social media-based conversations. This includes sending out regular updates with information about the brand, sharing available content, or simply keeping the users entertained. Via this daily engagement, the social media specialists in charge of your brand should develop relationships, reinforce your brand personality, and become its online voice.
- Customer service management. Social media specialists can also become an outlet for customer service. The person handling the accounts should be trained to address user queries, or direct them toward the appropriate person who can answer their questions and collect feedback from users.
- Measuring the audience data. Your social media manager should be able to keep a tab on the daily growth of your fan base across all of its social networks. This number should be supplemented by the level of engagement measured by an accounting of "likes," "Diggs," retweets, @replies, or other social responses. By collecting such detailed statistics and analyzing them on a regular basis, you will be able to establish trends and learn how to best engage your audience.
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