About Social Media Marketing Team

Social Media Marketing Team: We often discuss the importance of social media managers and the fantastic people who manage social media as a team. But often, for agencies, large corporations, and even some small businesses, social media is run by groups of folks spanning a wide range of skills.

So How do You Build an Amazing Social Media Marketing Team?

There are many things to consider:

• What skills do you need on your team?
• How to structure the team?
• Do you employ new team members?

How do Build an All-Star Social Media Marketing Team in 5 Steps

Building a social media team is a pretty important topic. We’ve alienated this guide into five steps to help you quickly navigate and digest the data.

Since most of you may already be acquainted with some areas, feel free to skip to the piece that interests you the most.

1. Assess your current situation
2. Set your social media goals
3. Decide the size of your team
4. Understand the required roles
5. Decide on the structure of your team

Assess Your Current Situation

Assessing your current situation is a significant first step in building your social media team. Several factors about your current situation can influence your decisions about your social media team, and some of these factors include the following:

Budget: Your budget can influence many critical hiring decisions, like how many people you can hire and what tools your team might use. It could also affect how ambitious you’d like to be with your social media aims.

Workforce: As a replacement for hiring new team members, there may be people in your company who are involved in working with or helping out with social media. Or maybe everyone in your company wants to spend some time on social media. We will discuss team structure in more detail in Step 5.

Resources: Resources can be tools like marketing automation software or resources like photos taken by your media team/articles written by your content team. Such capital can increase your team’s productivity and reduce the people you need.

Once you have a reasonable valuation of your situation, the next step is to align yourself with your business goals.

Set Your Social Media Goals

Goal setting has been exposed to increase a person’s incentive and performance. This becomes even more important when building your social media team. Knowing your aims can help you decide on the right team size, the proper structure, and the right recruits.

(It may be a decent idea to review the goals with your team after hiring them and regulating them if necessary.)

In recent years, the use circumstance for social media has moved beyond mere marketing and is now used for customer service, community building, public relations, and more. Here are ten social media goals you could goal for:

Brand Awareness: To start a presence and increase your reach on social media

Traffic: To get up and go on traffic to your website or blog

Lead Generation: To collect essential information from your prospects

Income: To increase subscriptions or sales

Engagement: To attach and engage with your audience

Community Building: To bring your brand advocates together

Customer Service: To comfort and serve your customers

Public Relations: to spread information and build relationships and thought guidance

Social Listening & Research: To attend to your customers and understand your market

Recruitment: To recruit the best aptitude

Whether you are new to social media and creating your first hire or looking to expand your present social media team, it’s essential to consider how social media can help you attain your business goals.

By understanding the connection between social media and your business goals and ambitions, you can begin to express the type of team you need to build.

Decide the Size of Your Team

What is the ideal size of a social media team is an interesting question to explore. It’s almost like asking what the perfect length of a business is, and there’s no right or wrong answer.

There are social media teams of different sizes. At one end of the range, companies like ours have someone who owns social media (that’s genius Brian Peters). At the other end of the field are companies like KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, which has more than 150 social agents to provide customer support on social media.

So yes, it depends and varies significantly from company to company! With that said, here are rare factors to consider when deciding on the ideal number for your team:

Your hiring budget: The more budget you have, the bigger team you can build.

Resources for social media (tools, photos, and content): The more resources available, the fewer people you’ll need.

Your Social Media Goals: The more extensive your goals, the more people you’ll need.

Your business goals: The more important social media is to your business, the bigger your team could be.

If having a number is helpful, the latest research on social media team size that I could find was done by Ragan and NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions—which surveyed over 2,000 respondents from organizations of varying sizes (less than 25 to more than 1,000) in 2012. (If you know of a more recent study, we’d dear to hear from you).

Most groups surveyed only had up to three people working exclusively on social media. I imagine that the average size of the social media team has increased significantly since then.

Understand the Required Roles

5 Key Social Media Skills to Hire

When deciding the size of your team, it can be helpful to understand the different roles and skills required within your social media team.

Here are five typical roles on a social media team:

Note: In some cases, one versatile person may fill all these roles, while larger organizations may assign multiple people to each position.

1. Social Media Manager

A social media manager takes a holistic view of social media and is often responsible for setting strategy and planning for the team. In a small group, they can also handle most social media responsibilities, such as managing all social media profiles, posting content, listening, responding to comments, and analyzing.

2. Content Creator

A content creator is majoring in creating content for social media posts. This content includes blog posts, images, and videos. Due to the scope of this job, they might sometimes act as designers for the social media team. This may also be responsible for taking the posts scheduled by the social media manager and preparing them to be planned and published.

3. Community Manager

A community manager emphasizes engaging and connecting with their audience and customers on social media. Her responsibilities typically include listening to relevant social media talks, responding to comments and queries, and establishing social media events such as Twitter chats or Facebook Live sessions. They are often seen as the face of the company and play a key role in your company’s connection with its biggest fans and supporters.

4. Advertiser

An advertiser works on paid advertising on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter ads. She is typically a quantitative person who enjoys experimenting with different ad types and creatives, analyzing social media ad results, and adjusting ad campaigns for maximum ROI.

5. Analyst

An analyst digits into the data and metrics of her social media struggles, such as engagement rates, traffic, click-through rates, conversions, and perhaps even revenue. Hence they are the technical person who can help set up the proper tracking system and analyze your team’s results using statistical techniques.

Here are some other roles that might fit a social media team, especially when your business is much more significant:

• Public relations specialist
• Seller
• Customer Service Specialist
• Alliances Coordinator
• Appointed
• Developer

Decide on the Structure of Your Team

5 Techniques to Structure Your Social Media Team

After you know the size you want for your team and also the roles needed to achieve your goals. You can decide on the structure of your social media team.

There are different ways to approach team structure, and here at Buffer, therefore we are constantly experimenting to find the system for our idea.

Hence you are looking for motivation on how to set up your team. In that case, the five ways to structure a social media team recommended by Sallie Burnett, founder, and leader of Customer Insight Group, Inc., is a countless place to start.

Here are the five structures described by Sallie:

Organic: A free deal for all

Centralized: A self-contained social media team

Hub and Spoke: A core team that works with other departments in the company

Multiple Hub and Spoke or “Dandelion”:  A leading social media team with smaller social media teams in different departments.

Holistic: Everyone in the company is involved with social media somehow.

What is Our Structure in Buffer?

We don’t have an excellent social media team. However, if I were to refer to the five ways of Sallie above. I think a Hub and Spoke structure might better describe our social media endeavor here at Buffer (although we don’t precisely see it that way!)

Inside the “hub” (i.e., our marketing team),

Brian (Digital Marketing Tactician) creates compelling new content for social media and experiments with new features and also products similar to Instagram Live and Snap’s Spectacle, among other things.

Ash Read and I (Content Crafters) write long articles on this blog.

Arielle Tannenbaum (Community Champion) hosts our weekly #bufferchat. Therefore along with Bonnie Huggins (Loyalty Marketer), listens and engages with our community on social media.

Outside of “downtown,” our Happiness Heroes (our customer service specialists) help our customers via Twitter and also Facebook Messenger, depending on the time zone. The rest of the team also switches to relevant conversations on social media (e.g., an engineer answering a technical question on Twitter).

Conclusion

Building a team can be one of the most challenging tasks for a manager, and this job is made even more difficult. Therefore with that said, I think there are many ways to build or structure your team. So don’t worry if your team differs from other companies’ social media teams.

Also Read: Portland Business Journal – Who are The Business Journal