Are you considering delegating social media management to your administrative assistant, virtual assistant, or receptionist? Many small business owners view social media as a task to hand off as soon as possible. If you are about to hire an assistant for the first time, you might want to include this in the job description.
Social media is one of the most important marketing tools for your business. Is it appropriate to assign this task to someone whose job is not specifically marketing?
The short answer is yes. Many individuals in administrative roles handle social media for their employer. The longer answer is yes, but… with careful planning and strategy. Anyone who handles the social media accounts for your business, even you, needs to understand the purpose, process, and goals of the task before running with it.
1. Know How Social Media Fits Within Your Marketing Strategy
It’s very common for a small business in its early days of growth to take the social media process for granted. After all, the owner uses social media for personal reasons regularly. How different can it be for business? As most people find out fairly quickly, it’s very different. A similar misconception also gets applied to delegating social media management. The assistant is a savvy social media user, so they should be able to intuitively understand how to post for the business, right? Once again, this doesn’t always turn out very well.
Social media for business is an aspect of marketing. All marketing needs to have a purpose.
Whether it’s social media, your website, blogs, ads, or a podcast, you need to know how that effort supports your business. This is why you should always start with developing your marketing strategy.
These are a few goals that businesses might have for their social media:
Establish a business presence
Educate and build your audience to recognize the brand
Attract subscribers to your email list or lead magnet
Sell products or services
Keep in mind that your goal might vary by social media platform. Some platforms are better for building relationships, while others are better for sales. Know the goal for each one that you plan to use.
If you’re not quite sure of your social media goal, or what you want people to do after they see it, your assistant won’t have clear guidelines on what and how to post.
Back up a few steps to work on your persona journey and marketing strategy. Once you understand how social media should be used, you can deliver guidelines to your assistant.
2. Establish Social Media Guidelines from a Business Perspective
Guidelines are what separate personal social media from business social media. Although your assistant might be very natural with their personal accounts, that doesn’t mean they will be as intuitive with your business account.
Your business has a style and personality of its own. When your assistant plans and creates content for the business, all of it has to reflect that style and personality. I refer to this style and personality as your messaging. Messaging is the compilation of words, tone, and values that when combined convey the key points in a way that resonates with your target audience.
Again, these guidelines may vary across different social media platforms. Keeping in mind the social media goals and messaging, the content your assistant produces should always read, look, or sound consistent. Your guidelines should include things like:
Topics to cover and those to avoid
Language style and specific words to use or avoid
Types of acceptable media such as graphics, videos, animations, and text
How often any given type of content should be published
Once you and your assistant have a mutual understanding of why you’re using social media for your business, and how you want to use it, it’s far easier to put the processes in place.
3. Create a Process for Efficient Workflow
Your business social media process is how you and/or your assistant will apply the strategy and guidelines.
As any business owner who has ever tried to “wing it” on social media knows, posting consistently takes a lot of effort! Coming up with content spontaneously gets exhausting and frustrating very quickly, often resulting in long lulls between posts.
With a workflow, however, your social media content can be planned, developed, and published on a consistent schedule. The first order of business is to determine how far ahead you want to plan your content. Most marketing firms work about 6 weeks ahead, meaning that most content for the upcoming month should be ready for review two weeks before it starts. Scheduling tools make it easy to publish the content automatically to each platform.
Some businesses prefer to keep the appearance of spontaneity by manually posting to each platform. This is easy to do, but it still needs to be planned. Any content that is not being live recorded should already be complete and ready to publish. And make sure to set a task or calendar reminder when it’s time to go live on your platform. It’s also possible to do a mix of scheduled and spontaneous posts.
Creating content itself can be done in a variety of ways. For instance, you might schedule one day every month to film several video segments to be posted daily or weekly. If your business does some kind of improvement work in the field, taking pictures and loading them into a shared drive needs to be listed in someone’s job procedures. If service reps are empowered to collect client feedback and testimonials, equip them with a set of questions or a link they can easily provide to clients. The social media manager might not have to create every piece of content out of thin air. Often, it’s simply their job to compile contributions from around the company into an organized format.
Standard operating procedures (SOP) make it much easier for everyone to understand their part in supporting the company’s social media content. If people need to take pictures, add content to a shared drive, or keep videos limited to a certain number of seconds, make sure they have clear instructions on how to do so.
Once content is ready to be scheduled, it needs to go through a review process. There are two reasons for this. First, someone needs to verify that everything ready to post is within the company guidelines and messaging. Second, everyone needs their work to go through another set of eyes before it gets finalized. We all have trouble catching mistakes, grammatical errors, typos, or awkward phrasing in our own writing. A final review ensures that what your company posts is polished and professional every time. Again, make sure this step is part of the scheduling process and that everyone is accountable to doing their tasks on deadline.
With a clear process in place to produce the social media content that reflects your company and that looks good when posted, you can expect to pull the most valuable and accurate data out of your reports.
4. Review Reports to Track Effectiveness
Social media reports (and all marketing reports in general) are not exactly the most interesting reading for most business owners. In fact, many business owners struggle to even interpret them. We can all look at a post and see that it got a lot of likes, or comments, or shares. But how did those interactions affect your actual business?
Reports inform your marketing strategy if you know how to structure and read them. This takes some work, and I always recommend working with an outside professional to get everything set up optimally. Or, if you hired an assistant whose real talent is in data collection, they might already know exactly what to look for.
Your business is unique, so your reports need to be customized. Use report features to learn more about your target audience:
When are they online?
Which topics get the most engagement?
What platforms do they seem to interact with most?
What actions do they take on your social media content?
What actions do they take after seeing your social media content?
How does your engagement compare to similar periods in past weeks, months, or years? The comparison timelines that matter most will vary by business type.
You will also need to set up the proper tracking codes on your website (and other owned digital platforms) so that you can see traffic flow from your social accounts to your site. It helps to know what posts send people to your site, get contact submissions, or result in a direct purchase. Sometimes it’s the content of the post itself. Other times, it might be the time that it was posted. It can be difficult to pinpoint the exact content and times that people go from social to your website, but the key metric to evaluate is how many people are actually making the trip.
Social media for social media's sake is a waste of time, money, and resources for any business.
Don’t forget that your strategy should be evident in your reports. If the actions people take based on your social media content don’t align with what you planned in your strategy, the reports will give you information about what to change.
Social Media Delegation Success
If you know that your assistant has the skills and motivation to manage your social media accounts, go ahead and delegate that task. These four important aspects to handing over account management will help you and your assistant get started on a successful plan to grow your audience and business.
Although you are handling your social media management in house, you might find that working with an outside marketing firm will give you the starting boost and on-going guidance you need. We work with many clients to develop their social media strategy, guidelines, procedures, and reporting structure so that they can take it over and run it smoothly.
I would love to give you the right support in creating a social media plan. Reach out for a discovery call to learn more.
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