Top Ten Reasons Why You Need A Social Media Manager For Your Business

A social media manager is the person in charge of a company’s social media marketing.

I often get told “oh I do that myself” or worse “my intern does that for me.” So why do you need one?

Here are my top 10 reasons why it’s good to employ a Social Media Manager, like me, even if it’s for a short period of time

1. Time-saving: You free up time in your business to concentrate on your actual business. For small businesses outsourcing is one of the hardest things to do. Believe me, I know. So take your time to find people that you can get along with and that you trust.
2. Develop a strategy: So many businesses just post randomly to social media without much thought for the overall strategy, goals or people they are aiming the business at. A social media manager needs to take a broad and comprehensive approach to your social media. They should sit down with you in the beginning and ask lots of questions about your business, brand and products. Following this, they will write a comprehensive strategy that encompasses what the goal of social media is, who your ideal customers are, a content posting strategy, a competitor and influencer review and also establish which key performance indicators (KPIs) should be tracked.
3. Stay up to date with changes: What the heck is an algorithm anyway?? Simply put it is the formulation the social media channels use to decide what posts you (the customer) gets to see. There are so many aspects to the platforms now and a good social media manager will be up to date with all of the constant changes and amend your strategy accordingly.
4. Develop and manage content: The primary focus of the social media manager should be to post high-quality, original and authentic content which is in keeping with the brand identity. They are also able to create content for you from scratch. Moreover, this content should be re-purposed across a variety of platforms rather than posting the exact same content on all of the channels. This is a big social media no no!
5. Engage: Social media managers do more than just manage content – they also manage relationships. Social media engagement is actually a massive and time-consuming part of the job. In many cases, social media managers are the face of the company. When customers send out a tweet into the ether, they expect a response from the person running your account. When customers follow you on Instagram and leave a comment, they expect to get some form of interaction with the brand itself. So a social media manager needs to be very well acquainted with the voice of the brand, and what the company stands for. The social media manager should also interact with carefully identified influencers for you.
6. Reflect and refine: There should be a strong focus on data, and this is one part of the role that excites me coming from a scientific background. It’s not just about collecting as much data as possible but by identifying and reporting on the metrics that matter and being able to interpret them so that the social media strategy can be adapted accordingly.
7. Hashtag research: Hashtags can boost your reach on social media and help you to monitor what your target audience, competitors and influencers are up to. Researching which ones to use should form an essential part of your Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest strategies. Moreover, they should be frequently reviewed to prevent you from getting into a hashtag rut. Recently LinkedIn has announced that they are making a move to using hashtags because they appreciate their importance. This helpful article explains more
8. Social listening: How do you know if your customers (and potential customers) are talking about you on social media? If you’re lucky and they’ve tagged you it’s easy or you can manually search your social media platforms but that’s very time-consuming. A social media manager will use social listening tools to keep an ear on what people are saying about your business. There are various tools we can use to do this and they vary enormously in price from free ones such as social mention and TweetDeck to some of the more costly ones like union metrics at approx £100 / month.
9. Attend and promote events and network: If you have a conference coming up or you’re attending a brand show your social media manager can play a big role in promoting that event. During the event, they can live tweet, Facebook Live or Instagram Live on your behalf. This, in turn, will build on your brand and your network.
10. Social advertising: This is online advertising (paid efforts) that focus on social networking sites and assuming you don’t have a dedicated advertising role, your social media manager will need to have experience with this. It’s foolish to assume you don’t need to do any paid for advertising, especially on Facebook. One of the major benefits of advertising on a social networking site is that advertisers can take advantage of the users demographic information and target their ads appropriately. This can be a powerful tool

Ultimately then the aim of a Social media Manager is to help a business achieve its highest-level goals through the power of social media.

If you found this article interesting and you’d like to discuss your social with me then get in touch through all of the usual channels.