Putting Together a Social Media Team

One of the very first things you need to consider is who will own social media within your organization. By own, we mean who will ultimately be responsible for when things go right—and when things don’t go as planned. In many organizations, the website is owned by the marketing department and supported by the information technology (IT) department. If you have a small business, these “departments” probably have only one person in them. If you only have one person on staff, you need to train that person to have a wide knowledge of the organization’s products/services and clear communication skills, and give them the authority to speak on behalf of your business.

If you have a larger company, we recommend creating a cross-disciplinary team to manage your social media. Why? Social media affects many departments and a larger trained team can best utilize the management of it.

FRIENDLY ADVICE

What if you run a small organization that doesn’t have a marketing department? If you’re in an organization with fewer than 10 people, you still need to separate out the functions needed for the smaller team. As you grow, it will be easier to separate the duties.

In today’s social media environment, you have no idea how quickly your business might explode.

Why You Need a Team

Thanks to Facebook and other social media platforms, customers now expect open, ongoing communication between the business and the customer. This isn’t going to change anytime soon. So that means not only do you have to get used to this new level of customer engagement, you also have to plan for it and embrace it.

If you only have one person in the office who manages your social marketing, it’s not scalable and can’t grow at all. In fact, it may stunt the growth. You need a team to help. And that team needs to be peopled with the right employees and empowered to make decisions and communicate freely.

Your team’s internal objective should entail the following:

You need to make sure that everyone on the team is on board with your Facebook communications strategy, plan, and implementation. How do you do that? The best way to get—and keep—everyone on board is by having weekly meetings so that departments can share the following types of information:

The Stakeholders

The stakeholders of the social media team should include a member of the executive team as a sponsor, and leaders from each of the departments involved.

In your organization, this might look like a member from the following departments:

FRIENDLY ADVICE

If you aren’t the CEO, it’s a good idea to get upper management to support your social media strategy. While they may not be involved in the day-to-day activity, they need to know why it’s important and how it can affect the bottom line.

It’s not often that you see information technology departments on a team for social media, but we recommend doing so for a number of reasons.

First, there are often bottlenecks within an organization to get staff access to social networking websites, tools to manage the social sites, and sites used to support your social campaigns.

Second, you might need to install software to build and manage your social media presence.

And finally, if you plan on video hosting or bringing in large amounts of traffic to your site, the information technology team needs to be aware of the potential growth and have plans to support this traffic.

Having IT staff on board enables them to let you know what’s technologically feasible and what isn’t. Additionally, if IT staff know what you are hoping to get out of your social media, they will be in a better position to help you achieve those goals.

WATCH OUT

Are you familiar with Super Bowl ads? Yes, the multi-million-dollar commercials that air during the biggest football game of the year in the United States. Many times for the past decade there have been commercials aired that pointed the viewers to a website.

In some cases, there was so much traffic that the website that was supposed to be a lead generation tool crashed. Oops. That’s too bad because the strategy was effective in getting people to the site, but couldn’t deliver the site itself. This is why it’s so important to have multiple departments and skill sets represented on your team.

Choosing the Right People

What skill sets should people on the social media team have?

Although it would be great if they were all social media and Facebook ninjas, it’s unlikely that this will be the case. Communication skills are the obvious answer. You are going to be picking leaders from each department, so here is a set of qualities we recommend:

Establishing Team Roles

After you’ve identified your teammates, it’s time to give them jobs. All of the jobs break down into three categories, as follows:

Dividing and Conquering

So how many people do you need on the front end to really conquer social media? You need at least 25 people.

We’re kidding. Most businesses use one to five people. The more people you can place on your team, the better and more efficient it will become.

WATCH OUT

As you begin to dive into your new social campaigns, make sure you have one person online at a time per account. You don’t want to step on each other’s toes as you answer people. This is why scheduling is so important in your planning.

As you begin to work as a team in the social space, building a schedule of the times to listen, engage, analyze, and hold group meetings will become very important.

As mentioned in Chapter 10, most people engage on Facebook before work (7 A.M.), right after work (5 P.M.), and late at night (11 P.M.). That’s when the engagers should plan to engage with them. Also, make sure to schedule activity on Saturdays. During nonbusiness hours, you can divide the task of replying to posts among employees.

We’ve moved into an era in which everything is fast and furious and people need answers right away. That’s part of the social media landscape and what you are getting yourself into as you embrace social media. The downside is that you need to be covered around the clock. The upside is that you are now connected to your customers around the clock.

It won’t take you long to figure out what scheduling system works best for your company. Starting out with a 24/7/365 social media monitoring system off the cuff might not be right for your business.

WATCH OUT

Make sure all of your employees sign social media management agreements. An agreement might entail that the Facebook page she manages is on behalf of the company, and not under control of the employee herself. Additionally, it should stipulate that when she leaves the company, she must give control back to the company. One drawback about Facebook is that any administrator of an account on Facebook can remove the other administrators and take control of the account. Protect yourself by training employees on this seriousness, and have them sign these legal documents.

Setting Up Workflow

So how should the multiple people on your team work together and in what order? They will still maintain their current company positions but they should work with their managers to identify time each week to work on their social media tasks. The most important parts to social media workflow are accuracy and delivery.

Your engagers will have most of the daily work, which might look like this:

The engagers also have a second duty, which is to listen for conversations on a daily basis. This means that they monitor the company Facebook page at many points throughout the day and respond to requests as needed.

The idea generators have less of a daily schedule and more of a weekly process that looks like this:

The strategizers may meet on a weekly or monthly basis. Their role dictates that they get reports from the engagers on a monthly basis to see what is and isn’t working on your Facebook campaigns. They then review, evaluate, and make any changes to your marketing approach.