When it comes to choosing a social media manager, or social media marketer, for a small business, there are four key components to look for:
1.Portfolio
First and foremost, you want to make sure that whoever you’re hiring to manage your social media does this professionally, as a full-time career. This means someone who lives and breathes social media, someone who understands the best methods, the kinds of social media posts that generate the most engagement, and how to increase your followers without overstepping that platforms’ terms of services. This kind of industry knowledge comes to someone who has successfully managed social media accounts for several companies in the past, and such a candidate would have a social media marketing portfolio that might include screenshots of managed accounts before and after they started working on them to show growth, custom content created for holidays, and select samples of their monthly reports.
2.Results
There’s a big difference between a social media poster and a social media account manager. A social media poster is one who posts to your social media accounts, whereas a social media manager is someone who generates RESULTS with your social media accounts!! Many people call themselves social media managers who just post, with no regard to how well those posts are performing. So what kinds of results do you want with your social media? It might be growing your follower base, building your brand recognition, getting exposure to new potential buyers, generating leads, or strengthening your relationships with your existing customers, clients or patients on social media.
3.Associates/Team
If you’re a small to medium company looking for a social media manager, you’re likely looking to use social media as a standalone marketing campaign. (That means it’s not part of the more integral marketing strategy like SEO, click funnels, video ads, or email marketing.) In that case, you’re likely looking for a social media manager who comes from a smaller team of fewer than 10 people.
We say fewer than 10 because larger agencies tend to keep prices lower by creating cut-and-paste social media strategies for all of their clients, and having rooms full of social media managers managing anywhere from 10 to 50 accounts weekly. Think of it as the Walmart of social media management. Though this can appear to be extremely cost-effective, in the end, if your social media is not leading to increased relationships with customers or leads and does not support your SEO strategy, it’s likely not worth whatever money you’re paying.
On the flipside, it is extremely rare to find a social media manager who can take high-quality photos, write clever or engaging captions, and ensure that your social media is generating results. You could find a unicorn who happens to be amazing at all of it, but it’s extremely rare. With that said, we found that the most impressive social media management companies come in teams of at least three people – photographer, a caption writer, a scheduler and an account manager overseeing them.)
So the sweet spot for a small to medium size business is an agency with 3-10 people, with each account manager managing between 5 and15 accounts. (Expect that the fewer accounts an account manager manages, the more attention your account will get and the more that agency will charge each client.)
4. Breadth of Services
A strong social media management candidate should be able to demonstrate their success in achieving a variety of deliverables for clients in the past including account growth, Facebook ad successes, and post reaches.
As small business owners, we’ve all experienced how rare it is to find one employee who can consistently handle the brunt of a heavy workload. And we‘ve also experienced relief when we finally find such an employee. When you do find someone you can hand over the grunt of the work to, it frees up your time so you can think of how to further develop that particular department. Social media marketing very often works just that way. Once a client finds that their social media is rocking, they’re often inspired to rebuild their website, or start getting their business ranked on Google Maps.
Trust us, it’s much, much easier to have one digital media marketing company who can handle a wide variety of your marketing needs, and better yet to have a marketing company who brings ideas to the table.
At The Shift Marketing, one of the things we love most is getting to know a brand inside and out, and not just developing a relationship with the clients, but with the products or services that the clients provide so that we can offer new ideas, strategies and tactics to help them grow. In other words, a simple social media campaign with us becomes a full digital marketing strategy for your entire business.
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