Assigning An Employee Your Social Media
As a full-stack marketer, I tend to work with small businesses that have limited resources. As a result, many times they assign the broad task of “social media” to one of their younger employees. When this happens, it is one of many job responsibilities and is usually just tacked on without much direction because the employer assumes that a “young person” will instinctually understand it and know what to do.
Just as with any other job given to “young people,” there is training that is required, guidance needed, and experienced oversight necessary. Social media is marketing and marketing is not something that every young person understands: just look at some of the decisions they make in posting their own social media. Yes, “young people” know how to use the post button but that doesn’t mean they know what kind of content will garner the best results, that they understand the talking points to use in the captions, that they can generate the engagement that needs to happen with followers, or that they understand how to measure what works and what doesn’t. It blows my mind that business owners think that lumping “social media” as an additional job responsibility on a recent college grad, sales associate, restaurant host or wait staff, receptionist, assistant, or whatever other entry-level job that a “young person” takes is a good idea.
I recognize that small businesses have limited resources for staffing and outsourcing, so this giving of social media to an existing paid position is going to happen out of necessity. Here is my advice for getting the best results from that effort.
Establish Guidelines
The employer should provide some guidelines for the employee to follow when considering what to post on social media. These don’t have to be hard rules, but simply something to fall back on when the person managing social media is not sure what to do or doesn’t have any marketing experience to help guide them to make the right decisions. The guidelines could include:
Talking points and specific language to use (or not to use). For a small example, consider that younger users tend to use “lol” a lot in their normal writing when they don’t know what to say or how to end a sentence; is “lol” part of your brand’s or business’s regular vernacular or does it matter to you if it is used or not?
Tone of voice. Is humor okay? Is it serious? Is it spiritual, calm, excited? Should you limit the number of exclamation points used per post? You get the idea.
Categories of content. What do you want to cover and not cover? Examples include: employee features, products, services, messages, etc. Is there anything off-limits (anything behind the scenes that is a trade secret, or any spaces in your physical location you don’t want to be shown, etc.)?
Approval process. Should all posts be pre-approved or does the employee have leeway to post whatever they’d like?
Style. Do you show faces? Are products always shown in use? Do you like flat lays and is there a specific background you’d like used? This can also cover writing style: caps and lowercase use, AP Style, puntucation use?
Colors, fonts and logos. Are there brand colors and fonts that should always be used? Do you have specific logo versions you prefer to use?
Tagging others. Who to tag or who not to tag? Consider providing a list of handles that are definitely okay to tag (like other employees, brands you sell, clients you services, etc.).
Hashtags. Any that are specific to your industry that should always be included?
Frequency. Minimum number of posts and maximum number of posts (no more than one feed post a day and unlimited stories, for example)?
Schedule Planning Sessions
Giving feedback on a scheduled basis will be hugely beneficial to both the employer and employee, even if it is only one hour each month (though weekly or every other week would be better). This could also be a meeting between a hired consultant and the paid employee — that would be one way to use professional help for guidance without paying the rates for them to execute (I am available for hire!). Here is what should be covered in those meetings:
Upcoming content opportunities, including holidays, marketing initiatives, etc. Brainstorm together what content to include and outline the calendar for upcoming posts.
Cover results from the previous week/month and discuss what worked and didn’t work.
Calls-to-action: what do you want to accomplish with the upcoming social media posts, what do you want the followers to do with each post?
Define Tracking Metrics
Both employer and employee should understand what is considered a success in the social media efforts for that specific business. Everyone should be on the same page regarding what is expected from the posting. The employer may only want the social media to “establish legitimacy” as a business and that is okay, too. But those expectations should be clearly outlined before judging the results of the employee’s efforts. Keep in mind that there are a lot of nuances to analytics, for example, there needs to be a baseline of data prior to starting any new efforts. Some common metrics to consider:
Likes. For example, you might say you want a 10% increase in likes over what you’ve been getting on average each month. Or maybe you want a consistent 20% of likes to overall follower count.
Shares.
Engagement. Comments, DMs, etc.
Click-throughs. Are people clicking on your links?
Sales. Are people actually buying from you once they click through the links?
Email list growth. How many email sign-ups are you getting from social posts?
Phone calls. If you are asking for calls, are you getting them? How many is reasonable to get each month or grow from what you’ve been getting?
As an employer, it is important to understand that social media is a marketing tool and is a lot of time-consuming work to plan and execute. It is no longer a “new media” tool — we’ve been using social media for over 15 years at this point. Social media is a living, breathing media unlike running television, placing a print ad, or posting an outdoor board where you make it and put it out there and hope it does its job. With social media, it is a daily (sometimes hourly) posting of content and then interacting with it and the people that engage with it daily (and sometimes hourly). Consider what you are asking of your employee when you assign them social media as an added task to their job responsibilities and give them the resources, time, and guidance they need to be successful.
If you’d like to hire me to help train and guide them on a monthly basis, contact me here.
