6 Steps to Building and Managing
A Successful Social Media
Marketing Team
Social Media Marketing
6 Steps to Building and Managing A
Successful Social Media Marketing Team
from Awareness, Inc | Creators of the Social Marketing Hub
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
www.awarenessnetworks.com
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
So you’ve decided it’s time to get serious about social media, and you’re excited to begin building a strategy and a social
media team. Whether your team is diving in for the first time, or restructuring an existing strategy so that it becomes more
effective, you should aim to answer the following questions for your team.
1. Why are we engaging in social media?
2. Who should be part of our social media team?
3. Where should our team focus our efforts in social media?
4. What social media content should we monitor and create?
5. How should our team produce content?
6. When and how often should we produce content?
This whitepaper aims to help marketing decision makers develop a strategy as it relates to team workflow. It also includes
tips for maintaining and evaluating your strategy.
1. Why are we engaging in social media?
The answer to this question will drive your team’s strategy and help you to identify the appropriate team members to
execute it. Some goals might include:
• Increase brand awareness and buzz
• Increase sales numbers and leads
• Resolve customer service issues through social channels
• Gain followers and fans
• Communicate more effectively with users about your brand
• Learn more about what users think of your brand
Once you have a list of goals, you can begin to identify the best people to help you accomplish them. Be aware that this list
may result in objectives that touch multiple departments and job functions.
Today, 22% of companies report they are “just getting
started” in social media, 31% say they’ve been “doing this
for a few years”, and 43% have been doing social media for
just a few months. The majority (86%) of companies say they do
not plan to outsource their social media efforts. Two-thirds of
them spend 6 to 15 hours per week managing social media.
- Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
www.awarenessnetworks.com
2. Who should join our social media team?
Anyone, from the CEO to the intern, can potentially be involved in your social media strategy. However, there are three
common places to recruit talent for a social media team:
• The marketing department: This is the obvious first stop for social media. If your company has an in-
house marketing staff, they should already be abreast of the latest social media trends, and be given the
resources to execute sound strategies for engaging with consumers and creating quality content.
• The call center: If your company already has a team that handles customer complaints and questions,
they should continue to perform this duty, with additional social media training. They should also be
encouraged to help the company develop new ways of serving customers using social media. Your call
center team may also be motivated to participate by the fact that social media that allows companies to
post useful info and for customers to help each other solve their problems—which actually decreases call
center workload.
• An outside public relations firm or agency: Companies big and small often bring in additional help to gain
expertise and access to relationships their company does not currently have.
Once you’ve built your team, you should pick a team “captain.” Industry experts agree that most social media initiatives
should have a single manager who acts as the gatekeeper for all social media communication, though he or she may have
other duties within your company. He or she may manage multiple team members who execute your social media strategy.
There may also be more than one team manager in each company: for example, one for each brand, industry or geographic
location. The popular site Yelp.com uses this model to great effect, retaining a community manager in each city who
monitors and responds to the ongoing conversation around its brand, engages with users on message boards when
appropriate, and promotes events using messaging and newsletter features, so that both the website and the real-time
events it organizes are always buzzing with engaged users.
“There’s quite a few ways to measure “return” - but
investment is just what you put in.”
- Mark Goodman, Editor-in-Chief, Go2 Media
“Don’t leave it up to the intern! Nobody’s too old
to learn social media skills. It’s great when it’s
collaborative inside and out.”
- Anne Holub, Web Communications Specialist, Chicago Metropolitan
Agency for Planning
In a recent poll of Fortune 500 companies, over 40% say
increasing brand awareness is a top goal for their social media
team. Increasing leads (15%) and driving an increase in sales
(13.8%) come next. Only 7.2% say their main goal is to learn more
about user behavior.
- Source: Flowtown
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
www.awarenessnetworks.com
3. Where should our team focus our efforts in social media?
You’ve likely heard the answer to this one before: it’s wherever your audience is already talking. This may be in more than one place:
today, people spend their days having business-to-business conversations on LinkedIn, planning their social schedules on Facebook
and raving (or complaining) about their consumer products on Twitter.
So how can your team monitor this decentralized, world-wide conversation as a team? You can split up the work in a few different
ways:
• By industry: If your marketing team already specializes in covering a few different industries, they should monitor
the influential blogs and Twitter users in those fields.
• By brand: Companies with multiple brands should assign dedicated social media team members to those brands
• By competitor: Companies should monitor specific competitors and identify trends in how they are acting/reacting.
• By social media network: If your team has a diverse range of ages or interests, some may be more familiar with
one networking site than another. For example, some employees may unfamiliar with the conventions of LinkedIn
or YouTube, but are already experts at using Facebook or Flickr. Save time and training resources by assigning tasks
accordingly.
Your team’s goal should be to stay abreast of what users are saying about your brand, and to begin to look for ways to join the
conversation in a useful way. Social marketing software can be useful in this regard, as it allows for keyword searching, comment
tracking and other monitoring tasks across multiple platforms.
Once you begin listening carefully to the conversation, ideas will likely naturally present themselves to your team members. The
team leader should regularly solicit, collect and vet these ideas. Which brings us to our next question.
“Never spread yourself thin. Find out which social
networking sites make sense for your company or client,
and then figure out the best way to integrate.”
- Jessica Frank, Digital and New Media Strategist, Antler Agency
“One of the most important things for any entity entering
social media is to look at how their brand or category is
being discussed already. Without a listening strategy, you
can’t contribute in a meaningful way or add value.”
- Richard Cherecwich, Account Executive, WIT Strategy
6 Steps to Building and Managing a Successful Social Media Marketing Team
www.awarenessnetworks.com
4. What social media content should we monitor and create?
Your team will need to brainstorm ideas that will help, entertain and engage your users, not just push new deals or products. Ideas
for content may come from every corner of the company, from the CEO to the folks in the call center. Your team’s task will be to
discuss and decide which ideas suit your strategy.
Questions to ask when vetting ideas
It’s unlikely that every great idea you have is possible for your team to execute. Your team should look at the following for each idea
before beginning a project:
• Does this accomplish one of the primary goals we set in the beginning of this project?
• Do we possess the time, talent and money now to create and promote this content, without a hitch? (Or do we
have the option to hire outside help if needed?)
• Will it be possible to measure user response to this project in a way that proves ROI?
Once you have a list of ideas that meet the above criteria, it’s time to discuss the nuts and bolts of content creation.
5. How should our team produce content?
Your team must develop a workflow process that allows your
team to stick to its goals, create great content and measure the
results of that content.
Every company’s workflow will be different, but all successful
workflow processes will designate the person (or people)
responsible for:
• Conceptualizing ideas
• Assigning content
• Creating content
• Editing content for accuracy and tone
• Approving content for publication
• Uploading and publishing content
• Ensuring content is being published as assigned
• Promoting content across multiple channels
• Responding to user feedback on content
• If necessary, mediating conversations between users on content
• Measuring user response to content
Your team leader should play a vital role in all of the above, but it may not be realistic to expect him or her to do it all. It may work
best to split up the task list by department, and charge the team leader with keeping each department informed of the others’
efforts.
Some examples of task distribution might be:
• You charge your marketing team with monitoring brand-based conversations and creating blog posts, which
are approved by the COO, while you leave responding to customers up to the customer service team, and meet
regularly with the team leader to discuss each department’s progress
• You assign the content creation to the creative department, charge the team leader with editing and posting all
content, ask the engineering department to handle gathering metrics on user response, and share all information
by email