This year, we managed to grow and gain a budget big enough to expand our team. We’ve opened more online marketing departments and worked out more opportunities to cooperate with our current clients. A larger budget means more social media profiles which then means more realized campaigns.

This kind of growth is a huge step forward for a company but it might not be entirely safe. It requires more responsibility on the part of the company which the company should be prepared for. For us, all of these structural changes happened around the time when I was returning home from my bike trip around the world and the company was moving to a new location. I’ve decided to take a risk and tried to find new blood for even while I was away. You can believe me that such a solution isn’t ideal.

We’ve managed to find people but the process wasn’t a systematic one and I didn’t have enough time on my hands to fully focus on it. Because of this, the effectiveness of the company went down and it wasn’t as high as we originally expected. When it comes to long-term clients, our ROAS and ROI result effectiveness is around 500% – 1000% and, when it comes to advertisements and content creation, it’s sometimes even higher. It all depends on the season, budget, products, and other factors. During the time of all these changes, we weren’t able to provide all of these services which resulted in clients getting less of a result for their money.

Because of this, after consulting with our clients, we’ve decided to return to the previous level of cooperation. These things happen, sadly, and we received valuable experience to learn from. Hopefully, sharing this experience with you will help you choose the right people for your own social media team.

The responsibilities of a social media expert in a team

Let’s say that you have a person applying for the position of social media manager. What should this person be able to handle? The following activities shouldn’t be a problem for a senior manager:

• creation and planning of content within set goals,
• innovations and suggestions for new kinds of posts,
• attention to detail and the ability to spot mistakes,
• copywriting and translations,
• defining target groups,
• advertisements campaigns ranging from simple ones to more complicated ones with retargeting,
• analysis and evaluation of activities,
• adjusting of activities and tactics for a specific client,
• communication with other members of the team and the account,
• responsibility for the return of investments,
• organizing team work and projects,
• mentoring, feedback for team members, and suggestions to improve,
• ideas on strategic initiatives, goals, and key performance indicators,
• focus on new trends, their testing and suggestions on their implementation into the clients’ projects,
• presenting their work,
• creating guides and strategies,
• delegating work in order to complete all projects on time,
• other related activities.

Knowledge and experience are irreplaceable

As the people involved in IT say, “hard skills”and experience with using the required programs are the key to success. There are many tools which can help you gain better results and your social media manager should definitely be able to use them. Some of them are, fox example:

• Business Manager on a high level,
• time tracking tools, such as Toggl.com,
• they should be able to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on a basic level,
• export pictures of the right quality and size,
• the ability to write engaging articles and, of course, a good knowledge of grammar is mandatory,
• online tools that will make work easier, help analyze activities and automate social networks,
• Google Analytics, Supermetrics, and other analytics tools,
• work with Google Drive and Microsoft Office, as well as the ability to automate them and use patterns,
• use an email client, calendar, and knowing what a “zero inbox” is,
• know the meaning of the abbreviations ROAS, ROI, CPC, CTR, CR, and others,
• communicate in the office, via email, through cloud, and through company documents,
• WordPress, HTML basics, and the basics of video editing are a huge bonus.

Work on real projects

People without actual working experience can’t prepare quality results as professional would. A small company should always invest in an actual professional rather than give their social networks to a junior or an intern – a student. Your new social media manager should be able to prepare concepts and also be able to realize them (prepare the content) and analyze them.

The structure, process, and system of a company

Despite everything I’ve mentioned in this article, you shouldn’t have high hopes and you shouldn’t only search for the perfect person. It’s likely that you won’t find them. Especially if your HR resources are limited and your company doesn’t have an established internal system that would help new people learn, gain basic information about their project and quickly realize them. While building our social media department, we underestimated this phase, too. It resulted in us taking a step backward instead of moving on to professional campaigns and video formats. But I believe and hope that we’ll be able to get back on our feet quickly and move forward and only forward from here on out.

A smaller team of under four employees and only a few clients is a lot easier to manage even without complicated organization and the aforementioned learning processes. All you need is to have professionals on your team. A learning process is mandatory when you have a large team and many projects and it should reflect the entry-level requirements, the testing period, control system, clearly defined expectations, KPI, and our set goals.

Always keep in mind that everyone doesn’t know everything. We’re always learning and skills can be taught to people in time. Everything requires time and the willingness of people to improve and do a good job with good results.

I sincerely hope that this article will help some people set their expectations and establish a profile of their ideal candidate for the position of social media manager.

Do you have any experience with leading a social media team? Leave us a comment! We’ll look forward to it.