Before my last semester of college, I worked as a marketing intern at one of the country’s top consulting firms. One of my many tasks was to manage the firm’s various social media accounts. This included the company’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages. Having taken classes on social media marketing and strategy, I felt confident in my skill set. There were a few times as an intern, however, when my supervisor, the marketing director of the firm, would hand me articles written on social media marketing and ask that I read through them, take notes of anything we should implement, and then report back to him. To my surprise, the majority of the articles I was handed stated that the number one cardinal sin businesses make when implementing social media into their marketing strategy is to have untrained employees manage their social media—sometimes that meant interns. If I’m being honest, the intern part was generally left out when I reported back to my supervisor.
Though at first I felt that these articles could be detrimental to me managing the company’s social media, I really did not have much to fear. When talking about interns, the authors were referring to interns that had not been trained in social media management. But what was even worse than an untrained marketing intern, was random people from the company being tasked with managing their business’s various social outlets on top of whatever job they already had.
An inside joke that a lot of marketers share is that some employers tend to think that their seventeen-year-old niece could manage their company’s Facebook page due to the fact that she herself has a personal Facebook page. One business owner recently told me that her company had only recently gotten on social media. “We decided we finally needed to get on the social media band wagon,” she said, “so we got one of our guys in IT to manage Facebook and Twitter. I mean, he has a Facebook so he should know what he’s doing, right?” Let that sink in for a second. There are actually employers out there that think that due to having a personal social media account, a person is automatically qualified to manage the social media account (or various accounts) of their company. Wow. So if I need a professional photographer, should I hire someone who has taken plenty of pictures with their iPhone? No training required as long as they know how to point and shoot, right?
With the amount of people on social media today, it is crucial that employers understand the importance of their company’s social media pages. These pages, when managed properly, can be the voice of the company that creates an alternative route for lead generation. But it takes skill. There is research and strategy that goes into the management. At what time of the day should you post? How often should you post? What kind of content should you post? Not to mention, when should boosting and paid ads be implemented into your company’s marketing budget? There are no universal answers for any of these questions.
Each company has a unique audience that they try to target. A strategy that works well for one company, won’t always work well for another. All of these decisions are determined through thorough research of the market and, a lot of times, by trial and error. Once social media marketing has begun, the efforts need to be watched, recorded, and studied in order to see if any changes need to be made. Managing social media is so much more than writing a clever post or uploading an attractive photo. There is a strategy involved that can only be accomplished by someone who, just like with any other skill, has studied and trained.
If your reason for using social media is to give your company a more personal voice while at the same time increasing your business, then you better make sure that it is being handled by a professional—someone who has worked with social media marketing before and has learned the tips and tricks. Think about the business you work for and ask yourself these questions: Who is managing our business's social media? Who is behind the voice of our business's social presence? Is it one of the young fellows from the IT department? Or is it a trained professional who has the knowledge and experience to hold such an important responsibility? For your sake, and your business's, I hope it is the latter.