How Many People Does Your Business Need on the Social Media Team

This is a very common question when it comes to most companies. Especially for small and medium companies, most of them have no clue what the number is.

Yes, there are many social media outlets out there, but with the current technology and tools, most of social media tasks can be put on autopilot. For example, you can use IFTTT to do most of tedious jobs. You can use Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts way ahead of time; no longer you will need to sit in the office and be on time to post stuffs.

Also, it really depends on the nature of your business; not all social media outlets are effective for your business. Instead of trying to do them all, you should only focus on channels that work the best and benefit the most to your business. Of course, that might take some trials to find out. Especially for any startup, it can take a quite while to figure them out.

Now, there are two aspects when it comes to manage social media. First, You need to ask yourself, do you need a social media manager or a community manager? or maybe both.

 

A social media manager is basically a person who develops strategies that best fit the business. A good social media manager knows right away which social media channels are good and effective for the business. He or she has clear idea on be best content to share or the campaign to execute, so that can generate most traffic and leads.

On the other hand, a community manager is basically a person who is a vocal face of a particular company. He or she basically handles tweets, Linkedin updates, Facebook updates, etc. He or she should be the brand ambassador to your company.

Now, that is getting out of way, let’s talk about the number and answer the question: how many does your business need on the social media team?

Like I mentioned before, it really depends on the nature of your business and the size of your company. If your business is solely focus on the customer service inquires via social media, for a big company, you might need 4 – 5 staffs, so that questions or inquiries can be answered or addressed in a timely manner. For most medium size company, you might need 3 – 4 staffs. And for most small size business, 1 or 2 staffs should be sufficient (considering the technology that we have today).

I am a believer of the idiom: “too many cooks in the kitchen”. Too many people are in charge of a project usually end up ruining it. Also that fact that if a team has too many people, many of them tend to slagging off. That is why a small project can take up months for a big company.

I am also a believer that every company needs to have a blog on the website. If your company wants to get more organic traffics, it needs interesting and unique content on the blog. And, it is not the set it once and forget type of thing; it needs to be fed with fresh content at least every once per week. There is no other way around it. For a big company, it might be under the umbrella of editorial team. However, for most medium or small companies, social media teams can basically come up with content that brand their companies.. 

After that, they can distributed posts through their social media channels; interact with people that are interested in the topic. That is the most effective social media strategy that most “social media specialists” tend to forget, mostly because that requires time and energy to interact with people online. What so called social media strategy that most “social media specialists” is tweeting posts or retweeting other people’s posts; that is not a strategy; anyone who is using Twitter or Facebook can basically do it.

The above is just my 2 cents. As always, if you think differently, feel free to leave a comment below and share your thought.