Wanted, Social Media Manager – Are You Available 24/7?
Advice blogs and columns on how to do social media abound. You can’t open a professional website like Linked In without being inundated with articles about how to succeed in promoting your business or nonprofit organization via social media.
Many writers reposition colleagues’ thoughts by expanding the material with their observations, comments and experiences.
Recently, I came across a succinct opinion about what it means to be the manager of social media outreach that perfectly dovetailed my writings on the subject.
Jeff Bullas writing about “10 Essential Skills a Social Media Manager Needs to Have on Their Resume” on Linked In, noted that a decade ago social media wasn’t a profession and it didn’t even enjoy a job description. It barely had a definition. Facebook was a year old and social media marketing elicited perplexed expressions.
“Fast forward a decade and every organization must have a social media manager, whether full time or part time,” Bullas wrote.
Truer words about the effectiveness of social media and the responsibility of being a social media manager couldn’t have been written. The job of being a social media manager requires 24/7 attention to the cyber venue to ensure that your audience, customers and other interested parties are given every opportunity to learn about what you’re doing. Tepid dedication to social media can have damaging results.
Twitter is an incredible tool that can provide your brand, your small business or your civic organization with a voice and personality. Twitter can also work to turn you, the small businessperson – the owner, into a thought leader about what is happening in your industry and your sphere of interest. The benefit of such a distinction is that you will become the go-to-person for answers and advice on what’s happening.
To be successful in tweeting, you will have to develop your personality and a unique style. That’s what makes the difference and can increase your Twitter followers and turn tweeting into a successful marketing tool for you and your company. As a small business owner, your social media activity should engage the world in the conversation that you initiate.
As the leader of your organization, you are goal driven, growth driven or mission driven. You focus on the bigger picture of promoting your company, product, service, NGO or issue. Consequently, you have to delegate the social media job responsibility to a trusted associate. Just as bookkeeping or human resources, social media management is a full-time or at least part-time task.
In addition to content, successful tweets should include a link to your website and other websites, blog posts, PDF documents, photographs or videos for greater impact. By doing so, you direct the readers’ attention to more information about the topic of your expertise. If a picture is worth a thousand words, adding an image to a tweet greatly expands what you can share to beyond the 140-characters.
However, you can’t wake up one morning and tell yourself “I’ll start tweeting today.” You have to develop a plan and strategy about what you want to accomplish. Becoming a thought leader is a legitimate marketing goal for you as the proprietor. Making your company well known for its product or service is an equally legitimate marketing goal for your business. But as the business owner, you must remember not to overlook daily chores as you tweet.
You can’t build your business by keeping to yourself and you surely cannot have success on social media without virtually shaking hands. You have to get out of your niche and interact. You should tweet the same information several times a day with slight differences. You have to invite readers to join your conversation and you have to participate in conversations. You should also follow likeminded people, similar businesses and vendors, common industries, and supportive stakeholders, like their tweets and retweet their tweets. Their followers and readers may become your followers and readers. This builds your community and recognition in Twittersphere. If you don’t interact with the world, the world, your potential clients and prospective supporters will leave you by the side of the cyber-road.
As Bullas noted, social media managers “need to be like a juggler at a circus and keep a lot of balls up in the air and make them all land safely. It requires skillsets which means managing many moving parts. Technical, analytical, creative with a bit of project management thrown in.”
Because tweeting and retweeting are never ending, managing the space is almost a 24/7 job. There’s always someone awake in Twittersphere – nearby or far away. It means monitoring, managing, updating and being inspired by the clients, advocates and other sources and addressing the issues raised.
Among the skills needed to do the job are:
1. Strategy planning
2. Tactics and execution – when to tweet or retweet
3. Community creation and management
4. Create content
5. Understand how content works on a social web
6. Optimizing content and technology
7. Creative mindset
8. Writing skills in a limited word count
9. Be on top of the latest digital marketing trends – which venue to use
10. Analytical skills – how to read SEO
11. Leadership and communication skills – internally and externally
It’s a major commitment and investment on the part of business and NGO management that should not be underestimated.
How will you tweet?
Join the conversation in cyberspace about boosting your business and outreach by using Twitter and social media and let me know your achievements. If you have examples of how you tweeted to boost outreach, let me know about it and I’ll help you spread the word about your success.
I’d also like to invite you to visit my Thought Leadership website:
If you’re looking for advice on recruiting, company handbooks and other human resources topics, I’d like to suggest to you this interesting website:
Scroll down along the Boosting Your Outreach blogsite to read or reread older posts.
I’d like to direct your attention to this timely topic: Cyber
Resilience at Ramapo College, Ramapo, NJ. Wednesday, November 8. All Day.
Sponsored by NJ Small Business Administration of Bergen County and Small
Business Administration. Admission Free. Registration Required. www.sbdcbergen.com
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