Making Social Media Work for You

The following is an edited extract from Organic Social Media.

I’ve worked with a lot of social media managers who felt obligated or pressured to take on every new platform that starts to gain a little momentum. Unless you have a large social media team—which includes content creators for all the different mediums—you can’t keep starting new channels without adding resources. It’s unrealistic to maintain and it’s not good practice.

It always feels like there’s a lot of excitement and eagerness to start a new social media channel for every new campaign, program, event and so on, but not enough thought going into where the content will come from, who will manage the channel and how it will be maintained. While it’s easy and usually free to start a new account on a social media platform, quality content and maintenance of an account do not come easy or free. Many social media managers I know are one-person social media teams. Others are communications strategists or administrative assistants whose responsibilities happen to include managing social channels. As more and more social media platforms pop up, many organizations are not adding resources or people to help with the ever-expanding responsibilities of managing social media, which leads to an impractical expectation that a lone social media manager will manage all the current channels while taking on new ones. This increases the duties of a lone social media person exponentially, causing problems like mental health concerns, burnout and lower quality of content.

There are five questions that should be answered before starting a new channel:

1. Are you creating the account because it’s the hot, trendy new platform, or could it actually help to support your organization’s mission and achieve your goals? (If the answer is that we want to follow the crowd onto the hot, trendy new platform, the conversation should stop here, with the understanding you can always re-assess the platform in the future if your organization’s needs, goals or strategies change)
2. Do you have the resources to manage the channel? (If the answer is no, then a discussion about where to obtain the necessary resources to properly run a new social media channel should be had first before moving on)
3. Is your audience currently on the platform?
4. Do you have a content management process for the new channel?
5. How will you track your progress?

Be an active observer first

I understand the need to open an account early in a new up-and-coming platform in order to grab your organization’s name in the space before anyone else does but doing that doesn’t mean you need to start using the channel immediately—or ever. It’s perfectly okay to state in the bio or any other appropriate section that it is currently not an active channel. This is a common practice for organizations and is not looked upon negatively. Being an early adopter of a new platform as a brand might get you followers at first, but it won’t grow your audience unless you regularly share meaningful content that continues to provide relevant and useful information. People will decide whether or not to follow an account based on what was posted yesterday, not the date the account was started. I’ve found it makes no difference whether you’re an early adopter or a late adopter, just as long as you’re providing value.

It pays to be an active observer of a new platform before jumping on to it as a brand, seeing how the platform develops, who adopts it and how it’s used. It may be that the platform is not a good current fit for your organization or your industry and there is no sense in investing a lot of resources, or the few resources you have, to manage it.

When watching a platform develop, you might find that the audiences it attracts aren’t the audiences you’re seeking to reach. Generally, people won’t adopt a new platform just to follow a brand account, particularly if they’re already following that brand on another platform and the brand’s practice is to just share the same content on all of their social media channels. It’s better for a brand to get on a platform knowing an audience you want to target is active in the space. Are your peers or competitors on it, and if so, are they using the app successfully? Are they growing audiences? Is there a compelling reason to make it a part of your strategy? If you do find that it’s a current fit, learn how the community likes to utilize the application and how those who have found success in the space are engaging their audiences. Think through the content you might want to share on the platform instead of just posting the same content you’re using for your other channels, and in the same way. This is why it’s beneficial to observe first because you can learn how to optimize your content for the new channel.

Social media should not fall under “other duties as assigned”

The landscape of social media constantly changes, along with the functionality of individual platforms. Early in my social media career Google+, Periscope and Storify were all part of a social media manager’s vernacular. And as I look at the myriad of new platforms that have come out in the past year I wonder if I’ll be creating brand accounts for any of them in the near future. Change is omnipresent in the industry—social media managers are always learning how to use new platforms, digital tools and technologies. Social media is no longer a hobby or a pastime, it’s a growing industry. It has become much more sophisticated and complex as time passes and technology advances. Maintaining social media channels for an organization requires, at the very least, a full-time position dedicated to the organization’s social media presence. I would even argue one full-time position is not enough, and that it takes a team. It certainly should not fall onto the list of duties of a junior member of a department as an afterthought, not if you want to see results.

In its simplest form, maintaining social media channels involves posting content regularly, which requires having content to post and publishing the content to the platforms. This is time consuming. If your organization is adopting social media as a vital part of its communications or marketing strategy it necessitates much more work—creating content, posting content, engaging with content, listening and monitoring channels, keeping up with new functions and practices—and that’s for existing platforms. Although there are new platforms that are constantly being introduced, there are still only nine hours in a workday. No one should expect one person to maintain the organization’s social media presence. An organization’s social media presence is its public presence and brand voice; there is no un-coupling the organization’s social media identity from the brand identity. If you wouldn’t leave it up to a junior staff member to manage the organization’s public-facing content and communications, you should probably rethink it if you have a junior staff member managing all the social media channels in addition to the regular duties they were hired to do. In addition to all the social media-related responsibilities, those who are full-time social media managers often serve as their own audio-visual team and information technology support.

In the past few years, crisis communication has also become a large portion of a social media manager’s daily responsibilities and it continues to grow. This fundamentally shifts how the position functions and serves the organization. Social media managers are the first people to receive feedback and criticism from their audience, as well as often being the first to hear of breaking events because they are on the front line of public-facing communications. Therefore, a key part of a social media manager’s job is to relay information and make recommendations to senior officials on the back of this. They should also be one of the first to know when decisions are made in regard to the situation. If there’s anything 2020 taught us, it’s that no two crises are the same. While we were becoming better equipped to respond to each new dilemma, there was no creating a template. Every crisis has its own challenges and constraints. For example, sometimes a crisis would break on a weekend or a holiday, sometimes it would be cut short by an even bigger story, sometimes it was strictly internal and at other times a global calamity. And while our responsibilities grew and our work hours extended, you wouldn’t know it by reading our job descriptions.

We need to start thinking about social media as a team sport. Each position on the team would serve a unique and necessary function, and there should be bench players available to complete the team. To be successful, it requires the full-time attention of a number of people.