How to hire the right social media specialist
As social media needs increase, more businesses are looking to hire a dedicated individual to carry out the work. Gone are the days of assigning random employees to – on occasion – post an article on Facebook or send out a tweet. The time is now to get serious about creating a social media strategy and sticking with it.
Doing it without a designated employee who is held accountable for its execution just won’t cut it. Hiring someone just because they’re particularly active on their own personal accounts won’t cut it, either, however. If you’re going to pay someone to manage your social media accounts, they need to be qualified in a professional setting – not just in the casual world of Facebook and Twitter.
But therein lies the problem. Many hiring managers aren’t adept in the social media realm, which means they’re not 100 percent sure what makes for a good candidate.
To cut through the confusion, Inc. magazine provided a few common mistakes to avoid when hiring a social media manager.
1. Don’t conflate personal and professional. It’s not too far fetched to say that pretty much all young people have an easy time navigating a whole slew of social media platforms. Shoot, they could probably send out a tweet with their hands tied behind their backs.
But Inc. cautions hiring managers to not make the mistake of “confusing personal social media fluency with social media professionalism.” The editors there said that a “social media professional should be able to describe how they select, curate and/or create content; how, who and why they select followers and connections; and how they integrate social media initiatives with other media.”
2. Don’t take their word for it. Have them show you. During an interview, ask candidates to walk you through their social media accounts. Ask them to login and talk about their social media management tools of choice. They should be able to explain exactly why they’ve chosen the platforms that they use.
3. Don’t ignore inconsistencies. Compare a candidate’s activity on both their professional and their personal social media accounts. Inconsistencies and “breaches in social media etiquette or inappropriate conversations” should be considered a red flag. “If someone is going to represent your business online, that person should also be able to demonstrate restraint and decorum in their personal social media accounts as well,” Inc. stresses.
4. Don’t shun mistakes. A small typo here, a minor error there – these types of flub-ups are surprisingly not worthy of the chopping block. There’s a lot to do on social media on any given day, so don’t totally disregard an individual who has sent a misspelled word into the social sphere. Ask them what they learned from their mistake and how they will avoid similar mistakes in the future.
5. Don’t forget the point. “A social media professional should know how to track and translate their efforts into real world actions, how to measure the impact of these efforts, and how to refine initiatives based on performance,” the Inc. editors explain. Therefore, ask candidates to describe campaigns they’ve worked on in the past and to the degree in which they can describe what worked or what didn’t.
6. Don’t forget the strategy. To impart the public voice of your company, it’s essential to establish specific criteria and boundaries as opposed to giving your new social media hire free reign. To create a positive work environment, however, you may want to focus more on the “do X, Y or Z” instead of the “don’t do this, that or the other.”
7. Don’t turn your back. A brand-new hire doesn’t know the ins and outs of your business. Therefore, it’s up to you to lay out your expectations. “To achieve this, you’ll need to routinely monitor the activity your social media hire does on your company’s behalf and have regular communications with him or her,” explains William Ward, social media professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Although you might like to put your social media strategy on autopilot so to speak, oversight in every aspect of your company is necessary.
Above all else, once you’ve chosen a new hire, don’t expect him or her to perform miracles. Social media, just like any marketing initiative, takes time to come to fruition.
For any questions about how to set your social media efforts in motion, feel free to contact the team at NetSphere Strategies. We'd be happy to help.
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