Hiring a Social Media Manager for your Small Business

Do you need a social media manager to help scale the business? If YES, here are 7 steps on how to hire social media manager and how much it cost to do it.

If there is anything a small business can never get enough of, it is publicity. Publicity is the fuel that drives a small or startup business to its desired destination. A business that finds it difficult to sell itself would never make headway in the business world, no matter how hard it tries. Publicity if done the right way brings in the much needed customers and cash, both of which a small business cannot do without.

What’s the Benefit of Having a Social Media Presence?

In today’s world, one of the most popular places that have been helping businesses sell themselves is the social media. In fact, any business that has not token it sales to the social media is missing a very integral part of its clients, and may never be able to operate at its full potential.

Having a strong social media presence is very essential. The kind of presence we are referring to is more than just clicks, likes, and Facebook reactions. It is a presence that can create brand awareness, drive product sales, and even attract bigger brands to your stable.

The only problem with creating a social media presence for your small business is that becoming a social media sensation is a long and constant journey. It would take you a lot of time, creativity and sometimes finances, and yet if you do not do it right, you may achieve nothing.

According to the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 64 per cent of marketing teams report spending six or more hours each week on social media. For a small business owner who is already spending most of their time on business development and operations, finding spare hours to strategize and dedicate to social media can be difficult.

Most of the bigger companies and brands have found ways around this problem as they delegate their social media activity to specialist agencies, leaving them free to concentrate on the important business of growing their bottom line. But outsourcing social media is never the exclusivity of established brands as many small businesses are outsourcing social media these days and hiring other experts to manage their whole process.

Your small business can enjoy the same benefits, albeit on a smaller scale. Using an external agency or freelance marketing consultant as your social media manager will free up crucial hours every week. You can use this time to focus on the operational side of growing your business, since your fledgling business should never be neglected even for a second.

Hiring a freelance social media professional is an excellent way to kick-start a new product or almost any business venture that can benefit from additional exposure. The average social media campaign will run for 1-6 months and can include everything from marketing strategy to writing services, graphic design, social sharing, social ads, client outreach and attracting large influencers.

Now that you know that your small business also needs a social media manager, it’s time to talk about hiring the person that is going to manage it for your business. Here are a few things you need to know when intending to hire a social media manager.

Why Hire a Social Media Marketing Expert

A social media manager brings a lot of benefits to your small business, and some of these benefits include;

• Stay abreast of latest trends: The online world is very fluid as trends change with the speed of lightening. A savvy and dedicated social media manager actively keeps up with the latest happenings in the social media world. He or she is then able to identify the best channels for your business and makes smart decisions that will ultimately bring in more prospects.
• Keep your brand on the right track: Your business’ message might easily go out inconsistently when more than one person handles your social media profile. Hiring a social media marketer would make sure that your brand’s voice is at a par with your branding strategy and marketing campaigns.
• Have a beneficial strategy: Having a strategy is what will ensure that you would launch a successful social media campaign. Find a social media manager who will set out a strategy that is directed towards achieving success in the online market. With a great social media strategy in place, you can make sure all your efforts are at work and not in vain.
• To have a business representative online: A social media virtual assistant is your main representative when it comes to the social community. He or she reaches out with your clients/customers on a regular basis through posts, comments, and direct messages. It is vital to hire a social manager solely for this purpose instead of delegating the responsibilities across your current team because this activity can make or break your business’s online reputation.
• To produce brilliant write-ups to further your business strategy: Copy-writing is paramount to your social brand content. This particular skill for online marketing is effective for driving engagement and clicks. Social media managers and assistants can craft a good copy, whether it be writing up your social media profile description, or posting status updates and tweets.

Hire a Social Media Manager that would be responsible for creating amazing content for your business. Because let’s face it, in the overly populated social media market place, you need creative content to stand out from the crowd.

• To attract new customers: Almost everyday, people shop online and discover new businesses and products that they are interested in. As you promote your business online, more people will come in contact with your brand, and the perception your promotions carry will determine if they convert into paying customers.

This is where hiring social media specialist comes in handy. With a strong knowledge of marketing, he or she can create online advertisements, promotions, campaigns and other postings to help build brand awareness attract new customers.

• To build a stronger community engagement: A great social media consultant can facilitate engagement for people to understand more about your product/company. He or she can ask the right questions and answer inquiries promptly through comments and messages. This helps create a loyal following and trust so that the target audience is more likely to interact and potentially buy from you.
• To boost SEO and increase conversion: A social media manager understands search engines so he or she can create content that is optimized to your niche. This marketing campaign can turn leads to actual conversions for the business.
• The free up enough time for you: Truth be told, social media management takes time. While you want to give your business a strong social media presence, you also want to ensure that the current way you gain more customers remain intact, the way you build relationships with your clients remain unchanged, and no matter how much time or effort is dedicated to your social media plan, your business revenues continue to grow steadily.

To achieve this, the best course of action is to hire a social media manager. An experienced one will prepare a good social media strategy for you, execute as stated in the plan, and in the process, bring far more value than you presumed to your business, while you focus on building every other part of the business.

Assigning your team to contribute posts without a defined schedule or strategy can be a waste of time and won’t even help your marketing efforts. This is primarily the social media manager’s job—dedicated to lead the digital marketing side of your business.

• Handle post automation/scheduling: Do you know that there is a better time of day to post particular content online? You may not know, but they do. A social media manager uses a variety of tools and techniques to create and schedule posts accordingly. These methods can save time and money in the process. Grow your business socially without having to put your entire effort and attention to it.
• Boost Your Brand Image: Reputable companies like Amazon and the likes have built a strong reputation on social media. Many other small businesses are not left out, as more people have to come to know and trust them because of their influence on social media.

By hiring an experienced social media manager to manage your company’s online presence, your brand would be promoted in front of the right audience and depending on how experienced the social media manager is, your brand’s image could have a tremendous boost and someday become a household name.

• Communicate Better With Your Customers: Social media gives you the power to talk to your customers in their comfort zone. It could be through direct messaging with customers that have inquiries or complaints, making frequent timeline posts that send a valuable message, or even communicating with them on Instant Messengers like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and more.

People don’t just want to be listened to, but also want to know their opinions matter. When you talk to your customers and make them feel heard, welcome, and important, you’d slowly cause your customers to build an emotional connection with your brand, and in the process, turn them into loyalists.

• Increase your sales: In the hands of a social media manager, your online sales could record amazing revenue growth, remain the same, or fall apart. Proper social media marketing can be an invaluable tool for small business owners to use to grow their income without spending so much on advertisement and more. To achieve this, handing the task over to a brilliant social media manager is key to hitting your targets and transforming your business as you know it.
• Best your competition: Your social media plan if executed well can kill the sleeping competition. With so many businesses having a lackadaisical attitude towards taking their businesses online and building a strong social media strategy that will facilitate their growth, you can get far ahead of them by using an experienced social media manager to steal a lot of their customers before they realize they’ve fallen behind in the market.

How to Hire a Social Media Manager for your Small Business and How Much It Cost

1. Consider the kinds of social media accounts you need

A lot of work is involved when setting up social media channels, including the creation of artwork, branding, taglines and initial content. It is also more difficult to start generating followers as an unknown brand, so initial costs are usually higher in the beginning as the social media management freelancer will need to run both paid and organic campaigns to grow your following.

Here is where you should consider whether it would be to your own advantage to buy already established social media accounts, or if you should create yours from the scratch. Established accounts are more affordable since they usually require a quick graphical refresh before moving straight to content. Consider your business needs before making a decision.

2. The number of accounts you need

While almost all businesses tend to gravitate towards Facebook and Twitter, certain industries actually see a greater benefit from channels like Pinterest, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Depending on your business, you have to which social media platforms would best suit your needs.

If you are a designer, you may have to go for instagram and Pinterest. Targeting each additional channel can raise the expected costs by $300-$2,000 per month for small businesses, and up to $5,000 per channel for enterprise ventures. If you are commercial enterprise, sites like Amazon and review websites like Google+ and Yelp would be of great help to you.

3. If you would be on the lookout for influencers

One of the bigger benefits of social media marketing is the ability to attract influencers and complementary businesses to your channel. If they share you with their own followers, it can lead to tens of thousands of potential consumers discovering your brand. With larger budgets, social media managers can actively engage influencers to create these types of opportunities.

4. Keep your customer service in mind

When a customer is unhappy about a product or service, they often turn to social media to vent their frustrations, and this can impact negatively on a business. Companies are realizing that they can turn these bad experiences into positive outcomes, but only if they are actively monitoring the most common review sites and reaching out to customers.

Social media pros use specialized tools to track company mentions in real time. Your responsiveness to customer inquiries will depend on your overall budget and the time frames that are negotiated before the project begins, so you have to keep customer service in mind while hiring.

5. The way you want your social media content to be created

Popular social channels are always being fed with fresh streams of content, blogging along with photos, videos, GIFs and other multimedia are a necessity in order to keep followers engaged. Depending on your business, you may have to include content from third party news outlets as well to ensure a steady stream of content.

The type of content created and its frequency will be decided by an editorial calendar, which may be run by a social media contractor or the client.

For those with limited budgets, it’s likely that staff members will do most of the writing after a few quick training courses. Larger companies may have multiple bloggers generating content independently. You may not have to go this way, but constant updating of related content would serve your purposes for the time being.

When to Know It’s Time to Hire a Social Media Manager

A small business that just kicks off today may not need to further reduce its meager finances by hiring a social media manager. This is because at this point you can still manage your social media sites and the engagements that come with it because it would be quite minimal, and easy for your to handle.

But there would come to a point where you are busy with other things and may not have that kind of time. And again, your social medial followership may have grown to alarming proportions that you cannot just do it alone and still run your business.

The question now is when to ascertain that it is time to hire a social media manager.

• Consider volume: there would come a time in your businesses social media life when you are unable to accommodate the leads coming in through your social channels. If you start noticing this, then it’s probably time to bring someone on board to handle this aspect for you.
• Piling up requests: If your social media drive is yielding some levels of success, you would see it by the number of requests you get on a daily basis. If you’re getting tons of customer service requests that are going unanswered because you do not have the time to follow up on all of them, then you need to take action. Watching your social accounts gather cobwebs spells bad news for your brand.

There’s no denying that wrangling your social presence can be time-consuming. That’s exactly why understanding how to find a social media manager now will save you major time and stress down the road.

Freelancer or Full Timers

Depending on your business, the issue is going to arise of whether to bring someone on full-time or to go the freelance route.

It is a fact that full-timers are going to require a larger financial commitment, but you would also get the benefit of working with someone who forms a relationship with your brand and is not sharing his or her attention with another brand or business.

Full-time employees obviously have more stakes in not only their performance for the sake of their jobs, but there are also in-tune with your business goals. The only issue with hiring a full time social media manager is that they come with more financial involvement as you have to pay their salary and provide them tools to work with.

Freelancers on the other hand represent a lower price tag and higher flexibility for brands, but they come with their own unique set of challenges because they usually may not work with you alone, and they can work from a remote location.

For starters, finding a freelancer with the skill set that you can trust with confidential company information like your account access is probably going to require some research; and no matter how you do your research, you may still end up with an undesirable element.

If you go the freelancer route, it’s extremely important that you use a third-party tool like Sprout, so you can give them access to the accounts they need without giving out passwords.

5 Steps to Hiring a Social Media Manager for your Business

Social media managers need to have a varied blend of skills, including management experience, be content and design savvy, have strategic and analytical thinking skills and marketing expertise. The following are ways you can hire an efficient social media manager;

1. Outline their job description

The first thing to do when intending to hire a social media manager is to outline what you expect them to do for you. Outlining these roles would help you know the kind of person you should be looking out for.

The role of social media managers typically include; implementing a company’s social media strategy; reporting on the effectiveness of social media efforts using analytics tools; drumming up inbound traffic for your business; assisting with launching a new product; working to build company audiences; helping with recruiting, etc.

2. Look out for relevant skills

There are skills that are necessary for a social media manager to have in order for him or her to be efficient. The ideal candidate should have at least three years experience in social media marketing and management, coupled with a degree in marketing, communications, business or a related field. Additionally, the ideal candidate should be able to interpret data and adjust strategies accordingly to give your business a competitive edge.

You should also be on the lookout for candidates that are comfortable with using industry standard tools like Google Analytics, Klear, Buffer and Hootsuite. Experience in search engine optimization (SEO) and familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite is equally a big plus.

While all these business skills are great, but since a social media manager would be working with people, so you must ensure that he or she has people qualities like maturity, patience, an understanding of the brand voice, and an interest in solving customer problems.

3. Schedule an interview

Once you have shortlisted candidates that meet the above qualities, it is now time to interview them on a one-on-one basis to see if what is proposed on paper is what they truly have, and equally to see if they are the right fit for your business.

During the interview, be sure to ask candidates about their past social media experience, and how they tend to structure and implement a strategy and then measure the results. Ask for specific examples of past campaigns that were successful, and even the ones that were not successful and ask why.

Use different types of question types to draw out different kinds of information. For example, hypothetical questions may help you predict how a candidate will react in certain situations; while off-the-wall questions will help you get to know their personality.

While the questions are going on, you should gauge whether the candidate has a passion for the job or if he or she is just looking for a paycheck. The excitement they exude can tell you how they feel about it.

4. Carry out private research

Before you hire a candidate and entrust him or her with managing your social media handles, you have to carry out some private research on them. Take a look at their personal social media profiles to ensure that they are reasonable and not vulgar.

Notice follower counts, plus what they have been sharing and liking. If people have interacted with their shares, or asked them questions, and if they have responded. Look for candidates who utilize a range of networks and whose profiles are impressive, current and well maintained.

There is actually a reliable way to measure a candidate’s online presence, and that is by the use of an app called Klout. Klout can predict a person’s online influence and activity. It will rate them on a scale from 1 to 100. On average, a person who uses more than one platform will have a score around 40. Once that score reaches higher than 50, you can bet that the person has extensive experience with social media.

5. Hire

If you have satisfied all these requirements and you feel that the candidate you have finally settled on is the right one for you, you can go ahead and offer them the job. Before you do that however, you have to ensure that they accept your pay scale as this is where disagreements tend to come in during the hiring process. Ensure that you offer a fair wage so you don’t break any rules, and also ensure that you do not give a candidate room to manipulate you based on pay.

How Much Should You Pay your Social Media Manager?

Because of the relatively recent role of the social media manager, the ideal wage to pay your social medial manager is still a bit fuzzy. Though it is generally accepted to pay someone with more experience on the job more than a fresh starter, but this may not hold much water as far as social media marketing is concerned.

While it may be hard to find an acceptable benchmark, but we can supply you with some average salary ranges for social media managers so you at least have some ideas of what to pay your managers:

The midpoint salary for a social media manager in the united states is ,000, according to The Creative Group 2018 Salary Guide. Candidates with extensive skills and experience, or those working for large agencies in urban areas, may earn up to $99,250.

According to act-on.com, hiring a social media manager on a part-time basis can cost from $50 to $200 per hour. If you go the agency route, things can get even more expensive. It is estimated that it’s common for agencies to charge $1,000-$2,500 per month to manage just a Twitter account. That doesn’t include setup either – that would be even more expensive.

To have a PR agency manage your Facebook page, expect to spend $2,500 to $5,000 per month. Some agencies will charge as much as $9,000 per month.

If you want a comprehensive social media strategy planned out and then executed, you’ll pay anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 per month for just two channels (like Facebook and Twitter). An average cost would be $4,000–7,000 per month. With prices like that, you may be better off just hiring someone to help you full-time

Keep in mind that these are national averages. You might pay more or less depending on location and the individual. But it seems the $45,000-60,000 range seems to be about average. As you are a small business that is just starting out on the game, you should endavour to make bargains that would not put financial strain on your business.

Duties of a Social Media Manager

Social media is more than just posting a few messages to Twitter and Facebook when you happen to feel like it. Here are a few tasks an external social media manager could take care of above and beyond simply posting messages:

• Social media strategy – including posting frequency, types of content, keyword research, influencer research etc;
• Set-up and branding of new or existing social profiles – providing consistent branding and voice across all your channels;
• Sharing and commenting on third-party posts that are relevant to your brand;
• Engaging in conversations with other users – be it existing or potential customers;
• Social media monitoring – keeping an eye out for mentions of your company and interacting with those posts;
• Social customer service – responding to questions or complaints from users;
• Following relevant industry influencers or potential business customers/clients;
• Content marketing – helping to develop your own original images, memes, articles, blogs and resources that can be promoted on social media;
• Newsletter marketing – a round-up of your company news and most popular social posts and interactions.

A good freelancer or agency should learn your industry or niche and help manage your social and online marketing channels. This will help you attract the right kind of followers that could be potential customers or partners for your business.

Conclusion

As we have seen, growing your social media influence doesn’t have to be a solo effort. You can hire help at any stage of the process even if you’re just starting out. If you want to have a strong social presence but either don’t have the time or interest or just don’t know how it works, you can hire a social media manager to provide you with a consistent, quality service.

From there, you can develop a new stream of business income by marketing to your social audience and getting them to join your email list.

The secret to social media success is consistency. It won’t do you any good to pop online with branded messages and inspiration only to go virtually missing just a few weeks after. Being consistent and continuing to show up and provide value will help grow your social platform.