How-Tu Tuesday: Managing Social Media With A Small Team

Whatever the size of your company, even if you are one-man band, social media should be a core element of your marketing strategy, and it’s often the case that businesses with small teams should be using social media over and above other marketing tools, due to the lower costs involved and how easily accessible the various social channels are.

For those with a limited number of staff members, or if you struggle to find the right person to manage the company’s social channels, check out our top tips below…

1. Create a Manageable Strategy

Before posting anything, create a strategy. This will help manage every aspect of your social media activity and allow it to run efficiently and effectively. The main areas to include are:

• Responsibilities – who is the person/s responsible for creating and posting content and analysing results?
• Hours spent – how much of each day or week should be dedicated to social media? This provides an understanding of the time it will take to create and post content and how it relates to the time given to other tasks in the company e.g. is too much or too little time being given?
• Design – how should your profiles be branded? This varies depending on the platform and size of artwork required.
• Content – what do you want to communicate to your customers?
• Target Audience – who are you talking to and what platforms are the best to reach out to them on?
• Analytics – how are you going to find out what works and what doesn’t?

2. Use The Free Tools

Although there are many paid-for platforms for both scheduling posts and analysing results, most of the social media platforms provide their own free scheduling and monitoring tools. In addition, some of the platforms which charge for their services, such as Hootsuite, also offer a free version which would work well for a small team who don’t require a high number of people to have access to it.

3. Manage and Plan

As mentioned above, its important to make the most of the free tools available to you as these will also help you plan your content and manage your time on social media more efficiently. Using a monthly calendar to plan content will help you relate your postings to both events happening within your company and events happening outwith your company, such as seasonal holidays. As opposed to having to post every day, planning content ahead of time, allows you to schedule your posts at one time via platforms like Hootsuite, TweetDeck or Hubspot. You can then use the time you save to interact and respond to followers who engage with your content.

4. Invest In Your Social Media

For some people, social media is something that comes naturally, and for others it takes a bit more time to understand the terms, the type of content that should be created and the importance of using hashtags, encouraging engagement with followers and using the various interaction buttons like retweeting, liking and sharing etc. So for those who struggle or feel like they would benefit from a little guidance, a training course or single social media session could be the way forward.

This is of course something offered by our very own Tuminds team – click here to find out more.

5. Share Success With The Team

When your team is so small, it can often be very beneficial for everyone to have an understanding of the role social media plays within the business and even possibly contribute in some way. The more people who get involved, the higher your engagement levels will be.

An effective way to get others interested in the social aspect of the business is to make your progress on the various channels easily sharable with the rest of the team. Depending on the monitoring tools you decide to use, you could create an internal monthly email that details interaction, the number of followers and the most popular posts, and this will illustrate to them the importance of social media within your wider marketing strategy.