A few months ago, a friend of mine was telling me he wanted to start posting content on his social media profiles for his business. He didn’t ask for my help and he didn’t ask for any advice, he just said he was doing it and that it was an easy thing to do.
Last week, I had dinner with this same friend. He was complaining about how hard it is to come up with something interesting enough to post. He told two other friends that posting on social media was very difficult and that it wasn’t as easy as he thought.
He was saying he was out of ideas and that he needed help. One of the other friends looked at me and said something like “That is what you do, right?”. This guy looks at me and says “I thought you were in Marketing”. You can imagine what my answer was.
So, yes, you can do it yourself, but you need to have a plan. You need to have a strategy. If you don’t you will run out of ideas very soon. Like my friend did. This is a very time-consuming activity. The best thing you can do is to have somebody exclusively dedicated to this.
I know there are a lot of companies that hire a graphic designer and let them take care of their website, their e-mail campaigns, their newsletter, their logo design, their photos and videos, AND their social media content. That is the worst thing you can do, as we have discussed in previous posts.
There is a reason why Community Managers and Social Media Managers were created. If you can’t hire a Digital Marketing team, at least have someone that will handle exclusively your social media content.
Many think that it is “only posting on Facebook”, and “how hard can it be?”. Well, it is a lot harder than you think and no, it is not only posting on Facebook. People don’t like to hear this, but that’s the truth. You need at least one professional Community Manager.
In previous posts, we have already talked about the importance of a content plan. You need a tone, a style, topics for your posts, a graphic concept, and a few other things. But the most important thing is that you need someone with the necessary criteria about what to post and how to post it.
This person needs to have some experience and some knowledge about what they are doing because they will be making a lot of fast decisions and calls about your published content and about how to respond to the interactions they will be having with the people that follow your company on social media.
Taking some online courses is ok, but that’s not everything. Those courses will teach you the technical aspects of being a Community Manager, but they will not give you the creativity or the experience needed to perform this job, as my friend has found out.
There is only one thing that can give you all the skills that you need to become great at this job, and that is doing it. Make a plan, stick to it, and in a few months, you will be looking at the results of your hard work. Be ready, so that when mistakes happen, you know what to do.
Old Dog Digital 