Social Media Manager Small Business

Do you need a social media manager to help you scale your business?  here are 7 steps to hire a social media manager and how much it costs to do so.

If there’s one thing a small business will never tire of, it’s advertising. Advertising is the fuel that drives a small business or start-up to the desired destination. A company that struggles to sell itself will never succeed in business, no matter how hard it tries. Public advertising, when done right, brings in customers and cash that small businesses cannot live without.

What’s the point of being on social media?

In today’s world, social media is one of the most popular places to help businesses market themselves. In fact, any business that doesn’t aim to sell on social media is missing an integral part of its customers and may never perform to its full potential.

Having a strong social media presence is essential. The type of presence we’re talking about isn’t just about clicks, likes, and Facebook reactions. It’s a presence that can build 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, continuous journey. It would take a lot of your time, creativity, and sometimes finances, but if you don’t do it right, you won’t get anywhere.

According to a 2021 report on the social media marketing industry, 64% of marketing teams report spending six or more hours per week on social media. For a small business owner who already devotes most of his or her time to developing and operating a business, finding the spare time to strategize and focus on social media can be difficult.

Most large companies and brands have found ways to get around this problem by delegating their social media activities to specialist agencies, giving them the opportunity to focus on the important business of growing profits. But social media outsourcing is never just for established brands, as many companies are currently outsourcing social media and hiring other experts to handle their entire process.

Your small business can experience the same benefits, but on a smaller scale. Bringing in an outside agency or freelance marketing consultant as the social media manager frees up critical hours each week. You can use this time to focus on the operational side of your business, as your start-up business should never be overlooked for a second.

Hiring a freelance social media professional is a great way to start a new product or just about any business venture that can benefit from additional exposure. An average social media campaign will last 1 to 6 months and can include everything from marketing strategy to copywriting services, graphic design, social media, social media advertising, customer acquisition. and the big influencers.

Now that you know your small business needs a social media manager as well, it’s time to talk about hiring someone to manage it for your business. Here are a few things you should know when considering hiring a social media manager.

Why Hire a Social Media Marketing Expert

A social media manager brings many benefits to your small business, and some of them include;

• Stay on top of the latest trends: The  online world is very fluid as trends change at breakneck speed. An experienced and dedicated social media manager actively follows the latest developments in the world of social media. He or she will then be able to identify the best channels for your business and make smart decisions that will ultimately bring more leads.
• Keep your brand on track:  the message of your business can easily collapse when your profile  network  share is managed by several people. By hiring a social media marketer, you will ensure that your brand aligns with the voice of your branding strategy and marketing campaigns.
• Develop a Profitable Strategy:  Having a strategy is what will ensure you launch a successful social media campaign. Find a social media manager who will outline a strategy for success in the online market. With a great social media strategy, you can make sure that all of your efforts are working, and not in vain.
• To have an online sales representative: The  virtual social media assistant is your primary spokesperson when it comes to the social community, he communicates regularly with your clients / customers through messages, comments and feedback. direct messages. It is imperative to hire a social manager just for this purpose, rather than delegating responsibilities to your entire current team, as this activity can create or undermine your company’s online reputation.
• To create brilliant articles to promote your business strategy:  Copywriting is paramount for your social brand content. This particular skill for online marketing is effective in attracting attention and clicks. Social media managers and assistants can create good copy, whether it’s posting your profile on a social network or posting status updates and tweets.

Hire a social media manager who will be responsible for creating amazing content for your business. Because let’s face it, in a crowded social media marketplace, you need creative content to stand out.

• To attract new customers:  People shop online almost every day and find new businesses and products that interest them. As your online business grows, more and more people will come into contact with your brand and the perception of your promotions will determine whether or not they turn into paying customers.

This is where hiring a social media professional comes in. With in-depth knowledge of marketing, he or she can create online advertisements, promotions, campaigns, and other posts that will help strengthen brand awareness and attracting new customers.

• To increase community engagement:  A great social media consultant can help people learn more about your product / business. He or she can ask the right questions and respond quickly with comments and messages. It helps build loyalty and retention of your target audience so that your target audience is more likely to interact and potentially buy from you.
• To Boost SEO and Boost Conversions: A  social media manager understands search engines so he or she can create content optimized for your niche. This marketing campaign can lead to real business transformation.
• You will have a lot of free time:  it is true that managing social media takes time. While you want your business to have an active social media presence, you also want the current way of attracting more customers to stay the same, the way you build relationships with your customers to stay the same, and whatever. the time or effort spent. your social media plan, your business income continues to grow steadily.

The best way to achieve this is to hire a social media manager. An experienced developer will prepare a good social media strategy for you, execute as stated in the plan and thus bring much more value than you anticipated for your business you are focusing on building any other part of the business .>

Assigning your team to post without a specific timeline or strategy can be a waste of time and won’t even help your marketing efforts. This is primarily the job of a social media manager, designed to lead the digital marketing of your business.

• Working with post-automation / scheduling:  do you know when is the best time of day to publish certain 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 putting all your effort and attention into it.
• Boost Your Branding:  Reputable companies like Amazon and others have built solid reputations on social media, and many other small businesses haven’t been left out as more and more people need to know and tell them trust for their influence on social networks.

By hiring an experienced social media manager to manage your company’s online presence, your brand will be promoted to the right audience and based on the experience of the social media manager, your branding. can get a huge boost and one day become a household name.

• Connect better with your customers:  Social media allows you to connect with your customers in their comfort zone. It can be direct messaging with customers who have questions or complaints, frequent messages that send valuable message, or even chat with them on instant messengers like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.

• Boost your sales  . In the hands of a social media manager, your online sales can show incredible revenue growth, stay the same, or fall apart. Good social media marketing can be an invaluable tool for small business owners to increase their income without spending so much on advertising and more. To do this, entrusting the task to a brilliant social media manager is essential to achieving your goals and transformation. your business as you know it.
• Better competition:  your social networks If the plan is executed well, it can kill a sleeping competitor. Since many businesses have the wrong attitudes on how to connect their businesses to the network and build a solid social media strategy that will fuel their growth, you can get ahead of them by using an experienced social media manager to steal a lot. of your customers before. that they will understand that they were lagging behind in the market.

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

1. Consider Which Social Media Accounts You Need

There is a lot of work involved in setting up social media channels, including creating covers, branding, slogans, and original content. It’s also harder to start generating followers as an unknown brand, so start-up costs are usually higher at the start as a social media freelance writer will need to run both paid and organic campaigns to increase the number of users. your subscribers.

This is where you need to determine if it is profitable for you to buy already created social media accounts or to create your own from scratch. The accounts created are more accessible because they generally require a quick graphical update before directly accessing the content. Consider the needs of your business before making a decision.

2. The number of accounts you need

While almost all businesses tend to look to Facebook and Twitter, in some industries channels like Pinterest, LinkedIn, or YouTube are gaining a lot. Depending on your business, you need to choose the social media platforms that best suit your needs.

If you are a designer, you may need to go for Instagram and Pinterest. Targeting each additional channel can increase planned costs by $ 300 to $ 2,000 per month for small businesses and up to $ 5,000 per channel for businesses. If you are a business, sites like Amazon and reviews of sites like Google+ and Yelp will be of great help.

3. If you are looking for influencers

One of the main benefits of social media marketing is the ability to attract influential and complementary businesses to your channel. If they share their followers with you, it could get tens of thousands of potential consumers to know about your brand. With big budgets, social media managers can actively engage influencers to create these opportunities.

4. Don’t forget your customer service

When a customer is unhappy with a product or service, they often turn to social media to express their frustration, which can negatively impact the business. Businesses understand that they can turn this bad experience into positive results, but only if they actively monitor popular payment sites and reach out to customers.

Social media professionals use specialized tools to track company mentions. time. Your responsiveness to customer requests will depend on your overall budget and the timeline agreed upon before the project starts, so you should keep customer service in mind when hiring.

5. A way to create content on social networks

Popular social channels are always supplied with new feeds of content, blogs and photos, videos, GIFs, and other media needed to keep followers engaged. Depending on your business, you might need to include content from third-party media to ensure a consistent content flow.

The type of content created and its frequency will be determined by the editorial schedule, which can be driven by an entrepreneur or social media client.

For those on a tight budget, it’s likely that employees will do most of the work after a few quick trainings. Large companies can have multiple bloggers generating content independently. You might not have to go this route, but keeping relevant content up to date for the time being will serve your goals.

When to know it’s time to hire a social media manager

Small businesses just starting out may not need to cut their meager finances further by hiring a social media manager. This is because at this point you can still manage your social media sites and related engagements as it will be quite minimal and straightforward for you.

But there will come a time when you will be busy with other things and you may not have time. And then again, your social social signatures may have reached alarming proportions that you cannot just do it alone and continue to run your business.

Now the question is, when is it time to hire a social media manager.

• Consider Reach  : There will come a point in your professional social media life when you may not be able to accommodate leads coming from your social channels. If you’re starting to notice it, it’s probably time to get someone to handle this aspect for you.
•  Cumulative Requests : If your social media accumulator gives certain levels of success, you will see it in the number of requests you receive daily, if you receive tons of customer service requests that go unanswered because you don’t have the time to satisfy them. everything, you have to act. Watching your social accounts harvest the web is bad news for your brand.

There’s no denying that tackling your social presence can be time consuming. That’s why figuring out how to find a social media manager now will save you time and stress down the road.

Freelance or full timer

Depending on your business, the question will be whether to hire someone full time or go for a freelance solution.

It’s a fact that employees will need more financial commitment, but you will also benefit from working with someone who builds a relationship with your brand and doesn’t share their attention with another brand or company.

Full-time employees are obviously more interested in not only doing what they do for their job, but also aligning with your business goals. The only problem with hiring a full-time social media manager is that they are more involved financially since you have to pay them a salary and provide them with the tools to work.

Freelancers, on the other hand, come at a lower cost and more flexibility for brands, but they face their own challenges as they can usually work outside of you, and they can work remotely. …

For starters, finding a freelance writer with a skill set you can trust sensitive company information, such as accessing your account, will likely require some research; and no matter how you do your research, you may always come across an unwanted item.

If you go the independent route, it is imperative that you use a third-party tool like Sprout so that you can give them access to the accounts they want without providing passwords.

5 steps to hire a social media manager for your business

Social media managers should have a diverse mix of skills, including management experience, content and design skills, strategic and analytical thinking skills, and marketing expertise. Here are the ways to hire an effective social media manager.

1. Provide a description of your work

The first thing to do when planning to hire a social media manager is to describe what you expect from them. Describing these roles will help you know who to look for.

The role of social media managers typically includes: implementing the company’s social media strategy; report on the effectiveness of social media efforts using analytical tools; increase inbound traffic for your business; help launching a new product; work to create the audience of a company; recruitment assistance, etc.

2. Look for relevant skills

There are skills required for a social media manager to be effective. The ideal candidate should have at least three years of experience in marketing and social media management, combined with a degree in marketing, communications, business or related fields. 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 looking for candidates who are comfortable with industry standard tools such as Google Analytics, Klear, Buffer, and Hootsuite. Experience in search engine optimization (SEO) and knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite is also a major asset

While all of these business skills are good, since a social media manager will be working with people, you need to make sure they have the qualities of maturity, patience, understanding of the brand’s voice, and passion for the brand. resolution of customer issues.

3. Plan your interview

Once you’ve listed the candidates who meet the above qualities, it’s time to interview them individually to see if they are actually offering what they really have on paper and if they are the right fit. For Your Business.

During the interview, be sure to ask candidates questions about their past experience with social media, as well as how they tend to structure and execute strategy and then measure results. Ask for specific examples of past successful campaigns and even unsuccessful ones, and ask why.

Use different types of question types to get different information. For example, hypothetical questions can help you predict how a candidate will react in certain situations; while the non-standard questions will help you discover their personality.

As the questions continue, you need to assess whether the candidate has a passion for the job or is just looking for a paycheck. The excitement they exude can tell you what they think about it.

4. Do private searches

Before hiring a candidate and handing them over to manage your social media pens, you should do some private research on them. Take a look at their personal profiles on social media to make sure they’re sensible and not vulgar.

Pay attention to the number of followers, as well as what they share and what they like. If people have interacted with their promotions or asked them questions and have they responded. Look for candidates who use different networks and whose profiles are impressive, relevant and well-maintained.

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

5. Hiring

If you have met all of these requirements and feel like you finally have a candidate, this is the right choice for you, you can go ahead and offer them a job. However, before doing this, you need to make sure that they accept your pay scale, as this is where disagreements tend to arise during the hiring process. Make sure you offer fair wages so you don’t break the rules and make sure you don’t give the candidate the opportunity to manipulate you on a pay basis.

How Much Should You Pay Your Social Media Manager?

Due to the relatively new role of a social media manager, the ideal salary for your social media manager is still a bit unclear. While it’s generally accepted to pay someone with more work experience than a newcomer, that can’t hold much water in social media marketing being all about.

While it can be hard to find this to be an acceptable benchmark, we can provide you with some average salary ranges for social media managers so that you at least get a feel for what you are doing. must pay your managers:

The median salary for a social media manager in the United States is $ 59,000, according to The Creative Group’s 2021 salary guidelines. Applicants with in-depth skills and experience, or working for large agencies in cities, can earn up to $ 99,250.

According to act-on.com, hiring a part-time social media manager can cost anywhere from $ 50 to $ 200 an hour. If you take the agency route, things can get even more expensive. It is estimated that agencies typically charge between $ 1,000 and $ 2,500 per month for running a single Twitter account. It doesn’t include personalization either – that would be even more expensive.

For a PR agency to manage your Facebook page, expect to spend between $ 2,500 and $ 5,000 per month. Some agencies charge up to $ 9,000 per month.

If you want to plan and implement a comprehensive social media strategy, you will pay between $ 3,000 and $ 20,000 per month for just two channels (like Facebook and Twitter). Average cost would be $ 4000-7000 per month, with prices like this you might be better off just hiring someone to help you full time

Please note that these are national averages. You can pay more or less depending on your location and your personality. But it seems that the range of $ 45,000 to $ 60,000 seems to be average. Since you are a small business that is just getting started, you should work hard to close a deal that doesn’t hurt your business financially.

Responsibilities of a social media manager

Social media isn’t just about posting a few posts to Twitter and Facebook whenever you want, here are a few tasks that an external social media manager can take care of in addition to posting:

• Social media strategy including frequency of post, types of content, keyword research, influencer research, etc. / li>
• Create and personalize new or existing social profiles – ensure consistent branding and voice communication across all your channels;
• Share and comment on third party publications related to your brand;
• Interaction with other users – whether existing or potential customers;
• Social media monitoring – tracking mentions of your business and interacting with those posts;
• Social customer service – respond to user questions or complaints;
• Tracking relevant industry influencers or potential business clients / clients;
• Content Marketing – helps develop your own original images, memes, articles, blogs, and resources that can be promoted on social media;
• Newsletter Marketing – A roundup of your business news and the most popular social posts and interactions.

A good freelance writer or agency should research your industry or niche and help you manage your social and online marketing channels. This will help you attract the right followers, who can be potential customers or partners for your business.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, building your influence on social media doesn’t have to be an individual effort. You can hire help at any point in the process, even if you are just starting out. If you want to have a strong social presence but 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 stable and quality service.

The secret to social media success is consistency. There is nothing good in surfing the internet with branded posts and inspiration, but just fading away in a matter of weeks. By being consistent and continuing to emerge and add value, you can grow your social platform.