You Should NOT Hire a Social Media Manager
Is social media important for your business? Probably, since you’re reading this.
Frankly, regular social media doesn’t have the ROI necessary to make having a social media manager worth the money. That money could be better spent.
Having customer support run through social makes sense.
Your posts will not be seen by enough people (watch that for proof) to be worth the salary of the social media manager.
You can get a growth team to create the outbound (posts), while the customer support team handles inbound messages on social. Customer support people are less expensive and can accomplish similar tasks.
Hiring a social media manager costs about $4000/month. As a business owner, you have costs on top of that. The salary is just 68% of the cost though, so it really costs you $5882/month.
Interestingly, that’s just a little more expensive than our eCommerce Growth plan.
In that growth plan, we implement social media efforts, but we also run email marketing, craft press releases, create a ton of content for SEO, manage social and search ads, as well as create contests and referral marketing campaigns to drive those sales!
Your business Facebook page is best used for link boosting (share your blogs) and customer support. Don’t spend too much time growing that Facebook audience.
Social Media can be easily outsourced
Social Media Management is not a full-time responsibility unless you have tens of thousands of followers who are messaging you regularly across multiple platforms. That is the goal, of course, but when you get there you can have customer support reps handle the inbox and a growth team (like us) handle the outbound social media.
With social media posting, you want someone who understands your brand and the overall vision, so it’s not really something you should outsource to a country that isn’t yours.
Social Media is not as hot as they say
It’s hard to cut through the noise on big platforms, which are the ones your social media managers will know how to use.
Sure, they can make posts and follow people… but in the hilarious words of Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder” – “a nutless monkey could do your job.”***
Focus on growth activities. As a standalone, social media management is not a growth activity.
Get more for your money
Social media management may or may not drive business. It should, but there’s a chance it won’t. Especially if you hire a social media manager that isn’t driven to make sales.
Social media is just one channel of the funnel. You can grow awareness and, with great CTAs, acquisition on the platforms.
If you use it as support, it could be a phenomenal tool for retention as you’ll be handling support publicly (just don’t screw up publicly).
Social media management is not as important as sales. Sales grow the business. Twitter followers do not.
That’s why you need someone wholistically invested in the business running the social media. And it should just be one aspect of their job, not their entire function in the company.
*** I’m aware that a monkey, nutless or otherwise, could not, in fact, do the job of a social media manager. However, AI could. And soon will. So, let’s just go ahead and get ahead of that curve.
