There is no doubt that Social Media has become an integral part of doing business, both in terms of B2C and B2B. Though social media has been around for years, it is still an area in which companies struggle. It may seem easy just to hire a single (often young) person to head social media, one who is attached to his or her phone, but a social media strategy cannot depend upon one person alone.

Recent studies have shown that nearly 90% of marketers use social media, and consumers have grown to expect that a brand has a presence on at least one social media platform. And they can’t just have a simple presence, they need to engage, too. In HubSpot’s The Social Lifecycle: Consumer Insights to Improve Your Business, 40% of consumers reported that they expect to hear back from a company to which they complained within hours. Nearly a quarter, however, expected no response at all.

Scouting for Talent
Companies can and should do better with social media, and it doesn’t start with the strategy, it starts with the team and the capability of the people on it. A Harvard Business Review article written by Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution author Keith A. Quesenberry discussed the way social media teams should be structured, with the fundamental idea that social media should not be concentrated solely on the marketing team.

Instead, it should be a cross-functional team in which members from all departments work together to broadcast a strong, helpful brand voice across all channels.

Create comprehensive brand guidelines.
Chances are your brand already has a style guide for the company’s content, but it may not have been broadened to include social media. Because the format, content and tone of the many social media platforms vary, Twitter’s character limits or Vine’s video-only functionality, for example, it may have been left up to individuals to interpret these guidelines without direct oversight.

Each department has a social media representative.
This is at the core of the cross-functional social media team, as social media should not be handled by marketers alone. One of the most common examples is customer service; many consumers, instead of calling or emailing the company, will seek out the brand on social media in order to offer compliments or complaints. But the rest of the organization needs a voice, too: the sales team can reach out to potential customers, PR can handle any bad press and the marketers, of course, can push out content.

Without these representatives, all social media chatter must be filtered through a standalone social media team first,  a customer service complaint, for example, would first be read by whoever is in charge of monitoring social media. That person would send the complaint to the customer service team, which would take care of the complaint. It then has to travel back to the social media team and finally to the customer. Using this process lengthens the time it takes to get a problem solved. If customer service is already monitoring social media, they can placate angry customers much faster.

Develop a core social media team.
Of course, even with members of each department handling some aspect of social media, it is still imperative to have a dedicated team that handles the inner workings of social media. They’ll know what programs and apps to use, and have oversight of the general social media calendar to which departmental representative can contribute.

Don’t forget the KPIs.
Social media can be hard to measure, in part due to its real-time nature. According to Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, only 41% of marketers said that they were able to measure the return on investment for social media activities, a low number for such an important part of a business. Ensure that your team knows how to reach its goals by setting clear key performance indicators, there are dozens of metrics to follow, so it’s important to identify the goals of your business’s social media strategy in order to identify which KPIs are most important.

B2C brands, for example, have a different target audience and therefore different KPIs than a B2B brand. B2B brands may be less interested in tracking awareness and more interested in tracking lead generation, whereas awareness can mean a lot more to a consumer-facing brand.

Examine the current structure of your social media team to identify areas of improvement with an eye on cross-functionality. While this may mean some shuffling of responsibilities and addition or reduction to the team, a cross-functional social media team creates more streamlined social media management, allowing customers to engage more quickly and more personally with your brand.

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