Join us for the next installment of the Social Media series. Today, Social Media 401: Influencer Strategies for Business on Straight Shot marketing podcast.

Straight Shot

Social Media 401: Influencer Strategies for Business

Join us for the next installment of the Social Media series. Today, Social Media 401: Influencer Strategies for Business on Straight Shot marketing podcast.  

Hello, and welcome to why on earth would I need a social media manager? I don't want to hire anyone. I could do it myself. My nephew is 17 and they could do it for me for free that's. Right today, we are stamping out ignorance answering questions and laying down some truth as to why you might want to consider hiring a social media manage for your business on today's straight shot, marketing podcast, welcome back everyone. My name is not Steve Harvey, and I'm not the guy from tool time or Richard Dawson. And this is not family feud. My name is Jennifer Bennett and you are watching or listening to straight shot marketing podcast. The show where we discuss how marketing impacts everyday life. And today we are continuing our social media series with an episode on why you may want to consider hiring a social media manager and what they do and why you might need them. So, Zachary, let's discuss. Let's start with the first big question. Why uh? Number one reason why you'd want to consider hiring a social media manager to work for your business is because of how important social media has become inside modern business marketing strategies. Right. 73% of all business marketers agree. Oh, this feels like a crest commercial. Doesn't it. 73% of all business marketers agree that social media is effective. If not very effective. For their business, 90.4% of all millennials, 77.5% of gen X-ers and 48.2% of baby boomers are on social media. That's the vast majority of all of us users spend an average of three hours a day. Using social media and more than half of them are using it to research products and find out more about companies about businesses like yours. 71% of customers have had a positive experience with a brand using social media and will therefore. Talk about it. It isn't that what all of us want is to start that word of mouth chain. Right? So we want people to talk about you. I could go on and on and on with statistics, but bottom line. And I've said this before, social media is now very important. For business, social media is where under-priced attention is available today. Now the early adoption period is now over. It is now known that social media is effective, that it works and majority adoption has already started. So it won't be long before it won't be considered under-priced anymore. So once the big corporations make the move from majority TV and radio to majority social media, it's going to be a lot more difficult for smaller businesses to buy social media media. So because of the law of supply and demand, there's going to be less available. And then when that happens, the cost goes up. Absolutely. And that is why it is the number one. Now the second reason will be because it will save you time. If you hire someone, time is a very valuable resource. As a business owner, you need to spend your own time in areas that will benefit your business the most. Right? So what's going to benefit you the most. Where are the areas that you have the most skill and the most expertise so that you're making wise use of this valuable resource? We call time. Now we, aren't going to get into a bunch of details today, but over the next few episodes in this series, we're going to be discussing all of the nuts and bolts of how businesses participate in social media. And when we do that, you will be able to see just how much is involved in proper participation, proper marketing of your business through social media. It takes a lot of time, time that you should be spending on whatever your main craft or product or service actually is. The world of social media has grown so large. There are so many different platforms that each have their own nuances, their own algorithms, their own audiences and their own rules and the separate ways that you have to work with them. It can be quite a lot. Well, we will definitely dive into that generally later today. And in detail in those few future future episodes, you keep talking about, I like, I like how we have episodes that always elude to other episodes. We'll use the forward or backwards. Thanks. There is more than just volume of work. Yeah. There's also a lot of expertise that's necessary to know all of that. You know, there are many, many platforms and you have to know about each one. And there's also the fact that the details are constantly changing all the time. Social media and technology are in tandem and as everybody knows. Technology changes constantly. So keeping up with that, keeping up with all of it in your mind while doing all of this work, it, it can be a lot. It's a full-time job by itself. Particularly when you start to add in the creative aspects of the job. And the impact of social media, that importance brings up another thing. It's serious business. Now it's called big tech and those rules aren't jokes to them compliance. Yes, that's important too, because you can get banned or shadow banned, not only on the platforms themselves, but by. The audiences as well. And in a lot of ways, that's actually worse. If you don't comply with the unspoken rules of social media, people will turn their back on you. And that is not good. The court of public opinion can be difficult to come back from somewhat unforgiving if you do it wrong, but great for your business, if you do it right. So let's talk more about what it is that social media managers do. We know it's important. We know that it will save time. We know there's expertise and compliance involved, but what physically are they doing? You know, what tasks fall underneath the job description? If you are hiring someone what's involved in that recruitment ad, obviously, as you've already stated, it's a position where you have to know all the platforms. All the traditions and all of the rules associated with all of them. And then you are also responsible to manage how to use those platforms, to showcase the company's brand strategically. Then you have to create the content that's going to fit those strategies. And then of course, place that content strategically on the correct platforms, according to those rules, according to that purpose, and you have to monitor how people are interacting with your brand and then participate that is engaged with them whenever possible. Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about the whole campaign, strategic elements of the job. Um, well it, it is strategy, but it's sub strategies. So now we get ... Well, let's look at it this way. Okay. The brand is the boss. Once the brand has been developed, it is King. What the brand says goes then underneath that is the campaign concept that's being used to showcase the brand across all different mediums, social media print. Video, whatever, right then at the medium level. Right. And medium meaning media and not like large, small, medium that don't have t-shirts. Yeah. So at the medium level, you have to determine how that brand and that overall campaign concept are going to be used in your assigned media, in this case. Social media. If you're the head of, you know, the magazine department, it would be magazines if you're head of the radio department, whatever, but this media. Is social media. So how are you going to use that brand in that overall concept in your media? Okay. Then it gets broken down onto the platform level. So not only social media, but specifically on Facebook, you know, on LinkedIn, there are things that will work on Facebook. They won't work on LinkedIn. These are the social media managers, strategic responsibilities. Okay. So there are tiers. Yes, exactly. Media manager. Isn't responsible for the brand or the overall strategy, but they are responsible for how those elements will play out on their mediums on social media. For example, well, things like hashtag contest, right? Tik-tok challenges, uh, Instagram, Instagram, carousels, YouTube videos, micro blogs that go on LinkedIn. There's very specific things for each one of these platforms. Well, the social media manager's job is "okay, how do I take the overall brand and, you know, use these tools, these methods", right. In, in, in, on social media. So it's not just, you know, that you're doing it, that you're posting on social media. It's how are you going to do it? Because how was very platform, specific things you can do on Twitter? You can't do on Facebook? Or other things you can do on Facebook, you came to on Twitter, but you, you get my point. Things are very site specific, then there's the paid media side of things. So that's, you know, advertising social media offers some of the most targetable advertising opportunities that we've ever seen. So they will plan and then manage digital ad campaigns on social media from month to month, everything from content to placement to the reporting. So. What about Kim Kardashians or Kylie or any of her other umpteen sisters? Um, it is a good question. So what you're talking about is influencers. So the social media manager will research which influencers on the internet would be best to promote their brand. And in what ways. Would be best to promote their brand within the platform that the influencer has. So these influencers, regardless of, of what. Technical platform they're on, they have their own plan, the platform of what their show is about how their, their show is done, that sort of thing. So the social media manager has to know that as well, so that they can determine, okay, this would be a good fit for this, you know, celebrities, this influencer, cause they're not all celebrities. This is what their platform is. It will do well for that and on this medium as well. And then there are several different ways that you can use influencers for your brand. Regardless of what platform they're on as well. So not only does he have to know all of them, but then he has to pitch the ideas internally and then also to the client, then it has to go and negotiate with the influencer themselves. Or in some cases like Kim Kardashians, she has a manager. So he would negotiate with their manager on all of the duties that they would do in the fees that they would have and that sort of thing, and then manage seeing it through. To fruition. So now we'll, we'll go over influencers soon in, in this series. So influencers are coming. We will be under the influence. That all sounds like a lot of work. That's why it's not a side gig. It's its own position. It's its own job, a job that didn't exist 15 years ago, but it is an important one in this day and age now. So how do our business owners, you know, get this person? I mean, how do they fill this role? Well, they have two options, really. Okay. But in both of them, you need to find someone that has the expertise has the time, has the skills. To do the work, just like any other position, which is an important thing for business owners to remember for entrepreneurs to remember, as you grow, don't try to do everything yourself. You cannot do your own job and all of the other jobs in your business at the same time, at least you can't do it for long or maintain any sort of quality while you're doing it. You cannot serve two masters. Not and be an expert at whatever the job is. If you own your business, your expertise is in whatever that businesses, right? So if you're a restaurant, maybe you make the world's best chili or, you know, the best barbecue sauce, or, you know, if you make widgets, then you should spend your time studying and making the world's best widget. Right. He makes sense. So you don't know all of the intricacies of marketing or accounting or distribution or whatever of their sub-sect of business you might be concerned with. You should focus on making the best, whatever that you can. So in finding that expertise in those skills, you have two choices. One hire someone to join your team as an employee full time. Or hire someone to join your team as an agency, right? Because you shouldn't be doing it right. You should be doing research, studying, perfecting, whatever your core business is. That's just good advice for any business, regardless of whatever industry you're going to be in. Now, the benefits to using an agency or at least. In our case, we've likely helped you to develop your brand. We've built your website. We, you know, know your customer extremely well. We did your cloud we know your brand, we know the campaign and how it should be executed extremely well. Right. And that helps with consistency. I think, across all platforms as well, I would imagine. Yes. And because we do it for multiple clients. All the time we have more experience and more efficiency than a lot of other people would. So it's, for example, if you hire one person they may have built, uh, worked with, um, you know, one company before they have experienced with that one company. I have done this for multiple companies. You have done this for multiple companies because it's. It's the way that our job works. Right? So therefore we're going to have more varied experience than somebody else does. Now that equates to being less hours for the client and therefore less costs for the business. Yeah. Hiring someone full-time can involve a larger salary benefits, packages, overhead and all that. Yeah. Um, but that's not always a deciding factor, you know, if you're. Coca-Cola there is more than enough work to justify the salary, the hours, et cetera. So hiring an agency for this type of work isn't going to be for everyone, but for a lot of companies, it's going to be the best thing that you can do. It's that expertise and skill, dedication to the craft. That's going to matter the most more than anything. Okay. So we've had some good discussion here today, but before I ask you to sum it all up for us, I want to remind everyone to like, and subscribe no matter where you are, it really helps us out a lot. If you have thoughts or just, you know, want to say hi, please leave a comment to let us know. Thank you. Now Zachary let's sum up our discussion here today. Give it to us straight. Okay. So the questions for today were why hire a social media manager. Okay. And number one was social media and the internet have become extremely important to our society into business communications. Because of that. So one follows the other number two, two was that it takes a lot of time to do it time that you don't need to be spending directly yourself. You need to be concentrating on your core business. This job that we're talking about, social media management is going to take up a lot of time. Okay. Number three, even if you had the time, you don't necessarily have the experience, the expertise in the skills that are going to be necessary to do a good job at it. Now, hiring someone that has those elements is just, it's just good business. And then number four, there are rules. So you need someone that knows both the stated. And the unsaid rules to the game so that you can remain compliant both in public opinion. And then of course, technically with the platform as well. So that's all for the first question. Second question was, what does a social media manager actually do? Now, overall, he drills down the overall brand and campaign strategies to how they're going to be used across all of the social media platforms. Okay. He also monitors the brand across all social media participates and engages with others on the internet and the digital stratosphere. Right on behalf of the brand, across all social media, he handles all social media content from planning to creation, to curation, uh, all the way through distribution. Right. Which means actually putting it out there on the interwebs. He also handles all aspects of social media advertising. (5) They also handle all influencer relations. Right? So dealing with influencers, either on a local level, on a celebrity level, this person would be the one that handles that for you. You would say you as the CEO would go, Hey, Bob. I want Kim Kardashians and he would go, yes, sir. Let me see what I can do. And then they would try to find how to get in touch with Kim Kardashian just for an example. So he manages social media for the company, all of it. Hence the job title, social media manager. Now, lastly, our last question we discussed was how to get a social media manager. You need to hire someone with experience in the skills that were mentioned here today. Now whether you do that by partnering with a marketing agency that does this on a regular basis, or whether you're going to hire someone that this is their career, they are a social manager by trade. Either one of those options is. Perfectly viable for, for this. Um, that's how you would go about getting those people really it's just like recruiting any other job. You just have to ensure that they have the experience in the skills and the experiences, the hard part, because this is fairly new, you know, social media has been around, you know, 15 years, if that. So, you know, finding somebody that has that, that experience and that expertise and got into it early. Is really going to be the trick. You know, I got into social media because I was already working in marketing at the very onset of when it first happened and people were going, I don't want to be on social media. I don't want anybody knowing what I'm doing. So there we have it. Do you think that you need to hire a social media manager for your business? Are you currently handling all of the aspects we mentioned today? We'll go more in depth into each of these aspects in the next few episodes. Foundational participation, strategic engagement, advertising influencers, et cetera. Yeah. So lots of good stuff coming up, subscribe to our YouTube channel or our podcast on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts until then. Thank you for listening. If you found this podcast informative, we hope you'll pass a longer. Our web address, straight shot.net to your friends, colleagues, and business associates. And please leave us a positive review on our facebook page at facebook.com.

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