Social Media: A Full Time Job

The good news about social media is that businesses are finally understanding that it needs to be a part of their marketing plans; the bad news is they aren’t allotting enough resources to make it really work for them.

If I had a dime for every poor PR person who I see straddled with the job of keeping the company Facebook and Twitter page updated, I’d be a rich woman.  I used to be the company PR person and I know how much that person is already carrying on their shoulders. Often their job entails: marketing, community relations, event planning, advertising, employee relations, government relations … oh, and that little thing called media relations, which by itself can be a full time job for a decent-sized company. Social media has now gotten thrown into the mix.

Now, if you had to pick an existing job to add social media duties to, PR is definitely the one I’d choose. Afterall, those people understand the company’s brand and message, and hopefully are skilled communicators and writers. But it’s matter of time – and social media takes a lot of it!

So what’s the solution? I whole-heartedly believe if companies truly want to do social media right (and to me, there’s no point in doing it any other way, because it just becomes a waste of money when the results don’t match expectations) they need to either 1) Add a new position whose job is entirely social media (and better yet, create a social media team) or 2) Hire a social media firm with proven success.

Adding it to a plate that is already full is a recipe for disaster and is the reason why social media sometimes gets a bad rap for its bottom-line results. You can’t expect that by posting to your Facebook page once a week, taking several days to respond questions and comments, and linking your Twitter account to Facebook, which always cuts off your posts because they’re too long for Twitter, to cut muster.

The only time it really works to add to an existing job is if you can find someone extremely into social media, who’s willing to be on at home, check in on their phone while out and generally be on all the time. That does happen occasionally, but you want to be sure that person doesn’t ignore their original job duties and that they don’t burn out.

The benefits of paying someone to do social media are:

1) That is their sole focus, so other duties aren’t neglected.  Social media is no longer a distraction.

2) They can keep accounts updated multiple times daily.

3) They can quickly respond to questions, comments and complaints.

4) They can proactively monitor tools like Twitter and Foursquare for mentions of the company and for prospective customers and interact with them, rather just be in reactionary mode.

5) They have time to brainstorm creative promotions.

6) They can stay up to date on the changes in social media (which goodness knows is a daily occurrence) and adapt campaigns accordingly.

7) They can put together a plan with goals, strategies and tactics.

They can compile and review metrics to see what’s working well and what isn’t.

What do you think? Should social media be added to an existing job? If so, who’s? If not, should you add a job? Hire a firm? In a future post, I’ll offer some tips on what to look for when hiring an outside company to manage your social media presence.