Social Media Is A Team Effort [Chart]

15 Roles You Need Represented On Your Social Media Team

Team workSocial media marketing has progressed past the “all we need is a college student who knows Facebook” phase regardless of whether your business is B2C, B2B, Not-For-Profit (aka NFP) or solopreneur. For many businesses this often translates to hiring a social media or community manger. While this is an important milestone, as a marketer, you need more because social media is a team effort. 

Social Media Team - Heidi Cohen

Here are twelve roles you should include in your cross organizational social media team.

  1. Senior management (aka the C-suite). While not all senior executives are active on social media platforms, research shows that customers want to see them there. This doesn’t mean that your C-level management should spend their time tweeting. Rather, think strategically about how best to show they’re involved. Take a cue from the President and Vice President of the U.S. – test short videos and Google hangouts. If these powerful men think social media’s worth their time so should your key management.
  2. Social media. By definition, these employees regardless of their titles are the face of your organization. But understand that doesn’t excuse the rest of your organization from contributing to your social media presence.
  3. Marketing (including branding, search optimization and advertising). As the head of customer acquisition and retention, your marketing department should should own the strategic direction for your related social media and content strategy as well as your branding, search and advertising in order to make the connection between your social media presence and your lead generation and/or sales process. This is particularly important since the Zero Moment of Truth happens before your business realizes that your prospect is in market for your offering. It’s also important for ensuring your marketing efforts support your 360° social media brand.
  4. PR (including MarCom). In many organizations, PR works closely with marketing and social media. It’s also responsible for crisis and realtime communications that occur on social media, especially Twitter which is often the place people turn for trending topics and breaking news.
  5. Customer service. As your organization’s front line for dealing with prospects, customers and the public, a member of your customer service organization is critical to your social media efforts. They can provide insights into what your target market is talking about across channels. While it’s useful to have your customer service team engaged on social media, understand that it can involve different skills than dealing with chat, email and phone.
  6. Sales (and/or retail employees). These employees are also your organization’s ears. They engage with your prospects and customers on a regular basis. In that role, they hear the good, the bad and the ugly about your firm and your competitors. Additionally, it’s important to provide them with the social media tools to support them in terms of prospecting, customer interaction and feedback.
  7. Creative (art direction and copywriting). Since social media is fueled by content, you need text as well as graphics and photographs to support your social media efforts. For some organizations, this may be outsourced to agencies or experts.
  8. Technology. Since most social media occurs on technology platforms, it’s useful to have support from your technology team to simplify the process. You need a variety of programming skills such as HTML, CSS and knowledge of your internal systems and databases to ensure that you can track prospects in your pipeline. For some organizations this may include a separate website and/or mobile team.
  9. Video, audio and graphic production. Depending on the social media platforms you use, you may need additional resources to create and/or edit your content. Bear in mind that you need a mix of different content formats.
  10. Analytics. To ensure that you’re able to measure the impact of your social media marketing, you need to have your analytics team capturing, tracking and assessing your results. Depending on your organization, they may be part of your social media, marketing, finance and/or analytics team.
  11. Human resources. HR isn’t always on everyone’s list when it comes to social media but there are two good reasons to include them. First, if social media isn’t included in employees’ job description and/or objectives, it won’t get done. This is particularly important if you’re seeking to engage any or all of your employees.  Secondly, human resources should leverage social media for employee acquisition and vetting. LinkedIn is a key social media platform for the Inc 500 who use it for hiring.
  12. Legal. While social media often moves faster than most lawyers would like, it’s important to have one or more resources you can consult to fast track social media related issues. Additionally, they’re important for helping to draft social media guidelines and contracts involving employees, agencies and talent to ensure that your organization retains essential content rights. Lastly, they’re useful when you encounter intellectual property issues related to social media and associated content.

Here are three other non-employee representatives you can’t overlook when it comes to corporate social media.

  1. Customers. Leverage social media to interact with your prospects, customers and fans. Synapse research on Facebook has shown that the biggest social media impact occurs post-purchase when customers tell others about you. Of course, this translates to ensuring that you’re providing great value and delighting your customers. This is particularly important when you’ve disappointed prospects and customers since they have a bigger platform to let others know.
  2. Influencers. These are the high profile experts in your category or niche. Where possible work with them but do so in a transparent way. You don’t want anyone to be blatantly promotional or a shill since that doesn’t work on social media.
  3. The Public. Whether they or those they influence buy from you or not, you must consider how your social media interactions appear. To this end, you should be monitoring what’s said on social media to ensure that your interactions are understood in the way you intended.

From an organizational perspective, your social media team should provide a well-rounded view of your company to the public. In the process, you should work to provide answers to their questions and respond quickly to any issues.

Who else would you recommend being on your corporate social media team? Should every employee participate on social media or not?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen


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