There’s a really big difference between what needs to be done and what you need someone to do. And there’s few roles more evident for that than small/solo social media teams.

When you’re talking about the broad range of responsibilities you need someone to do, it’s critical to remember that one person is not a team. And employing someone does not automatically create capability.

Social media roles fall into a broad range of skills and individuals will vary across them all. Finding someone who can meet your goals isn’t about all of the things *they* can do. But the things they can make happen. 

Skill vs capability 

Content production – This covers a range of skills from writing copy, creating carousels, curating images and videos, or even shooting and editing photos and videos. In some cases it might involve someone being on camera themselves.

Do you need someone who can do these things, or make sure they’re done right?
Existing marketing or comms teams can write social copy and produce images and video alongside other work. Your social person can edit, approve, manage tone, provide templates, image sizes etc. There are stock image libraries, freelance video editors, and on camera talent available for hire.

Channel management – This covers everything from literally publishing and scheduling content, through to permissions and access, the setup of pages, ‘About Us’ and FAQs. And then details like keeping links, bios, locations, hours etc current, moderation tools, tagging and classifying content, new platform features, enabling and disabling capability, and right through to management of inboxes and workflow.
There’s a lot of work hidden in here, and it’s easy for it to fall over. And often this work needs specific domain knowledge.

Making sure pages have up to date details prevents CS issues and customer complaints, platform capability is as much about profile pictures being seen and keeping the page secure. Who can get into your pages and how? Community management looks after the people moving through, but channel management is running the train station itself.

Community management/Customer care – This covers everything from writing engaging copy intended to bring discussion, answering questions publicly and privately, managing that information into and out of the business, connecting with people, building relationships, identifying influence and solving problems.

Do you need someone who can do all of these things? Or can they handle the conversations themselves and leverage existing CS teams, change management etc.
Who really needs to own issues, and be held accountable for it? And who makes sure they’re actually held to account?

Paid Advertising – This covers everything from creation of images and copy optimised for conversion, technology integration into websites and stores, actual campaign management, budgets, optimisation and sales.

Do you need someone who can decide on messaging, or manage the process end to end? Collaborative approaches with existing teams can optimise sales funnels, and simplify the load sitting on a single pair of shoulders. Even looking at the difference between always on campaigns with fixed budgets and regular reviews vs campaign based activity. Frequently, paid campaign activities can exist across social networks and web based traffic, which may not fall under same experts umbrella.

Reporting and Analytics – This covers everything from regular reporting on volumes, conversations and traffic, to detailed analysis of issues, customer care conversations, CSAT and recommendation data from customers through to broader business performance based on customer perspective.

Being clear on your expectations here, and the time needed to develop it. If you’re needing ongoing reporting, what will it inform within the business? And what cadence do you need? Are you willing to really allocate the time for it, and then act on the data?
Over reporting is as much of a waste as under reporting is, even if for different reasons.

Reputation and Risk management – This covers everything from the things happening on your own platforms (both owned and controlled) and out to those you don’t like third party forums, review sites, and broader media mentions, social media groups.

Do you need someone to manage these? Have you considered them at all? How many places do you push out into and how often? What kind of engagement and brand protection are you willing to do, pay and wait for?

Risk management isn’t only happening outside the business though, are you hiring someone with enough seniority or authority to push back where needed? Every decision ultimately needs an owner, even in social media. And if that authority sits outside the social media team, where does that line end? Who pushes back on risky plans? Who is accountable for them if your social team advises against something and it blows up?

It’s about knowing what you need, and who needs to be doing it.

The biggest takeaway is to simply keep in mind the things you really need done, and where you need them to be actually completed. The more skills you need someone to have, the less experienced they can be in all of them. Which in many cases won’t be too much of an issue. You may only need basic editing skills vs a Hollywood level editor.

But it’s also about workload. A one-person team can produce amazing work. But if they’re shooting, editing, writing copy, planning a campaign and managing that process into the business you can’t have short turnaround times to get things moving. There’s only so many hours to complete the work one by one.

My advice; focus on the things most important to you and your business. And bring on people with those skills. For the rest? Just make sure they know how to find the expertise as needed.
I don’t need to know how to make a crème brulee, only how to find a place with that real crunch.