Growing Social: How to Scale Your Social Media Marketing Team

As your company’s social media or community manager, you’ve worked hard to grow your brand’s social media presence. You’ve fostered relationships with your customers and have grown your communities—so much so that it might be time to call in for reinforcements. If you think it’s time to expand your company’s social media efforts, here’s your step-by-step guide to scale your social media team.

Step 1: Develop a strategy for each social platform

Take what you’ve learned about your audience on each social network and use that knowledge to shape your strategy. Each of your communities have most likely already defined how they want to interact with you and more importantly, how they want you to interact with them.

Do more people reach out with questions on Twitter than other networks? If you’re seeing a lot of direct requests for help, your Twitter strategy should involve a customer service plan. If you’re having good luck with promotions on Instagram, you’re going to want marketing and creative support. Think about what has been working best on each network so you can establish the type of support you’ll need on each one. Then, define and formalize your overall strategy and individual network strategies.

Step 2: Determine the roles you’ll need to execute your strategy

Now that you have defined your strategy, you can determine the roles you’ll need filled and allocate accordingly. It’s important to take the time to define each role clearly so your social networks are beneficial to your company and to your communities.

Make a list of all services or support you’ll need—customer service, project management, content creation, etc.—and then think about the existing departments that have people who would be the best fit for those roles. When setting up your team, make sure to consider what permissions you would like to give each member. Depending on their role and level of responsibility, you can adjust their permissions so that they have the right level of access on each network.

Step 3: Set expectations

Now that you have a team in place you’ll want to set expectations. Do you expect five Facebook posts a day from Marketing? Do you want one Vine video a week from your Product Development team? Create a content calendar detailing your plans for each network to share with the entire team so everyone knows what is expected of them and when.

You should also detail your policies for engagement and tone so your brand voice and procedures are consistent across all social channels. Put these expectations for social media use—tone of voice, response time expectations, etc.—in writing as social media policy. Your policy will serve as a guide for your team members new to social and will set the tone for employees and your communities.

Step 4: Connect your team

Now that you have your content calendar and your social media policy in place you’ll need to implement a plan for uniting your team. Consider holding regular meetings to discuss strategy. If your social team consists of employees in different offices you can set up a conference call or use Google hangouts to connect your teammates in a video call (for free!).

Not only will you need to meet face-to-face to discuss your overall plan, but you’ll also need a collaborative tool to keep track of assigned tasks and projects. Social media tools like uberVU can be really beneficial in organizing your social team. In uberVU, you can create accounts for your entire team and set different levels of permissions for each team member. You can also organize and assign tasks so nothing slips through the cracks.

Assign tasks to your team members directly in uberVU

Step 5: Report your progress

In addition to keeping everyone connected you should also keep everyone informed on how your social is performing. Keep track of the important numbers—the growth of your communities, sentiment levels, what networks are performing best, etc.—and share your reports so the entire team can measure (and hopefully celebrate) their efforts. Regular reporting will not only help you track your success and tweak your strategies, but it can motivate your team by showing them real results.

uberVU can also help with reporting. Our quick and easy reporting feature can help you present the social media metrics that matter most to your company and automatically deliver them to your team.

Now you’re a team!

There you have it—your step-by-step guide to growing your social media team. Don’t fret if there are hiccups along the way as your team members learns their new social roles. Remain focused on your strategies and be there to guide them along the way. And remember to keep it fun! Social media is an exciting avenue for your company to expand its presence. Celebrate victories and set new goals with your team to keep them engaged and driven.

Want to see how uberVU can help you connect and manage your social media team? Find out how we can help you organize your workload and report your progress in a free custom demo.