Social Media: Sharing the Workload

All too often, social media is assigned to the marketing person or, in the absence of one, anyone who seems even remotely familiar with Facebook or Twitter. What many companies seem to forget (or maybe just ignore) is that ‘the chosen’ person usually already has a to-do list as long as their arm so even trying to absorb a single hour of social media into each working day is going to be a challenge. Therefore, sharing the workload across several people is often a good approach.

Share by activity

One way of doing this is by breaking down all the individual activities and assigning them to different people. For example:

• A handful of people to write a blog each per week – maybe on rotation
• One person to seek out valuable content to re-tweet/share, say 3-4 per day
• One person to post more ‘personal’ content ie. what’s happening in the office, say twice a day
• One person to contribute to each LinkedIn group that you’re a member of
• One person responsible for saying ‘thank you’ for re-tweets/shares and engaging in conversation

Share by platform

Or another way of doing it is to assign each platform to a different person so that they have full ownership of that particular site. This can be very motivating for employees as they then become experts in their platform and gain a really good understanding as to what resonates with the audience, what doesn’t, what creates the highest levels of engagement etc.

However you do it, just make sure that the chosen people are able to allocate enough time for social media each day. It needs to become part of their routine else it’s likely to keep getting put to the bottom of the to-do list.

Announce your ‘Team Social’

Once you’ve got your team members assigned, officially announce your ‘Team Social’ to the rest of the company and schedule in a regular Team Social Catch-Up so that you can all keep abreast of what others in the team are doing, what’s working etc. This will give the whole team a real sense of identity and show the rest of the company that you really mean business and have a game plan. This can also have a positive effect on getting others involved which means you can then share the workload even further.

Remember…not everyone’s a writer

Whilst not everyone in your company is necessarily going to be a good writer, there are other ways that they can get involved. Some people are just great at thinking up ideas/topics to write about so try and develop a system for collecting these ideas. It can be very rewarding for these people to see their ideas come to life. Other employees might get involved by promoting the content across their own social media networks which is great for increasing your content reach.

Feedback on your successes

Don’t forget to frequently let the rest of the company know about your social media wins. Whether that’s your audience growth, engagement levels, lead generation or sales, the more they see that social media can actually drive tangible results to your business, the more people are likely to want to get involved.

What about you?

How do you share the social media workload in your company? We’d love to hear any other ideas that you have!