Connor Brooke3 Reasons You Must Own Your Social Media Strategy
Does Hire-a-College-Intern to handle social media sound familiar? This approach tosocial media marketing can be alluring especially if you still haven’t ventured onto Facebook and one of your firm’s senior executives will owe you a favor for hiring his Facebook-savvy spawn as your social media intern.
This seat of your pants approach to social media marketing is based on the following three perceived benefits.
- College interns understand how to use Facebook. No surprise there. Facebook started as a student network. Students have grown up interacting and building relationships on Facebook and, as a result, most have more than the average 130 to 150 Facebook connections. While these students have a group of peers with whom they interact, they’re most likely not your target market. Based on my teaching experience, these exchanges don’t translate to an ability to implement social media marketing plans. Further, it doesn’t imply interns understand how to use other social media platforms your business may need.
- College interns are free. Depending on your business’ location and employment laws, interns generally aren’t free unless they’re receiving school credit for their work in which case they need to do one significant project. However, interns require strong oversight since they may never have worked in a business environment.
- College interns provide a quick solution. While getting a student to watch your firm’s social media assets can be relatively easy to implement, the problem is he may not understand the rest of your business or how your internal systems work. As a result, they don’t present your business effectively and their social media efforts can’t be integrated into your overall plan.
3 Reasons a college student can’t handle your social media marketing
Here are three reasons, fundamental to your long-term business objectives, why a college intern can’t handle your firm’s social media marketing strategy.
- Social media marketing requires understanding your products and brand(s). One of the major reasons to use social media marketing is to build brand awareness and provide product support. A college student doesn’t understand your brands’ strengths and benefits. Further, on social media platforms, brands require more than just a logo. Branding is ingrained into how your organization and products are represented. Your brand’s face and voice are conveyed through social media marketing.
- Social media marketing requires marketing knowledge and experience. Social media marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It must be aligned with your corporate goals and integrated into your overall marketing plans. To this end, social media marketing strategies, strong content and supporting marketing are needed.
- Social media marketing needs a company representative. From a corporate perspective, it’s important to think about the image you want to present on social media networks. Your firm’s representative requires a deep knowledge of your organization and its history since social media marketing requires a level of transparency and being active in a public arena. Therefore, consider who’s best fit to represent and engage with your prospects and customers.
The bottom line is you need to have experienced employees who can respond to whatever the social media ecosystem throws at them. They must know your brand, marketing and your organization to best leverage your social media presence.
Is there anything else you’d add to this list and why?
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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I’ll be happy when this wave is over. It’s pretty obvious age isn’t relevant in this discussion. What’s relevant is digital marketing knowledge and experience, both of which do not come by default with age (the assumption many people seem to be making lately in this “debate”).
The three reasons for not hiring college interns aren’t limited at all to college interns. They apply equally to people of all ages and levels of education. Obviously, someone who doesn’t understand your products/brand and doesn’t have any digital marketing knowledge or experience shouldn’t be managing your social media.
They shouldn’t be managing anything in your company actually.
But that has nothing to do with age or being a college student. That’s elementary logic. This wave of articles lately should have all been entitled: “Someone Who Doesn’t Know Anything About Marketing or Your Company Shouldn’t Be Your Social Media Manager.”
No offense, but duh! “/
Thank you for this article! I agree putting it in the hands of anyone outside the company, edpecially a college intern is a mistake. It’s hiding behind someone else –and it’s hiding your head in the sand. I’m finding those in upper levels of the manufacturer I work for visibly cringe when “Social marketing” is mentioned…as if they feel it’s beneath them, or if they don’t acknowledge it, maybe it’ll go away. (Some have not tried to relate, or learn about it).
I would add to your list that (depending on the product/service) relating to the potential customer is so key…if you have someone in their early 20’s be the voice of a company whose “fans” & potential buyers are at least 10-20 years older..big mistake. If true fans and users of our product are the ones “following” us, they will sniff out someone BS’ing immediately and assume the company/brand doesn’t know it’s own product,customer or industry…
Age is important but the irony is that you mention a 40 year old. 40 year olds are the perfect age to have rode the digital media wave. If the 40 year old was there in the mid 90’s until now and stepped in when BBC, IRC, webcasting, Friendster, MySpace, Youtube, Twitter, etc then you have a gem that a “user” could never imagine. Experience is invaluable in this scenario.
I have seen this time and again from various of my clients…they think that because they don’t fully understand Facebook and because there is no cost to participate, that they don’t have to invest in a knowledgeable marketer for the job. Thanks for clarifying these issues Heidi.
It is so irresponsible to keep flooding the channels with this ageist nonsense. The conversation is hot right now not because it creates a brouhaha based around insults and generational nepotism. It’s sad that bloggers attempting to ride the hot topic wave don’t realize how much they are hurting young job seekers who might just be as well qualified as not-so-young job seekers. The same is true in reverse. But when my networks are flooded with – YOUNG PEOPLE CAN’T DO X – which is what has been happening, I know that people who are hiring can see it, too. Why have that thought planted latent-seeded in their heads? People with experience, as a result of being in the workforce longer, have something to fall back on – that experience. Young folks might be well-qualified to take one of these jobs but they are fighting a prejudice… and again, these problems go both ways. Wish we could just stick to skills/attributes without having to favor an age-range.