How to Build an Accomplished Social Media Team for Your Agency

Have you ever thought about building a powerful social media team for your agency? Social media management for a business is quite different from running several accounts at a social media marketing agency.

The key to satisfying social media marketing clients at the agency level is by building effective strategies, implementing winning tactics, and analyzing content performance.

A social media team doesn’t mean it has to be a 10 to 20 people department, maybe, a two-person team might work for your 8-employee company. However, there are large organizations and agencies that have dozens of social media professionals working in their social media departments.

The whole idea is that your social media marketing team should be accomplished, competent, and smart to take your social media presence to the next level no matter the size of the team.

Let’s dive deep into some basics:

Why Do You Need a Social Media Team?

Before getting into the details of a step-by-step guide to building a useful and effective social media marketing team for an agency, it’s important to shed some light on the need to build this team. The essence of building a social media team is to ensure that your brand remains on top of its social media marketing game. Historically, it’s been seen that it becomes difficult for the founders to keep up with social media.

When it comes to social media marketing, there are several social media roles that the team must be aware of or know how to deal with the challenges.

If you’re wondering what to do with your team, read 10 Social Media Goals For Marketers [+Tips To Achieve Them]

6 Reasons Why You Need a Social Media Team

1. It creates and implements a social media marketing plan

It’s the beginning of the campaign where ideas are brainstormed, topics are finalized, copywriting is done, and creatives are made.

2. It manages social media content publishing, scheduling, and analyzing

One of the roles of a social media team is to manage the content publishing, scheduling, and analyzing. Since social media content is crucial to getting attention, lead generation, and building an audience on social, a dedicated and talented team is required to pull this off.

Also, learn more about 21 Social Media Posting and Scheduling Tools of All Times

3. It spreads the word about your products or services

Your social media team isn’t only responsible for creating and sharing content on social media. Instead, it also uses word-of-mouth, guest posting, social mentions, and link-building tactics to spread the word about your brand.

4. It engages with loyal fans and potential customers

As I said before, social media marketing isn’t just about putting out social media content. Therefore, audience engagement and interaction play a vital role in building a powerful community on social media. A vibrant social media team knows how to find new eyeballs and engage the existing followers across different social media platforms.

5. It discovers new social media opportunities

Some social media experts don’t shy away from trying new ideas and opportunities. One of the responsibilities of a social media team is to ensure that they try new social media engagement strategies.

Have you ever noticed sometimes an influencer or celebrity shows up on a brand’s social media page? It’s a called social media takeover. It’s a social media collaboration strategy to revitalize the existing audience as well as attract new followers.

6. It increases your brand reach across multiple platforms

No doubt when a team of professionals takes up the task of running a social media campaign, they apply different tactics such as ads, giveaways, polls, questions, and mentions to entice the audience to react to their social media posts. Thus, it increases their accounts and content reach. As a result, the brand benefits from that reach and attention on social media.

These are six of the main reasons why you need an excellent team to drive your social media strategy. I reckon there are dozens more reasons why every entrepreneur, influencer, and brand must have a social media team to manage the online social media presence.

Social Media Team: Roles and Responsibilities

You might find social media team building and management a little overwhelming, especially if you haven’t had a chance to build or work in a social media team.

The best way to break it down is by highlighting the common social media team roles and briefly explaining their job descriptions to make social media team management easier as well.

Here are the potential roles and responsibilities in a social media team:

Social Media Manager: A social media manager normally heads the team. This person is responsible for building social media marketing strategies for the company or agency’s clients. Moreover, a social media manager also manages content ideation, content publishing/scheduling, and social media workflow.

Social Media Internee: A social media internee is someone who works under the social media manager and is responsible for gathering the social media content from the content team and submitting it for approval. Once the social media manager approves the content, it gets scheduled or published right away.

ContentStudio is an excellent social media management tool that provides a complete social media suite to publish, schedule, discover, plan, and analyze content. One of the best features of this tool is the approval workflow. It lets you add social media employees to manage social media publishing, but it won’t be published unless the social media manager approves it. Try it for free!

Social Media Executive: A Social Media Executive collaborates with various departments within the organization to promote the overall brand through social media channels. His/her role is to maintain an engaging audience experience and promote audience satisfaction, managing all social media platforms, campaigns, and team members.

Blogger/Content Writer: A blogger or content writer is solely responsible for writing long and short-form blog posts. Since blog posts are vital to social media publishing and search engine optimization (SEO), it’s hard to rule out the importance of a blogger.

Related Read: 7 Content Marketing Hacks in 2022 to Drive More Traffic to a Blog

Copywriter: A copywriter is a person who works with both social media manager and digital marketing manager to write better copies, for instance, emails, social media posts, ad text, etc. The specialty of a professional copywriter is that person is good at coming up with attractive yet relevant taglines and phrases.

Graphics Designer: A graphics designer comes up with all the creatives, images, and create online infographics – you can’t move forward with your social media marketing if you don’t have social media images. The platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest require a lot of good-quality pictures and images to stand out from the crowd.

Content Curator: Content curation is a process of gathering existing content and putting it in front of the audience. A content curator is a guy who piles up a list of similar content and repackages it to serve the audience. The curation could be done just with the company’s content or using the industry experts’ content. The job is to provide the audience with something useful and new.

Video Editor: A video editor is your go-to guy in the social media team if you need anything video-related. Normally, a video editor’s main job is to edit videos. However, most video editors could take photos and record videos like experts.

Learn more about How to Build an Effective Video Marketing Strategy in 2022 [With Tips & Examples]

General Podcast/Video Host: Some companies take podcasting seriously. Therefore, they hire a podcaster who hosts the official podcast of the company. Empire Flippers is a perfect example as they run several podcasts and they have different hosts for each podcast.

Digital Marketing Manager: The digital marketing manager runs ad campaigns, collaborates with the social media manager, and gives input on the content topics/ideas. The main job of a digital marketer is to capitalize on the audio, video, and text content and set the trajectory of the company’s online marketing.

So these were the key roles and responsibilities of a social media team. However, the company’s size and budget determine the number of social media team employees. Most budding entrepreneurs and startup founders wear several hats and manage the social media marketing themselves.

On the other hand, a social media team of an agency looks quite different. Since a social media agency manages social media campaigns for multiple brands, they need a full-fledged team to get the job done.

How to Build a Successful Social Media Team

To build a successful social media team, it’s important to identify the team’s roles based on your digital marketing strategy.

We’ve shed some light on a number of social media team structures and their roles. Each one of them plays a significant role in implementing the social media marketing strategy.

If you’re wondering how to establish a successful team that takes care of the whole process, here’s the answer for you:

Analyze your current situation

First things first, you must brainstorm on the current situation you have going on at the moment. Look at your social media handles and check out the posting frequency. Find out who is responsible for social media content and publishing.

Analyze the followers’ growth and engagement across all social media platforms. You can’t build a social media team out of the blue because you can’t fix something if you don’t find out the fault in it.

Assess the resources you need

Once you’ve gone through the situation and got some idea of the current situation of the social media marketing strategy, list out the resources you need to fix things up and take the control of the situation. In some cases, there may not be any social media publishing or social media activity recorded across all platforms.

So you must be well-prepared to pivot from your tactics when needed. A lot of companies don’t even sign up on Twitter or Instagram and they reach out to the digital marketing agencies for running ads on these platforms. So those agencies have to start from scratch.

Decide the size & structure of your social media team

You can have the best social media strategy tailored just for your brand, but it won’t work out until you have the house in order. Before you hop on to hire employees or team members for the social media roles, it’s necessary to talk to the HR or Accounts department to find out the financial capability of the company.

It’ll give you an idea of how you should move forward with your social media team hiring. The size and structure of your social media team won’t be just a matter of operations, but instead, you may have to look at the financial aspects of the agency as well.

Analyze every social media team member you need for your team and justify why that hiring is crucial to the success of the social media team.

Hire the required roles

Once the dust settles, you’re all set to hire members for your social media team. Go for the hiring process along with the HR manager and hire the best candidates for the respective roles at your agency.

Select a social media management tool for your team

Once you’ve hired the social media team members, the next up is training, socializing, and making them feel safe. Start with sharing the basics, meaning your approach to social media at your agency. You can always share the SOPs of your company later on.

It’s highly unlikely that the new team members don’t know much about social media. The reason why these employees land social media roles at companies is that they have figured it out for themselves or the employers they worked for in the past. Therefore, they’d surely know how social media works.

All you need is to translate your social media strategies, operations, and tactics going forward. If you’re managing client social media accounts at your agency using a social media management tool like ContentStudio, train your newly hired social media team members and give them time to absorb all the wisdom, knowledge, and information being shared with them.

Also read more about 20+ Best Social Media Marketing Tools to Try in 2022

How to Manage Your Social Media Team Effectively

In today’s day and age, social media has become inevitable. Not only is social media rapidly evolving, but it is also posing challenges for marketers to keep up. A decade ago, there was no TikTok and the majority the internet users didn’t know the power of YouTube. Therefore, social media management wasn’t a big deal. Fewer companies had Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. However, social media took off after 2014-15 when it became a mainstream channel. In fact, social media opened up new business opportunities and jobs for hundreds of thousands of people across the globe.

In the past few years, social media management has become an integral part of the marketing strategy. Therefore, it’s essential to figure out how to build or manage a social media team to turn things around.

Here’s how you can manage your social media team effectively:

Define social media team members’ roles

It’s highly unlikely that things go in the right direction if the roles aren’t defined properly. When all team members know what the agency or company expects from them, they’d be able to make an effort toward goal setting.

It’s a basic thing that most agencies never pay close attention to defining the team members’ roles. As a result, most of them face difficulties in keeping processes smooth. Since there is no clear direction given to the team members, they end up doing what they think is right.

There is no rocket science behind defining roles. If a graphics designer has come on board with a social media team, the person should know what to expect going forward. A social media manager must communicate what tasks would be given to the graphics designer on day to day basis.

Similarly, the graphics designer must also know who else is in the loop, meaning who he or she needs to share the designed images with.

Create a collaborative environment

It all starts with being respectful, empathetic, and generous toward each other. It’s the social media manager’s duty to create a safe environment for the team members. Drafting the rules of business in the department and sharing them with everyone always make a difference.

Besides, when the manager and senior team members take responsibility for creating an efficient, healthy, and collaborative environment, it usually works out well.

So if you’re creating or managing a social media team, try to implement these nuggets to create a collaborative space where everyone cares about each other, helps one another, and makes the next person feel safe.

Use a project management software

There are dozens of project management tools that you can use to streamline your communication with your team. There is no better way to manage an online team than using such software.

Most of these project management tools have advanced communication features such as notification, mentioning, private messaging, threads, file sharing, team messaging, task management, reporting, and analytics. Try Trello, Asana, or ClickUp.

Make team members accessible to each other

One of the challenges of managing a social media team is to ensure that the team members are available for each other. Accessibility could be a pain in the butt if you don’t have a system in place.

As highlighted in the previous point that a project management software could be a game-changer. However, the top leadership must distill humility and compassion among the employees so that they care for the job as well as co-workers.

The accessibility doesn’t sound like a big issue unless someone from your team takes a few days off of work or leaves the company – there are examples around us when predecessors set examples of helping their successors to keep the balance intact.

Set deadlines for each task

A huge responsibility of a social media manager is to keep up with what’s happening in the social media department. Usually, a social media manager remains in contact with graphic designers for media and creative designing, content writers for articles, and social media internees for social media posts scheduling/publishing.

Setting deadlines for every task goes a long way. It’s always a good idea when every team member has a deadline to meet. When there is a collaborative environment and the team works on something collectively, setting deadlines for everyone is a no-brainer.

Follow the content publishing schedule

Following the content publishing schedule is no easy job and perhaps it’s one of the biggest challenges for social media managers. What social media managers need to do is to build a solid relationship with other team members to keep things smooth and steady.

Once everything starts to fall in place, make sure that everyone keeps up with the plan. The key to sticking to the schedule is communication with teammates and a sense of responsibility on the individual’s part.

When everyone in the team knows about the deadlines and how important they are, it’s quite possible that no one wants to let down the whole team.

Let’s Conclude

Building an accomplished social media team means you’re able to hire people that are right for the job.

You don’t need to be bossy at work to make a vibrant team. The biggest challenge social media professionals face is to create a sophisticated environment in a workplace that allows everyone to feel safe to express their ideas.

Furthermore, hiring has a huge role in making a successful team. If the right candidates come along, it gets easier to train them for the job.

When a social media manager operates as a leader, he or she is most likely to succeed in building an effective team no matter what.

I’ve shared how any agency or brand could build a strong and efficient social media team by applying the basic principles of communication, collaboration, and dealing with people.

There is always a learning curve, but some of the ideas are observed up close.

If you’re building a social media team for your agency, then try to be creative, empathetic, and supportive of your team no matter what.

Most successful teams are built by the team leaders that foresee what these individuals can do for the company.

Let us know how you’re building your team on social media!