Many business owners are accustomed to being Jack-of-all-trades. They are running their core operations, cover the work of a secretary and office manager and also manage the marketing and accounting tasks. When your business is starting out, it is manageable. You don’t have a lot of administrative and customer service work to do.
But as you get more clients and expand your offering to several products and services, you are no longer able to handle everything. At a certain point you should consider hiring people to cover various roles, including a social media manager.
Do You Really Need to Hire a Social Media Manager?
The first thing that comes to your mind is the salary you have to pay for a new employee, including taxes and benefits. You are looking at your budget and think that you could do better things with the money, such as invest more in Facebook ads or other digital marketing strategies.
But without proper management of your social media channels, spending money on ads and social media marketing is money thrown out of the window. You will likely miss a significant lookalike audience for ads and lose a warm lead because you didn’t answer to their query in a timely manner.
How Do You Need Your Business Needs a Social Media Manager?
There are several signs that tell business owners they should stop DIY their social media marketing and entrust it to a professional instead. These are some of the warning signals you should pay attention to:
1. You Have a Long Queue of Unanswered Messages
Private messages on your Facebook or LinkedIn pages should receive an answer within a few hours. So do public comments on your posts on all social media platforms you need.
But you simply don’t have time to look everything up and prioritise answering them properly. By contrast, an experienced social media manager knows how to automate answers to common questions and reply in person using the adequate brand voice of your company.
2. Your Writing Skills Are Not Improving
You’ve tried everything including reading our articles on copywriting. Yet, you still cannot write that catchy caption for photos or headline for Facebook ads. It does not mean you are not good at your line of business – you just don’t have the talent to write about it.
A social media manager has strong writing skills as part of their core abilities. After a short time spent getting familiar with your business and brand voice, they can write social media posts that will create a lot of engagement.
3. You Do Not Understand All the Platforms Your Customers Use
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok…it gets confusing just browsing all of them in the time slot you allocated for social media tasks. You are not familiar with some of them and have no idea how to write in the specific format for each of them.
With a social media manager working for your business, each of your social media pages will be populated with content adapted to the specific format of each platform. This is crucial, because many people follow brands on several channels. And they don’t like seeing the same message copy/pasted as caption on all the platforms.
4. You Are Stretched Out Too Thin
You are already working +40 hours each week and have forgotten when you had your last vacation. There’s simply no time for it. And social media marketing takes a lot of what should be your spare time.
It is possible that you are spread to thin, not just in terms of working but the number of social networks you cover. An experienced social media manager will quickly identify the platforms that generate the lowest engagements and number of leads and which can be dropped.
5. You Prepare to Increase Your Ad Spending
If you want to grow your number of social media leads significantly, you are probably considering increasing your Facebook ads spend. This is the moment when you need to hire a social media manager.
They can identify the best audiences and craft ads that will generate a solid and relevant traffic funnel. Otherwise, you will most likely get a lot of empty clicks and even get your ads marked as irrelevant or repetitive by people who are not likely to buy your products.