Choosing the social media voice of your company can be a complicated process. This is the person who will represent your brand, and who will basically be in charge of the content you put out there for your audience. You don’t want to choose just any person for this job… there are certain criteria that you should look out for in making the choice.
So what are the best practices in choosing who will represent your brand in social media? Here are some tips to help you out.
1. Social media and marketing knowledge
The person you choose to be the voice of your company should be social media savvy and have excellent marketing knowledge. Since this person is going to be in charge of your social media content, which includes your newsletters, press releases, blog posts, and posts on your social networking sites, then she should really understand your consumers and how to connect with them. She needs to know how to engage your audience, and should understand the correlation between marketing and increasing sales.
This person should also have experience using different social media platforms for both personal and professional use. It would be a good idea to check her pages and profiles to see if she has a healthy number of followers and really knows how to encourage discussion around topics. If she has a blog, you should also check it out to see if it offers good content, has lots of relevant comments, and is optimized for the search engines.
There are so many people claiming to be “social media experts” nowadays, but be warned that just because someone claims to be an expert doesn’t mean she is. Before hiring anyone, make sure that you do your research and ask around for recommendations.
2. Friendly and personable
When it comes to social media, you should definitely look for someone who’s friendly and personable to represent your brand. After all, this person is going to have to interact with people, so she needs to have excellent people skills and be socially adept.
Also, you need to ensure that you’re going to be comfortable working with this person and having her on your team. If not, then you’re just going to have an awkward working relationship, which would not be good for your company.
3. Where should you look – internally or externally?
This is an important consideration in choosing the person who will be your company voice. You can decide to look within your company, especially if yours is just a small business. It could be anyone – the owner, the person in charge of marketing and promotions, one of your very loyal and active employees, etc. You should choose someone who is loyal to your brand, and who can really represent your company well.
Of course, you can also decide to look outside for someone who can represent your brand. This is a good idea if you’re looking for someone who can objectively look at your company from the outside and see what it needs to work on. And this is definitely an option if you don’t have anyone socially savvy enough on board to become your company voice.
Remember that choosing who will represent your brand as your company’s social media voice is definitely critical, so take some time to really look for someone who is qualified and knowledgeable, not just someone who is full of hot air. This is one of the first steps in establishing a consistent and personable presence in the social media world.