How to Manage your Social Media Manager.

In the world of social media, success is difficult to measure.

Failures and missteps, however, are costly and immediate, plus you run the risk of being vilified by the blogosphere. So with success difficult to measure and understand, the field is plagued with mediocrity people who know how to set up a Facebook account or create a Vine, but don’t truly think strategically or act in the brand’s best interest.
Why the failure? The upper echelon of management may pay lip service to the importance of social media, but they don’t fully explore the implications. There are two main reasons for this:

• Intellectual laziness. They want to claim that they have a full social media presence while not fully understanding what that means, so they delegate someone to create and then let go (and are happy to hear back with amorphous reports of success with words like engagement and impressions)
• Arrogance. People are embarrassed to admit that they might not fully get it and don’t spend the time needed to educate themselves and the team

Simply put, top executives must pay attention, not just to reputation management, but to make sure the person in charge really knows what they’re doing.

So some things to think about when hiring and working with your social media manager:

• Do they understand metrics or just send Facebook analytics?
• Are they making sure that the social media plan is tied in with business or company goals?
• Is there a real plan/reason for being active in certain social media spheres? There’s sometimes no need to be everywhere.
• Do they have contacts at the key platforms?
• Are they on a continual hunt for the next big thing?
•  Are they coming to you with real ideas and next steps?

What’s key here is that everyone is still figuring it out. I’ve met with numerous social media experts, all with different ways to measure success. With something new popping up each day, finding the right person who’s able to grasp the landscape is daunting. That's why the
person who is in charge of social media is integral to success.

Knowing how to manage the social media manager is key.