5 Reasons Why Social Media Is Not A Job For Your Intern
There is a shift in the world of marketing and social media is taking over!
Nowadays business owners are finally realizing social media marketing is a fundamental to success. It’s a primary marketing tool no longer an add on. Why? It’s trackable, proven to work, cheap, effective and perpetual. Something else a lot of business owners think – it’s easy. Here’s why they’re wrong.
To put your social media marketing in the hands of your intern, in-house team, PR agency that “also does social media marketing” or your sister in-law who is an influencer is the wrong move. The world of social media is constantly changing with platform changes and new algorithm updates popping up constantly. If you want to get the most out of your money you need a real agency who takes your social strategy seriously.
Perhaps you’re doing your own social media marketing because you’re a B2B and want a general presence. This article is not for you. But if you’re a business that deals directly with consumers, an e-commerce shop that sells clothing or beauty and/or hospitality- then keep reading!
The Full 5-Prong Approach
In order to get the maximum benefits of social media marketing, it takes:
- Organic posting
- Influencer marketing
- Paid social advertising
- Daily growth hacking and community management
- Strong content creation that entertains as well as promotes
It takes all five of these together. Just following one or two of these will not achieve social media success. In truth, adding on contests, email marketing and social incentive campaigns will also help a lot and dramatically increase your metrics all around.
So let’s return to the initial question: why isn’t social media a job for your intern? Well, implementing all five of the strategies above requires training and skills. Inexperienced social marketers have a tendency to solely focus on influencer marketing, in my experience. This is like running up a hill on a treadmill. It’s a lot of work and it’s not going to get you anywhere without the other steps. Trust me, it’s extremely difficult to track influencer marketing success directly back to your brand. Yes, you can hand them promo codes for their fans to shop and some of them have really impactful influence and game changing effects but you’ll probably spend most of your digital marketing budget on ONE post and see ONE uptick. It’s not at all well rounded or going to last forever.
So what if your intern is running ads? Well, running ads on social media is not a simple process. It’s a game for the creative genius, experienced, and backend tech science. Facebook’s ad manager has given marketers dozens of ad goals and call to action buttons with each goal effecting the performance differently. The trick here is to know your stuff. Failing at that is throwing your money at Facebook for nothing.
For Example:
You’re promoting an ad. Choosing SHOP NOW vs a LEARN MORE call to action will impact on those ads in completely different ways and affect their performance. The more direct your ad is, the stronger the creative needs to be, because Facebook/Instagram favor ads that do not look like direct marketing. Will the intern know this? Or will they most likely randomly choose one? Facebook often changes it’s rules mid-campaign and your ad will stop running. You won’t be notified of what to change and you’re in a guessing game to fix the issue. This is where experience is essential to prevent this from happening and – if it does – to get the ad back up and running straight away with what we call “backend surgery”. Inexperienced social marketers often abandon ship at this point and the ad goes into the abyss.
Social media is not a passive aggressive marketing tool anymore. Organic engagement is down and paid ads are up which means your IG feed can look as stunning as possible but if you are not running paid ads to generate website traffic, then you cannot simply expect sales from an organic post. This means your PR agency needs to know how to use ALL of social media’s tools available and not just ONE.
Following these steps will help significantly, but it also requires time to gain the intuitive experience necessary to succeed. If you don’t have the time to develop this, don’t hand the job to your intern. Hire an agency that handles social media solely and understands the nuances, the algorithms, the content trends and “dos” and “don’ts” better than anyone else.
If you found this article helpful and you’re interested in talking to us about taking your social media marketing game to the next level. Please contact us here.
