6 Rules to Delegate Your Social Media

I used to insist that anyone who has a business should learn how to do their own social media. Within the SME world this often works best. If the founder or owner of the business knows how to use Twitter to retweet others, mention people’s Twitter names in a sentence, chat and banter, and share links to relevant articles, they are able to make new contacts, build relationships, show their expertise, and reach wider audiences.

I was determined to prove that anyone could learn and be able to get their heads around the differences between LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and master the art of showing the best of themselves and their businesses across the board.

And while I still stand by this, I have realized that there are certain skills in copywriting and design that make some folks better cut out for the job. That is why sometimes it’s better to delegate – plus giving something to someone else is one of those things that stops procrastination.

Here are some rules about who you choose, what you ask them to do, and how you split the workload:

1. Briefing

A good social media manager will ask you a lot of questions before beginning. They need to know about your company culture, the reason you started the business, your goals for the future, and the reasons your favorite clients buy from you. They need to know the objections you come across in the sales process, and what the “penny dropping moments” are. They need to know what makes your company different from the others in your field. For more, see Buffer’s questions to help define your social media marketing strategy.

2. Approvals

Once you have discussed all this and which channels will be managed, you should expect a content calendar so you can see what the proposed plan is. There are plenty of templates out there, but chances are they will have created their own.  Even if someone else is going to do this for you, you need to approve it. It might sound like a hassle, but it’s necessary, at least at the beginning. Once you do it regularly, it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to review and approve a well-presented content calendar. A regular pattern of when and how you see this needs to be established, and an agreement for how quickly you can get back with feedback approval, allowing time for edits to be made on the schedule of posts.

3. Experience

Even if you’re delegating, you need to see what it’s like. So, this means you should consume social media within the business world. It’s great if you are already reading blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram messages shared and created by other businesses. Try for a week at least – watch what others in your industry are doing and what your clients are doing. Look at people who use social media to share useful links, and people who use it to talk to their followers. Read the comments and check the numbers on different posts. Note the prevalence of images vs text posts. Click through blogs and read the good ones and take note of the bad ones. Learn to notice what’s good and what’s not good. This will make you better at choosing who you’re delegating to, and seeing if their skills match the high standards you have for anything out there representing your business.

4. Efficient content planning

A bank of “evergreen content” should be prepared for you to approve, and this can be mixed up and shared over the next few weeks or months. Evergreen means that it’s not time sensitive – so insights, true facts, tips and educational blog posts, collections of resources that won’t become obsolete anytime soon. Both images and text are part of this. See Hubspot’s guide to creating evergreen content.

5. The “spontaneous” stuff

You should also be sent something “time related” to approve every week. This includes which links to recent articles you might share, as well as the “this happened today” type posts.

6. Engagement

Let the social media manager plan and create content, report stats, and other regular replies and posts, but you should engage with and understand customers too. Learn the basic etiquette, reply to tweets, and tag people in posts.