One of our Insider members, Rusty, is the owner of The Green Monkey in Raleigh, NC. The Green Monkey is an amazing gift shop with a craft beer and wine bar (check it out sometime when you’re in Raleigh!). Rusty has always been an active member of Insider. He always shares his successes and helpful tips in our private Facebook group. In September, he shared with us a huge social media success.
During the summer, The Green Monkey added a Social Media Coordinator to its team to help with content creation and Facebook & Instagram posting. On September 22nd, Rusty shared that The Green Monkey Instagram account reached 7,154 more accounts than they did the previous month. That’s a 300% increase within 30 days (well, an increase of 323% to be accurate)!
Having a team member who is dedicated to social media can help you focus on your own tasks. While also giving committed and expert attention to your social channels to grow your online community and increase sales.
Here at Crystal Media, we recommend that our retailers hire someone to fill the role of a Social Media Manager; not only to help the business reach its goals, but to give the owners time to focus on what they do best… run their business! Many retailers have a hard time finding social media success, which makes sense if they’re having a hard time juggling it all: keeping up with best practices, using new features, capturing quality content, posting regularly on all the platforms, and connecting with their audience.
This week we wanted to share 3 tips from our Hiring Guide (available to Insider members) for bringing on a Social Media Coordinator or Manager!
1. Hire for Personality vs Experience.
Crystal shares that the tools, the strategies, and the how-to’s can all be trained. If someone has the experience you’re looking for, it may allow them to dive in and start more quickly, but the experience can always be taught. Personality is something that can’t. This is a person you’re trusting to represent your company and your brand online. The candidate should connect with your culture vs just having the expertise you are looking for.
2. Give Them Proper Time.
Whether you’re hiring someone new or giving this responsibility to an existing team member. Giving them the proper time to create content, post to social, track, and potentially create ads for you is critical to seeing social media success with their role. In the Hiring Guide, Crystal shares that the time each business would require varies per company size, strategy and goals. In the example she gives, if the Social Media Manager is posting to both Facebook and Instagram, managing the ads, writing a blog, posting to Pinterest and creating email marketing, their schedule could be 30+ hours of work!
3. Give Them Proper Training.
Training your new team member helps show them how you like things done. You should include thorough training on how to create content, post to your social sites, and training on the brand’s voice and personality, along with any other training they would need to be successful.
We always suggest that our Insiders have their Social Media Managers go through our Social To Sale training, and also watch training videos about specific features on social media (like how to make a TikTok or IG Reel) in our Clarity Portal library!
Rusty has seen such amazing and quick results with The Green Monkey’s dedicated Social Media Coordinator. He shared that the main task of this new role is to create and post daily to The Green Monkey’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. Each of the posts are focused on specific products from The Green Monkey. These products correlate with what is featured in their weekly e-newsletter, Live video podcast, and in-house video monitors. The Coordinator focuses heavily on Instagram Reels and IG feed posts. He also helps out with ads and it’s required of him to create a weekly carousel ad to promote the gift shop and its product assortment!
What I Want You To Take Away From This Blog:
- Hiring a Social Media Manager can help you better focus on your daily tasks.
- Hire someone who connects with your culture vs just having the expertise.
- Give the Social Media Manager the proper training and tools they need. So they have the skills and mindset to both connect and sell on social media.
Okay, over to you…
Do you have a team member who’s dedicated to social media? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’re an Insider member and you’ve hired a Social Media Manager, be sure they have the tools and training they need to keep up with new features, trends and social media best practices by watching training videos in the Clarity Portal.
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