How B2B Social Media Managers Can Contribute to Company Success

Being a social media manager is a full-time job. A little bit of content creation, curation, audience engagement, social outreach, and scheduling through Oktopost all add up to make a super busy day.

It goes without saying that being a good social media manager — not merely someone who posts to Facebook all day — requires dedication, passion, and someone creative! It’s a special skill set that needs to be taught and gained, and being proficient in this skill is sometimes a prerequisite for reaching the top of the marketing food chain.

So why is it that social media management gets overlooked and is undervalued as a career path? Some would argue that, relative to social skills (verbal and non-verbal communication) and hard skills (mathematics, finance), social media skills are less critical in a workplace.

Moreover, others may associate the importance of a particular job with the difficulties or challenges that accompany it. For example, a product developer is faced with the challenge of breaking a code in the system and fixing bugs. These complex challenges require intelligence and technical thinking, making product development a highly esteemed profession.

In light of this view, social media managers don’t face any “real” challenges and aren’t viewed as a prized asset to the company. This is completely false. While social media managers aren’t responsible for breaking computer codes, they still face legitimate business challenges, that once solved, can have an immensely positive impact on the company’s performance and success.

So in this article, I’m going to shed light on some of the common pain points faced by social media managers on a daily basis as well as demonstrate how they can easily counter them to substantiate their worth in the company.

1. Align Social Media with Business Goals

Showing always goes further than telling. In most cases, social media managers are strong at crafting social content and promoting it across the different networks, but one of their biggest challenges is demonstrating measurable results — results that can speak for themselves and be aligned with business goals.

Whether the business goal is to generate new sales opportunities, retain customers or explore a new market, social media can help achieve that as long as there’s a clear strategy in place. So if the goal is to retain customers, social media managers can align their activities by spending more time on social listening; monitoring live channels, responding directly to customer questions, and engaging in relevant discussions.

Once social media managers have a defined path to reach this business goal, they need to be able to track and measure their activities. The secret to real measurement lies in implementing tools and KPI’s that enable social media managers themselves to visualize and report the data. Without taking the time to look at the data, all social media activity is a shot in the dark.

On that note, Oktopost caters for this exact challenge. As a B2B social media management platform, Oktopost equips every social media manager with advanced Social Analytics where they can access unlimited metric reports to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what can be improved.

Beyond likes and shares, they can track clicks and conversions from social media to identify which channels and messaging drive results for their business. What’s next? Social media managers can start taking ownership of their results and ensure that their role is being taken more seriously by upper management.

2. Increase Engagement in Crowded Networks

Social media is saturated with information — no one wants to listen, yet everyone keeps on sharing content. This reality sets new obstacles for the social media manager who’s tasked with the goal of increasing engagement. What makes this task even more challenging is the fact that they have to post messages from the company’s corporate social channels. And let’s face it, audiences are tired of being targeted by company promotions.

Luckily, this issue does not solely lie in the hands of social media managers. In fact, many marketing leaders have been awakened by the problem of Information Overload and have been forced to find new approaches to communicate with audiences that don’t take the form of advertising. This is where employee advocacy comes in.

Employee advocacy is extremely top-of-mind for B2B marketers because it’s a clever strategy for attracting audience engagement despite the barriers. Instead of messages being delivered by the company’s name, the social media manager can mobilize employees to share content on behalf of the company.

When employees speak positively about their company’s new product, their message carries more weight than a company boasting about its own success. By tapping into this effective strategy, social media managers have a much greater chance of building their audience trust and increasing engagement.

3. Connect Sales with Marketing

It’s a known fact that many sales and marketing teams are misaligned. Despite their similarities, they often sit in different rooms and even on different floors. The lack of communication between sales and marketing poses a challenge for the social media manager who’s at the frontline of the company’s online communication.

Social media is where 55% of B2B buyers learn about your company and 84% of CEO’s and VP’s make purchasing decisions. So the information they get better be accurate! As buyers move down the funnel, if the core messages they’re seeing on Facebook and LinkedIn are inconsistent with the core offerings communicated by sales, they will be more reluctant to convert.

As the voice of the company, social media managers are responsible for understanding exactly who their target audience is so they can craft hyper-relevant content. And what a better way to gather this information than from the people who know prospects best — sales! By encouraging sales and marketing to meet regularly, the two can start sharing insights, brainstorming ideas, and ensuring that all messaging is seamless across every channel.

Another way to bridge the gap between sales and marketing — and ultimately align their objectives — is through employee advocacy. On one hand, social media managers must provide bite-sized content that is interesting and relevant enough for sales to share. On the other hand, sales must use this content as a way to stay up to date with industry insights and attract prospective clients.

Sounds like a win-win situation right? Employee advocacy not only helps to create a stronger relationship between sales and marketing, it helps positions the social media manager an important player in this power-relationship.

Takeaways

The value of a social media manager in a workplace can sometimes be overlooked. On the surface, social media marketing isn’t seen as an important skill set, nor is it considered to be a complex role with “real business challenges”. However, as you dive deeper, you begin to understand how the challenges facing social media managers are likely to affect the rest of the organization. Whether it’s helping to drive growth in leads, build audience trust through employee advocacy, or strengthen the relations between sales and marketing, social media managers have a lot to offer!

Originally published at www.oktopost.com on January 2, 2018.