You Ask, I Answer: Top Lessons for New Social Media Managers?

In today's episode, Mike asks, what is one thing every new social media manager should know? Oh, that's a long list. Everything for a social media manager, new or not, needs to start with your playbook, your guidelines, your handbook, your policy manual, whatever you want to call the thing. It has to detail what is acceptable and what is not. The biggest danger any social media manager, new or not, will run into is running into unanticipated situations and not having guidelines that give them a sense of what they should or should not do.

Hey, this certain type of complaint comes in. How do you handle it? This other brand calls you out. How do you handle that? So having that playbook really details what it is that you're going to do and not going to do.

What are the brand guidelines? What is the brand voice and personality? All these things. Again, if you don't know this up front, you risk putting yourself into situations that will cause damage to your company. Over at the Trust Insights website, we have a list of what we call the 9C community management framework.

These are nine different areas that you as a uh brand manager, marketer, social media manager need to think about and have written out guidelines in advance for how you're going to handle these different things. So let's go through these really quick and then dive in a bit. Content, conversation, common interest, caring, connection, control, concourse, cue, and calibration. As a new social media manager, you should have details for each one of these things. Content.

What are you going to provide your your community, your audience with on a regular and frequent basis so that people get value from it? What are you posting? How often are you posting? Is it good? Is it worth sharing?

Conversation. How often are you going to try and stimulate conversations with your audience? Asking them questions. What questions should and should you not ask? Are there rat holes or landmines that you could step on that would bring up the ability for people to complain?

We have seen no shortage of bad moves by brands asking, like, hey, what do you think of us? And then suddenly every customer's having a bad experience lights them on fire. So don't do that. Again, have those guidelines. Common interest.

What is your social media focused around? And more than just your company. If it's your industry, what are the topics in your industry that you care about that you can respond favorably on? If you're really bad at, for example, uh, I don't know, mixing a certain type of concrete, make sure that's not on the common interest thread. Caring, how are you going to handle uh members of your audience or community who are in distress when you are doing your uh monitoring for your brand?

If you have you're following somebody and they you know say something that indicates, for example, that uh they may be entertaining thoughts of self-harm, how are you going to handle that? What are your guidelines? Uh connection, how do you connect members of your audience to each other? If you're again, if you're doing a great job with monitoring your social media community, and you see people asking for help, how do you connect them to resources that are non-competitive that provide them real value? Are you doing that?

Should you do that? Do you have a policy for that? Control. How do you deal with bad actors within your social media community? Uh everything from blocking people, reporting people.

Uh what are your guidelines? What are your guidelines if one of those people happens to be an executive at your company? We've certainly seen no shortage of people in the last few years who on their personal social media accounts say and do things that might be antithetical to the values that your company supposedly has. How do you handle that? What's the policy?

What's the procedure? Again, these are all things that you need to have written out in advance so that when it happens, nobody's surprised about the actions you take. And especially if you're a more junior manager, you are not held accountable for things because you have gotten sign off in writing about how you're going to handle these situations in advance. Concourse, where are you going to be active on social media? What channels?

For social media, depending on your company, you may be in 10 or 11 or 15 or 20 different places. Does the software that you're using interact with those places? How much time will you need to invest in each one of them? Uh queuing. How often do you prompt people to do business with you in some fashion?

Do you uh is like every other post? Hey, check out our blog, check out our newsletter, check out our whatever. Is it every fifth post, every 10th post? What's your policy? Again, what tends to happen as uh fortunes change is that sales and marketing teams start to get really antsy about lead generation and new deals, as they should.

It's their job, but then that tends to roll downhill on the social media manager, and they're like, uh, sales keeps asking me to make every post a pitch for them. Right? How are you gonna handle that? Need to have that written out. Calibration.

How do you measure your audience to determine uh what's happening? You know, when you're doing social media management, what are you measuring on? Uh, what are the metrics that you are have signed up to be accountable for? You need to have this as well. And the last one, and it's not a little list, I think we're gonna add it to the list, make it tenses for fun, is crisis management.

What do you do when everything goes sideways? This is more than just something that happens to your company. We are living in a pandemic which has not happened like this in a little more than a hundred years. How do we handle it? How do we react to it?

What is the policy? In the first couple weeks, people were saying, you know, nobody should be posting on social media. Oh, is that true? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your company, your brand, your guidelines.

This list of now the 10 C's, um is the starting point for what should be in your handbook, in your playbook. What are all the different things that you're going to do to reinforce and write down for each of these areas that will help you as a social media manager, new or not, to know what to do when situations occur. One of my favorite stories uh from Barton de Thur Thurston, who used to work at the Onion, was that when the Onion was getting ready for an event like a Super Bowl, for example, they would have a spreadsheet of every realistic imaginable possibility. Power goes out, somebody gets hurt, uh, fans riot, whatever, and have their comedy tweets written out in advance, hundreds of them in advance, so that when something happened, they didn't have to wait for approvals, they didn't have to wait for anything, they would have to set stuff ready to go, and they could be seen as highly reactive when in fact they had planned far far ahead for every reasonable possibility. That's the kind of thing that you want in your playbook.

What are all the realistic situations that could happen? How are you going to handle them? So that when they do happen, just open up the book and like an airline pilot, open up the quick reference handbook, find the situation, do the follow these steps, and uh you're at least going to do what your company has approved. So you're not gonna get yourself in trouble, and ideally you're not gonna get your company in trouble. So, really good question, Mike.

Long question. There's a lot to unpack here, and it's gonna take you weeks, if not months, to properly do all the documentation for this so that you're prepared in advance. If you have follow up questions, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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