Only 9% of surveyed organizations have full-time positions dedicated to managing social media responsibilities, while 90% include those as part of someone's overall responsibilities, according to a survey by King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42. Yet 85% of survey respondents say that original content is critical to the success of their social media campaign.
How to make sense of these two divergent data points? Clearly most firms view social media as important and realize that content must be engaging to keep consumers coming back. At a certain point, it makes sense to hire a social media staffer full time. But where exactly is that point? Some thoughts:
When your customer complaints are reaching the point of rebellion. PEPCO, the Washington, DC-area utility company, has been on the receiving end of a wave of customer complaints, and more recently a local investigation into the poor reliability of its services. The company recently made a social media staffer full time - fortuitously right before an outage affecting 300,000 customers that took days to resolve. Andre Francis did his best to soothe customers outraged by the delay and has since been helping customers via Twitter with other customer service problems.
When not enough fans or followers are responding to your posts. Ashley DiVeronica is director of Social Media Marketing at the TransMedia Group - but she started out in a freelance position. "The biggest factor in creating my position as a full-time job - which is now a full-time department - came down to engagement," she tells MarketingVOX. "I proved my case by taking two different clients, one with constant communication versus an account with little and sparse communication. The difference in followers/fans, retweets, questions, responses, and so on were staggering between the two. The more active each account was, the more the fan base and interaction rate would climb."
But how many is enough in terms of retweets or responses or comments? That number has been a subject of debate for firms - one oft-cited statistics is provided by Forrester, which has determined that out of 100 followers, at least 15 need to be very engaged, says Carla Yashiro, a newly hired corporate marketing manager at GoldSpot Media.
"Nineteen percent is a better figure, but anything under 15 is something to worry about," she tells MarketingVOX. The other 80% are likely paying attention to the posts but just not commenting, which is a typical breakdown, she said.
When you want your sales to increase. Pat Wyman, CEO and founder of HowToLearn.com, is in discussions to bring someone on full time to handle the site's social media outreach for the most basic reason of all: she wants to see sales increase. "Frankly that is how we measure the success of a social media project." Since the company began using social media, she noticed a correlation with sales growth and wants to step those channel sales up even further.
