Managing Social Media with Remote Teams

As a small business, you might be conducting your social media marketing with a “team” of one, just you. You might be working with one other individual who assists you with posts and online community management and customer service. As your company grows, however, bringing on outside help may be necessary.

An affordable way to address growth and address work overload is to outsource social media marketing to individuals outside of your company and working with them virtually. In some cases, you might need to set up and manage a virtual team as part of a telecommuting option for your staff.

When working with a remote social media marketing team, the first step is to get all team members on the same page by providing both technical training so they know how to use your company’s communications and marketing tools and a briefing on the policies and procedures that they’ll be following.

Some things to convey to your remote team include:

1. Your company’s mission, voice, and the image you want to project online.
2. Your company’s values and code of conduct when representing your brand.
3. Specific community and customer service guidelines to follow.
4. The internal and external communications, editorial and quality control processes.
5. Each team member’s role and responsibilities.

Your communications and social media marketing guidelines should be in writing and included as part of the employee handbook. Team members should sign the document to acknowledge that they understand and agree to the guidelines.

In addition to understanding the way in which social media marketing should be conducted, your remote social media marketing team also needs to know how to use the tools you’re providing to publish and engage online.

The main types of tools you should have set up for efficient and effective social media marketing collaboration include:

1. A social media dashboard. This tool needs to be able to interface with the main social networks you’re using and help you monitor and publish to those networks. The larger your team, features such as the ability to respond to comments and questions on each network and assign team members actions to handle customer service inquiries are important. Some popular social media dashboards include Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
2. A team communications tool. Remote teams typically don’t have the benefit of face-to-face spontaneous interactions, but there are online tools that can help mimic this important aspect of collaboration. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two such platforms that allow for on-the-spot conversations that include the ability to categorize and archive content.
3. A file and document sharing tool. Social media marketing requires a wide range of documents and files including planning documents, an editorial calendar, graphics, photographs, even audio and video files. You need a shared repository for these items. If you don’t have a company intranet and shared server, cloud solutions like G-Suite (Google Apps), Office 365, and Zoho.

To help your team members collaborate, map out the entire collaboration process in advance to make sure it is clear and streamlined. Your process map should involve everything from brainstorming ideas and planning out campaigns to setting up an editorial schedule, assigning tasks, managing tasks, and reporting outcomes.

Decide who reports to whom and which team members will be given admin permissions or all access to edit your networks and website versus more restricted access. Most collaborative tools allow you to set different levels of permissions so not everyone has full control over every feature.

After briefings and trainings, start collaborating and be aware of what is working and what isn’t. Throughout the process, you may encounter new situations that warrant a re-evaluation of your guidelines. Listen to your team members and solicit their input on how you can improve your social media marketing procedures on an ongoing basis.

Managing a remote social media marketing team can have its bumps and pitfalls including occasional miscommunications. With the right tools in place and clear processes established, your team should be able to handle the workload effectively, and you can focus on running the rest of your business.