Business Loan Option Blog

Odds are, if you’re looking to hire a social media expert, it’s because your recognize the power of social networking, but haven’t any idea how to get your social media presence working for your business. While most business owners are used to hiring talent in areas that they don’t know themselves, this type of hire needs a bit more understanding to make sure you get someone who can perform and produce the results you want for your business.

Just like you wouldn’t go ask for a business loan, without first figuring the requirements, you will want to find out what the right requirements are for a social media expert. If all anyone needs to proclaim themselves a social media expert is a few online articles, and a Twitter account, then everyone in the world can be hired as a social media expert. That doesn’t mean they can create a social networking campaign and media exposure that you want to create sales leads, and convert those leads to customers. When looking for a social media expert, create a checklist and verify the performance of the person, before you consider hiring them.

What To Look For In A Social Media Expert

Their social media profile should include:

Completed Social Media Campaigns – What other projects have they done? Where is their social media resume? Do they have references for companies that they’ve worked for doing social media campaigns, or are they self-taught? What is the extend of their experience?

Facebook Profile – They should have a presence on Facebook, with at minimum 200 friends. Check to see how often their status is updated and the level of comments and how they interact with others on this social networking site. It will give you an idea of the quality of service they can provide for you on Facebook.

Twitter Account – Check to see if they have other profiles, on Twitter. Their website should list their social networking profiles and be easy to friend or follow. On Twitter, most social media experts will have at least 2000 followers.

Website(s) – Check out their website(s) to see what types of services they offer. Pay close attention to how their website looks and functions. If they really are social media experts, their site should be easy to navigate and comment. They might include social media techniques like video blogging. Their specialty should be implementing social media campaigns, not writing content. If they’re selling services for content, it’ll conflict with the social media tasks that need to be done first.

Search For Industry Keywords – Within the content of the site, see if they know the jargon of social media experts or if they are over-using it in an attempt pass over insufficient credentials. This can include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Technorati, StumbleUpon, and all manner of sites and tools that they should be familiar with, on a personal level. Take a look at what they’ve done for prior customers and if it matches the keywords they’re using to explain their services.

How They Track Performance – They should be able to tell you how to track performance of your social media campaign to see if you’re getting the amount of traffic and conversions you’d hope for by paying an expert. The bottom line is you’re seeking traffic and conversions. It’s not enough just to have friends and followers, you need to see conversions and how that relates to your sales.

Business Integration – Can they integrate your offline business activities with your online presence? When you have a sales event in a retail brick-and-mortar store, how do they get the word out and make the traffic come directly to your physical store? Are they only capable of running a business online, and have no concept of how to integrate your offline activities. You need social experts with both sets of skills.

Recommends Tools for Automation – Social media experts should help you get started managing your own campaigns by recommending automation tools that people in-house can use to update their social media campaigns. If they’re not forthcoming on tools and educating your staff, you can bet they’re hoping you’ll be tied to them forever, or they’re not doing it in an efficient manner.

Provides Training – A social media expert company should be able to train one or two of your employees in the proper way to maintain the level of interaction necessary to keep your profiles active and your audience engaged. That includes training on the tools to use, how to behave, and how to automate multiple updates at once. It can even include more technical information like how to become SEO-optimized and keep that in mind when posting content to the site.

Hiring is a stressful process that is time-consuming and expensive. Hiring the wrong person is such a costly mistake, that many small business owners try to do things on their own until they’re forced to hire someone. If cash is short, but demand is high, this doesn’t work as you can fall short of fulfilling demand, ultimately costing you money. Putting in a business credit application early to acquire funds for additional hiring can help you anticipate the need for a new hire, but it doesn’t keep you from making the mistake of hiring a bad hire, which eats up the money quickly. Luckily, today, some of the risks are easily managed, especially during a recession that has an abundant labor force available. The perks and benefits necessary to retain quality talent aren’t as essential and temporary contract workers and freelancers are becoming more the norm, rather than the exception.

Simple Strategies To Locate and Hire Quality Talent

Here are few strategies you can use to make sure the next time you’re getting ready to hire, that you have a set plan to weed out good from bad candidates, and ultimately choose the right person for your company.

Advertise in unusual places – The conventional wisdom says that you want to advertise where you get the most exposure, like Monster.com or your local newspaper. At a time where millions of people are out of work, advertising your job here will only accomplish getting completely spammed by everyone, regardless of whether they are qualified or not. Seek other avenues, like trade magazines, online groups, your company website, recruiters, social networking, and through word of mouth with your employees. Weeding out spam applications by advertising in the right places is going to do a lot to reduce the expense of hiring.

Use telephone screening first – Anyone can do an initial screening to determine how a person presents themselves on the phone and what talent set they have before asking them to do a live interview. It doesn’t have to be done by the hiring manager, although that is often the case. A personal assistant can help to screen candidates and forward only those that appear to be viable to the hiring manager.

Give them a skills test – It’s easy to lie in order to be hired, and in today’s competitive markets people are willing to say just about anything to get hired. The proof is in how well they perform, so don’t just look at their certifications and awards, ask them to complete a sample skills test. If you hire through a temporary agency, many of them require testing to ascertain the skill level of their labor force, and that’s one less thing you have to do yourself.

Hire on a temporary basis first – Use a temporary agency to locate quality talent, or look at a freelance board to locate people. These people are willing to work part-time, temporary, and don’t require that you provide health benefits, or unemployment compensation should they not work out. If they do work out, the negative is that they may not be available for subsequent projects, if they’re very popular. At that point, you can see what it costs to hire them out from under the temporary agency and offer them a full-time contract.

Reduce the interview process – It’s popular to make an employee go through many rounds of interviews, but this impacts the efficiency of your other workers. If there really is that much time to do interviewing, instead of adding to work that directly increases your bottom line, you’re probably top heavy already. There’s no need to hire someone else. It’s a waste of your time, and theirs too. Try to keep the interview process simple, and streamlined. Besides, if they’re brought on as temporary workers, you’ll find out from day-to-day interaction whether they’ll work out. If they don’t, they’re just not hired full-time. If you find you do need multiple experts to verify a candidates skills or demeanor, turn to professional recruiters.

Use professional recruiters - These people want to find quality talent that will net them a fat commission. If you are detailed with what you want, you can hire an army of professional recruiters to help you with your staffing needs. Make sure they have their own screening process, and how thorough it will be. Work only with recruiters who are knowledgeable about your industry and its specific needs. Check credentials, and don’t assume that all manner of background check has been run. Make employment and commission conditional on passing background checks, like criminal and credit histories, if that’s important in your industry.

That’s the cardinal rule of business. Hire talent for things that you don’t know yourself. A successful business owner is one who knows when they’re in over their heads, and calls in the experts. Is it likely that you, as the business owner, understand the fine points of law necessary in legal disputes that arise while operating your business? No! For that, you want to hire a competent lawyer to have on your team. The same is true with various other facets of the business that demand specific talents that are best left to others to oversee. This gives the business owner more time to create new business opportunities and market the company, to investors and customers, in a way that generates growth and value for everyone.

Accountants

Hire someone to keep the books in a way that you can supervise. You don’t want to give away too much power here as it can be a ripe area for fraud. You do want to understand what you’re signing, if you have to take out merchant cash advances or conventional loans. You may not have to do all financial research, but you can have someone else tell you what options are available and then make the decision which financial instrument is right for you. As always set up business procedures that are transparent to you. Having someone to manage taxes, business expenses, and payroll can significantly free up your time for running the business.

Lawyers

As mentioned, getting in contact with a lawyer is one of the first actions you should take, even before you get into business. You need to understand what business structures are going to help you succeed in business and how to set up agreements that won’t come back to bite you in the behind later. Fortunately, you can hire lawyers on retainer or through prepaid plans that will give you contact to lawyers when you need them at a reasonable price.

Human Resource Managers

The amount of time it takes to screen and hire an employee is astronomical. With so many people looking for jobs, you can find someone whose job it is to weed through a pile of resumes and hire the talent you need without taking more time out of your day. They can fine tune the process of keeping tabs on employee complaints and escalating only those that need your immediate attention. Human resource managers are great for understanding the labor laws and what practices you need to avoid to keep your business running within legal guidelines. They can help you put perks in place that retain talent and make your employees happy to work there. They can oversee programs that help employees that are in distress and keep them working by providing the support they need so they can keep their minds on their jobs. Human resource managers are a great addition to your team.

Technical Experts

You can hire people who have a technical expertise that you don’t. If you don’t want to hire a full-time employee, many technical people now do contract work. If you want someone to program some piece of software for you, you can even do it online, through places like Rentacoder.com. Maybe you want to set up an online presence through a e-commerce website. You can do that without knowing how to code yourself, just by detailing the specifications of the job and opening it up to bid. Anything technical that you don’t know how to do is now easily outsourced to someone else.

Content Writers and Publicity Managers

Another great way to outsource work is to hire content writers or publicity managers. These people can help put just the right words to paper in your promotional paper materials, and on your website too. If you either don’t want to spend the time writing your own copy or promoting yourself online or elsewhere, hire someone or some company to do it for you. Once they understand who you are and what your company does, it’s a simple matter of setting up creative copy to make you look good at the budget you desire. Some publicity managers will even write your speeches for you, if you have presentations you need to make online or to a live crowd. If the President does it, why can’t you, right? It just makes good sense to hire people who are knowledgeable in the art of swaying public opinion to help further your business goals.