Integration Is the Key to Successful Social Media

Social media roles should not be stand-alone in the marketing department. As the fastest-growing and now most popular activity taking place on the internet, it is more important than ever that your social media strategy forms part of your overall brand strategy. It is not just a form of communication or a useful platform, as managed correctly it can be the cornerstone of your online marketing presence. It might be the case that some marketing professionals who have grown up with social media have specialised in this area as a discrete discipline. It might also be the case that you have more experienced all-rounders from the marketing profession who know a little about these platforms but to whom it is still relatively new. By integrating social media expertise into your central marketing team, you can start to build and share a broader knowledge to support and drive your marketing activity. If you do not already have specialist social media resource within your marketing team, it is well worth investing in training for your current staff, or if head count permits, to hire in new talent to complement your existing skill sets. To maximise your social media marketing impact, it needs to work together with your PR and search marketing efforts too. Content and communications are the driving forces behind most effective online strategies, so you need to have the right talent at all levels to address these requirements. You need to have effective planners and strategists who can weave the work streams together into a cohesive strategy, and you need the skilled implementers to make it all happen. Finding the right skills, experience and expertise can be tricky. However, working with marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands can make it easier. Good marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands will be able to help you define the correct role profiles when you are creating new roles and need to combine an effective range of skills into one position. They will also be able to advise on focussed specialist roles to complement your existing team’s capabilities. Before taking on new resource to drive forward your online and social media strategy, it is worth clearly defining that strategy first in order to recruit the most appropriate skills to make it happen. If you wait to define the strategy once the social media resource is on board, you may find yourself with a strategy limited to their area of experience. Seek support from specialist consultants to help you define your strategy first if this is beyond your normal scope of work.