Takeaway: The disaster of the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience reminds brands of the dangers of overhyped events. While marketing, especially assisted by AI, can promise a dazzling experience, you don’t want your actual event to fall short in an age when everyone can document it.
Incorporating memes and trends in your brand's social presence
Reflecting on 2024’s social media memes, one thing is clear: navigating trend-driven content creation requires balance and critical thinking. Joining popular memes can connect with audiences and boost visibility, but staying true to your brand voice is key to being authentic.
Community: Successful social media trends brought people together and created a sense of community, especially across generations.
Adaptability and accessibility: They were accessible (like easy dances) and adaptable (like loose formats) so different people and brands could partake.
Creativity: Successful trends sparked an outpouring of creativity. Whether in reaction to an unexpected event, editing style, or subject matter, many trends showed us new ways to tell stories and show the world who we are.
Blending spontaneity with strategy is key to jumping on social media trends. Like all social media success, knowing your audience is the foundation for identifying the right trends to invest in.
As social media becomes an increasingly important piece of the marketing puzzle, more businesses are paying close attention to how they structure their social media teams and what types of people they hire for these roles.
While brand new start-ups or small businesses might immediately hire a social media manager, covering your social media needs isn’t always that cut and dry. In fact, if you don’t get clear on your goals, functional needs, and skill requirements up front, you run the risk of building a team that can’t scale with your business.
This guide will give you a clear path for planning and structuring your social media team, including the most common social media roles and when you might need to hire each of them. We’ll also cover some key considerations that come after you’ve hired your team: How will they work together? What resources will they need? How will you keep them happy and high-performing?
Let’s dive in!
Step 1: Define your social media team’s purpose
The purpose, structure, and focus of your social media team are directly related to your brand's goals. These goals will help you build a social media strategy, identify the social media functions you need covered, and prioritize the skills and specializations you need on the team.
1. Get clear on your social media goals
Before you can structure your team, you need to know what they'll be doing. Otherwise, you’ll fall into the most common social media pitfall: Just posting to post.
Translating brand goals to social media strategyIf you don’t already have a social media strategy that outlines your goals, you can develop a loose idea from the following question: What are your brand’s overall goals, and how can social media help reach those goals? This will clarify your social media goals and how to reach them.
For example, if a startup brand’s main goal is to build brand awareness, this might translate to the social media goals of increasing views and follower count. A tactic for reaching these goals is to focus on short-form video.
That’s a fine starting point for now, but be sure to bookmark our guide to building a social media strategy so you can read up on it later.
2. Identify your team’s core functions
Next, you need to figure out the functions or focus areas that your social media team will work on in order to reach these goals.
Using social media strategy to define social media team functions-1You probably don’t have unlimited headcount to hire as many social media folks as you want. Most businesses average one to five social media team members. That’s why you have to get extremely clear on the key functions that will move the needle for your business. There are many areas that your social media marketing team can be directly or indirectly responsible for, including:
Content creation: This is the classic and most common function of the social team. They might handle the actual creation — photography, videography, copywriting — or collaborate with other teams or freelancers. It doesn't have to be exclusive to social content; many teams are responsible for blog posts, infographics, long-form YouTube videos, and more.
Customer service: Social media teams often play the role of customer service reps. They address issues, answer questions, and solve problems to convert potential customers and keep existing ones happy.
Lead generation: By posting valuable content, hosting webinars, or running contests and giveaways, the team can attract and engage potential customers, driving them toward the sales funnel.
