You’re making a big mistake if you hire a Social Media Consultant without any technology skills.
Well, there’s a controversial statement to kick things off!
Maybe you’re a large business and you have a whole team of people looking after your needs online.
In this case, your specialist in social media consulting wouldn’t necessarily need the breadth of skills that I’m going to talk about, but it’s still preferable if they do.
To be successful online, you need to be able to market your products and services correctly and doing this requires technology skills.  You can’t avoid it!
So, here are six technology skills your Social Media Consultant should have:
1. A Good Understanding of the Analytics Tools Available
You hear a lot of talk about how difficult it is to measure social media, but it’s an awful lot easier to measure activity online than to try to measure the impact of someone driving by a billboard!
The tools that are available are getting better and we can certainly measure a lot of social media activity now.
Your Social Media Consultant needs to be very comfortable with opening up Google Analytics, setting up goals, monitoring trends and improving results. Â They should be monitoring conversions from different channels to see which social media channels are most effective and making the adjustments as required.
They should be looking at assisted conversions to see which conversions took place that were assisted through social media activity.
They should also be taking out platform-specific tools and identifying what is working and not working and helping companies evaluate, in monetary terms, the value achieved through social media management.
2. An Understanding of Search Optimization
You don’t need to be an SEO guru any more to optimize your content for Google. Â If you are an SEO guru, you’re in danger of over-optimizing your content, which may affect your rankings in the future.
However, a consultant should be able to review your blog content and recognize major issues with its optimization.  If they don’t, then you could be writing all that wonderful content and getting a lot less traffic than you deserve.
If you look at your Analytics, you’ll probably find that the majority of your traffic does not come from social media, it comes from Google.  Social is great for getting people to hear about you but most of your traffic will end up coming from Google.
3. A Knowledge of Social Optimization
The optimization of content for social media is also increasingly important skill your social media consultant should have.  This can be just as basic as understanding the most important image sizes that you need to share on social media media channels.  It can also be more advanced knowledge where they understand the importance of adding tags to your content, specific to each platform, to help the platforms to understand more about the content shared.
For example, when using a tool from Know.em to identify issues with social media optimization, the following post scores 100%. This is because the Open Graph tags are all created correctly for the content.
Does your consultant ensure that these are set correctly for each of the social networks you share content out to?
4. A Knowledge of Social Media Tools
A very good knowledge of the range of social media tools available is also essential in social media consulting.  Your consultant could be working two hours a day sharing content when they should be automating half of it using the tools available and reducing the time they are billing you from two hours to one hour a day.
Your consultant may not be aware of the social media analytics tools that will help them understand what works and doesn’t work, which would help them to implement corrective action.
Without a good knowledge of the tools available, the social media marketing experts are shooting in the dark.
5. Strong Knowledge of Email Marketing and Marketing Automation
Unless you have the budget to bring in another consultant who will look after your email marketing and marketing automation, then you need your Social Media Consultant to have a good knowledge of these things, including an understanding of the best tools available for this.
Email marketing is an essential part of any social media marketing strategy and it’s very unusual for a business involved in social media marketing to not have any email marketing.  To me, email marketing is a another way of socialising with your audience.
What are their recommendations for email marketing – MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact etc.?
What are their recommendations for a marketing automation tool – OntraPort, InfusionSoft, Marketo etc.
Even if you are not ready for a marketing automation tool now, when your audience grows you will need to move to a marketing automation tool and it’s a big bonus if your social media consultant already has expertise in this area.
6. Ability to Optimize Your Conversion Process
Your Social Media Consultant should do a good job at getting out the word about your content, and this will drive traffic back to your site.  But what if your conversion rates are low?  A conversion to you could be a sign up to your newsletter, a trial for your product or service, or a purchase.  There will be a process that leads to conversions.
- What is the point of getting all this traffic if you don’t get good conversions?
- Which split testing tools are recommended by your consultant?
- What landing page software are they recommending?
- What split tests are they setting up?
- Which steps of your funnel are causing issues?
Your consultant needs to know the answers to these questions.
Social Media Consultant Important Skills Summary
In an ideal world, you will bring in different people with different areas of expertise but, if your budget doesn’t allow this, then your Social Media Consultant will need broad technology skills. Â In this article we have highlighted just some of the skills required.
Do you agree with what we have outlined above? Â Would you add any other skills to the list?
We would love to hear your feedback below.
