Jim Tobin: One of the questions we get a lot as a social media agency is, what should our internal team structure be? Meaning on the brand side, how should we structure our own social media management team? And we've seen a lot of different configurations. We'll go through some of those today. But let's start off with a few things. Taylor, as you think about team structure, what sort of factors come into play? Taylor Glymph: Yeah, I think one of the first things that come into play that come to mind is that no company feels that they have enough resources for what social media requires. So from a large team to a small team, oftentimes you're hearing about how they feel like they don't have the resources to keep up with the speed of social or the changes that are happening in social. And even connected to that is that the sizes of these companies don't necessarily always correlate to the size of the team. We've worked with smaller brands that may not be a household name yet, but have large teams. And we worked with large retailers that you think would have an extremely large team that don't necessarily, they have fewer internal resources. It's not always the case, but it does happen a lot more than you'd think. And so I think there's always that balance of understanding what kind of team you need. Jim Tobin: Yeah. Taylor Glymph: to run your company socially. Jim Tobin: Yeah, the other factors that I see coming to this is, does the internal leadership buy into it? How much do they think social matters? For some brands, literally 100% of their marketing is social media, for others it's a small fraction. That gets to the size of the team. What's the customer demand? We work with some very large retail brands, they're getting hit on social constantly and somebody's gotta deal with that. And the last one is sort of the complexity of what you're selling. I mean, sometimes B2B brands, have really complicated products that need to be explained by sales engineers who almost come over to the social team. So sometimes B2B brands have bigger social teams than even B2C brands. But let's talk, let's get into it Lisa, let's talk about really the structures we might see. Let me share a couple images for our friends here. Alright, so now we see lisa: Yeah, Jim Tobin: what lisa: so Jim Tobin: we commonly lisa: in Jim Tobin: call lisa: this Jim Tobin: the lisa: structure, Jim Tobin: one-man show. lisa: it's actually more common than one would think. You know, sometimes we get, I'll get a call in business development or even just talking with our clients. And you find someone who is overseeing social media. They usually have a title that's either social media manager. Sometimes they're also the digital manager or the marketing manager of the brand. So they're wearing multiple hats, usually in general, but then even on the social media side, they're wearing multiple hats. They usually feel like they need a lot of things and they're trying to be supported internally by the internal marketing teams, but often those internal Taylor Glymph: Beautiful. lisa: marketing teams are also very strapped. So when you think about, you know, design team that might be in-house, a lot of things that we hear in this model are that they don't have enough time for social media content creation. They are able to do it on the other side, but they don't have enough time for social media content creation. And so what it means is this person becomes as versatile as they can, but as you can imagine, social is always changing. pulls them so far into the weeds as well that they usually need some kind of strategic support because they're so far executing that they can't even kind of rise above and think about why they're doing social media in the first place. I'd like to say that this is not the most common structure, but I would say, I would like to bet that for a good many of companies still, even though we're 16 years as an agency later, We still see this and it's very common. And like Taylor said, even larger brands, you'd be surprised that this person might be focused more on social. So they might have that social media title now, but they still are relying on customer care to do a lot of the community engagement. And they wish that they could do more video content production, but they're kind of strapped with the assets that they have. So that's. This is very common. So if you are one man show, you're not alone or one woman show, you're not alone. And that leads us to kind of the second structure that we see, which is becoming a little bit more common as the social media managers internally are kind of saying, hey, I've had enough. A lot of them are making kind of the case that they need more resources to support them. And I failed to mention this, but in the earlier model, sometimes we also see some different agency support structures that are also supporting them. So you might have internal brand teams, but you also might have a creative agency, or a social media agency, or a media buying agency that is supporting them with some of those functions. As we move to mid-scale teams, this is where we see two to three internal resources. And we still see that social media manager, but we see that either they're supported by full or part-time resources in two additional areas. The most common ones that we see them supported by is a dedicated community manager. This is key for clients that have a lot of inbound customer comments and customer care, and they really need someone to be on the channels more full time. It also can be a role that's helpful if a social media manager wants to play a more strategic role and they don't want to be the ones always publishing content or optimizing all these different assets for all these different channels, because now even if you have a great content producer, you still might need to syndicate one piece of content across four very different channels, and that takes time. So this community manager can offload some of that from the social media manager. Typically, we see content production is still, even in this model, often not full time for social. It's usually a shared resource internally. So again, it might be someone who has half of their time to social media content, but often still not full time even in this model. And that's just because creative resources are always in demand. And the demands of social are increasing in terms of video content. So even if they've got a great content producer, now we're hearing that they can't create short form TikToks or reels. And that is a challenge that they're trying to overcome in their content production. So, you know, this even with a mid scale team, we work with a lot of mid scale teams, and you might say, well, don't they have everything covered and... they don't, they still need help with paid media, reporting, often even content production. And then the full scale team, as we move into that, often we see... The main differences in the two are the community managers. There might be multiple community managers if there needs to be a community manager that's only focused on reactive engagement. So typically you'll see this for large brands that get a lot of inbound reactive volume needing multiple community managers for that. or maybe even a company that has multiple divisions that they need to support with social. They might have multiple community managers working with those divisions, getting assets and being that internal resource. In this model, there may be a full-time content producer for social, even though I will say that's still fairly rare from what we see. And at times we have seen an influencer manager be part of this team. Often that influencer manager may be split with PR still. So again, not always a full-time resource, but still a resource that's managing influencer relationships. And then again, these people might be supported by additional team members that may come from either an agency or in-house. So if there is like a broader marketing analytics team, they might be supported with that. But often we see analytics is just not supported across the board very well. When we talk about... roles internally, we tend to see a lack of understanding how did everything that we just produce work? And that usually is because the social media manager and all these team members are highly specialized in managing communities or producing content. And it's just hard to find someone that can take all of the social data and kind of analyze it. So we typically don't see those roles, but here's just a snapshot of the three most common that I just went through. In case you're curious, like I said, I think the most common ones we see are the one man show or the mid scale team, although we do work with several brands that are just larger brands that might have the full scale team model and still even need an agency. So you still see like, just a lot of different hybrid approaches of all of this in terms of agency support and how agency support might be tacked on to any of those structures. Taylor Glymph: One thing that I really find interesting about that, Lisa, is that social media manager being carried throughout each of the models, because especially when you think about it from working with other teams, agencies, other partners, that having that major point of contact that's got their ear to the ground about this particular brand, what's happening on their socials, is a key part of the process and kind of making sure that person... is interacting with the other different lisa: Yeah, Taylor Glymph: partners lisa: I think Taylor Glymph: and lisa: that's Taylor Glymph: vendors lisa: a really Taylor Glymph: to lisa: important Taylor Glymph: make sure lisa: point that Taylor Glymph: that lisa: you make Taylor Glymph: messaging lisa: is that Taylor Glymph: is lisa: when Taylor Glymph: consistent. lisa: people are like, where should Jim Tobin: Yeah. lisa: we start? What kind of resources do we need? And I would say from hands down, having a strong social media manager internally is key, but not expecting them to do every single piece of execution and making sure that they are senior level enough that they can understand and guide directionally and strategically. the execution because when you have someone who's so junior and you're putting them in that role and they have multiple divisions saying, post this on social media, or why are you not posting on social media? It's easy to kind of do a lot of activities and wear yourself out and be overworked and burdened, but not have a lot to show for it. And then on the agency side for us, it's really helpful to have that key internal partner that's guiding us in what the... brand or direction is of the content strategy so that there's a little bit more insight from the brand side to make sure that social is really hitting everything that it needs to hit. So we find it being helpful having someone that has a few years of experience at least and also can work internally and understand what's really important for the organization rather than just kind of having someone. that you're like, this person knows social media really well and they were our intern and they should continue to do it as a social media manager. I think that doesn't really set Jim Tobin: Alright. lisa: your organization up for success at times, even though they might be highly skilled and they should continue to help execute, they just might need a little bit more mid-level support to kind of help navigate the internal atmosphere. Jim Tobin: Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because a brand would never let an intern do their trade show exhibit or the print ad they're running in the trade magazine or, you know, any of that stuff. But if social is being done well, it's delivering even more eyeballs than those things. And there, you know, some brands just don't seem to get that yet. But and as Lisa said, for all three of those models, there's roles for agencies to play. We typically get. leaned on for content creation, paid media, reporting, influencer, and general strategy because it's really hard to be tactical and you've only worked on one brand for the last three years and really know what 10 other brands are doing. So I hope that was helpful to you. Lisa, great job running them through, those one-man teams knowing what to ask for when they get to move to two or even three, and the twos and threes going to know what to ask for when they get to go. A little bit more head cap. So thanks so much.