Alex Knapp of Forbes wrote an article “Can Only Millennials Manage Your Social Media?” In it, he takes issue with an article written by Cathryn Sloane in which she asserts that only folks under 25 can work on social media projects because “…we spent our adolescence growing up with social media.
We were around long enough to see how life worked without it but had it thrown upon us at an age where the ways to make the best/correct use of it came most naturally to us.”
It’s ironic that I came across that debate when I did because I was just having lunch with a prospect who said that his social media manager was divorced with grown children and dove into social media later in life as a means to reconnect.
Thanks to her job, she’s now connected practically 24/7.
Social media managers, young or old, need to have certain attributes in order to do their job well. My list of those must-haves:
Conversational writing style
Obviously, the person needs to know how to write (and how to edit down to 140 characters). However, the writing style needs to be engaging.
A natural curiosity
One thing I learned as the editor of a company newsletter is that no one is going to offer up content. The social media manager needs to have a natural tendency to pull information out of others, across the organization, to gather content that is engaging.
Self-starter with a high sense of urgency
Social media is all about immediacy. A good social media manager needs to be able to not only get news/ideas/questions out quickly, but also respond within an appropriate timeframe to any comments/questions to further the conversation.
Collaborative personality
Posts can come from anywhere in the organization that news, an opinion or a question for the masses might possibly exist. This person needs to know how to work with different levels of employees to get this information and set agreed-upon priorities for its dissemination.
Bitten by the bug
Your social media managers need to love technology—or at least social media platforms. They need to be posting, monitoring and responding on multiple sites all day long. They’d better love them all—or, maybe better yet, love the way each of them helps your company to make connections.
Whether corporate social media should be managed by young people or by those with more business experience under their belt is really up to the specific needs of the company. However, I’d argue that there are certain attributes that the person should have, whether he/she is old enough to remember The Brady Bunch or not.
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Alison Frederick is the director of business development for WordWrite Communications.
You can email her directly at alison.frederick@wordwritepr.com.
