5 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Social Media Consultant

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTCheck to make sure the consultant that you hire is active on their own social media. Huge amounts of followers don’t always mean success. Focus on how engaging they are with their own audience.Social media is a fast-moving industry. Ask your potential consultant how many conferences they have attended or what they read for updates. You will want someone who remains up to date on all industry news!Although there isn’t a qualification for just social media, you will want someone knowledgeable. Ask what qualifications they have that are suited for the industry. Do they have a marketing degree? Or, have they taken any courses from influencers in the industry?You will want to see examples of past work your consultant has completed for other clients. You will want to see what specific campaigns they have done and what the result was. Don’t be afraid to ask for ROIs and results!Look at the consultant’s testimonials. Better yet, ask to speak with some of their existing clients. You will want to know what the relationship is like and how they feel the project has gone.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Hiring a social media consultant is extremely important for your business. You must choose wisely! Make sure that above all else they are able to interact and keep up with your followers, always engaging them. This is the most important part of social media marketing.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSQuestion 1: Do they practice what they preach? – 04:11Question 2: How do they keep up to date with industry changes? – 06:39Question 3: What qualifications do they have? – 08:19Question 4: Can they show examples of their best work? – 10:04Question 5: Are there any testimonials or can they provide contact information for prior clients? – 11:59LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODETeresa’s blog post about questions to ask when hiring a consultantTranscript below Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I'm your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you've had a really good week, and I am really excited to talk about this week's podcast episode, because it's something that I am super passionate about.If you've listened to some of the others where I've got a bit of passion out, I tend to talk quite fast, and I tend to record the podcast really quickly, so I'm kind of hoping that I'm going to do that this week, because I am actually away with my family on holiday. We have brought the children just to Wales.I say just to Wales, that's really bad, isn't it? It's not just to Wales, Wales is lovely, and the children are having a great time. We're spending time at the beach, we're going swimming, and we're just hanging out as a family, which we don't do very often, if I'm honest. We all tend to have our own lives.I know that sounds weird, but when I think about my step-son who's 15, he spends a huge amount of his time up in his room, or playing on his games, or on his phone. My eight year old, who is eight going on 18, she has got her iPad, and they tend to get so wrapped up in their lives, as do we as adults, so whether it's doing work, or normal adult stuff, we don't often spend a huge amount of time just all sitting in the same room and talking.This is what we've been doing this week and it's lovely, so we're having a really fabulous time, but I've kicked them out this morning, because obviously one thing I can't do with them around is record a podcast. They've gone off to the park, and I'm here recording. So like I said, I'm hoping it's going to be a easy one to record, because I'm super passionate about it, and therefore it won't take all day. Let's see.Okay, so today what we're going to be talking about is something really close to my heart. When I first started my business, one of the things that I was really struggling with, and I think I've talked about this before, is that there were social media people who were charging good money to businesses to do their social media, and they weren't very good. I was really concerned that when I started telling the world that I was going to offer social media consultancy, or training, or my agency were going to do the social media for people, I was super concerned that I didn't want people to think that I was a fraud, or I wasn't very good, or I didn't know what I was talking about.When I first set up, I worked really hard to get really good at this, and I went and found all the world's experts, I did loads of training, I went back to my initial marketing degree to see how obviously that would help with doing social media and profiling customers, and that sort of thing. Like I said, I worked super hard to ensure that I was offering a good quality service.But there was still lots of people out there offering social media that possibly weren't at the standard they should have been, or that their clients thought they were. Some time ago, I wrote a blog post, which I am now going to talk through as the podcast, about the questions you should ask when taking on a trainer or a consultant for social media.If you are working in social media and you are a consultant, then this might be a great podcast for you to listen to in terms of the types of things that you might want to make sure that you tick these boxes. If you're not a social media person and you're a business, if you ever do think about taking on a social media person, then again, this is hopefully going to be really helpful for you.I went through these five questions that you must ask. I'm going to talk you through these today, and hopefully by the end of this, you're going to have a really fair idea of if and when you take someone on, or if you are a social media person, that whether you or they tick these five boxes. Let's get started. Question 1: Do they practice what they preach? Question number one, do they practise what they preach? What I mean by this, is have you been and had a look at their social media? Have you checked out their follower numbers? Have you seen how quick they are to respond, to read posts, or to read tweet content? Do they get back to people? Are they active on it? Are their followers interacting with them?Let me break this down a little bit. The first thing that most people will look at is follower numbers. Depending on the platform, these can be either easy or harder to get. If you were not so moral about this, then you could even go and buy followers.I've seen some accounts with huge followers, that I've thought to myself, "Oh my gosh, how on earth have they got those followers, they've done three posts?" In fact, I had a great example of this. There was a guy who contacted me for training on social media, and he wanted me to train him so that he could go and do social media for a living. "Absolutely fine, not a problem with that," I thought. I went to check out his social media just to have a look at him before I responded, and his Facebook page had something like 5,000 followers.Now, a Facebook page is actually quite difficult. Unless you're paying in terms of to do like adverts, but even still, it would take a bit of an effort to get that many followers on Facebook. His Facebook page had 5,000 followers, and he had done two posts. Literally, two posts, and one of those was updating his cover photo, or something like that.So there was no way on earth that these were genuine, real followers. And also, those two posts had no interaction on them at all, and he hadn't posted for what looked like weeks. I just think it's not just about the follower numbers, it's not just about how many people follow their different social accounts, it's also about how they're interacting, whether they're real, alive, what their posts look like, what they say about them. Are they real? Are they human behind their posts? Do they practise what they preach? Are they doing their own social media? Are they doing their own social media as well as their promising to do yours?Now, I get it. Lots of people will say, "Well, I don't have time to do my own, because I'm doing everybody else's," and I'm in exactly the same position, but actually for me, that's where my business changed. When I started to prove that I could maintain my own, then suddenly, that seemed to make quite a big difference. Question 2: How do they keep up to date with industry changes? Question number two to ask them, how do they keep up to date with industry changes? Now again, I've said before, we are in one of the fastest moving industries in the world. Social media moves at the speed of light, things change all the time, platforms evolve, they remove things, they bring in things, trends change, so how are they keeping up to date with things like that? That's a question I would ask them.There were a few different ways in which they could be doing this. Are they doing courses or training? Are they attending events? Now, events are a really good one. I think by asking them what was the last conference they attended, I really think that is a worthwhile type of question.In the UK, there aren't masses of social media conferences. There is Social Day, which happens in London. There's also MarketEd.Live, which is a general more marketing conference, but certainly has lots of social media aspects about it, and there's a new conference that's literally just been announced, which I'm so excited about, because I've been asked to speak at it. It's called Atomicon, and it's by Andrew and Pete, who