Top 5 Qualities of a Social Media Consultant

Most companies are hiring social media staff and consultants these days. Having been involved in social media now for the last three years, as well as hiring both consultants and staff, I have some definate recommendations so that you can get more than you hoped for.

1. Check their following. Whether you are hiring an individual, a contractor or a company, check out the number of followers they have. Unless they can show they’ve at least attracted 1000 followers either on twitter or on Facebook, ignore them. They haven’t played enough with social media to know how to effectively use it. The best will have over 10,000 followers, but they’ll be more expensive of course.
2. Make sure they do the work themselves. This applies mostly to hiring individuals and consultants. You can throw a rock across the streets these days and hit a social media consultant, but most of them only understand it at a strategic level and then usually only because there is so much material on social media. Find those people who have actually built their own followings and not merely managed others.
3. They need to be creative and analytical. If they’ve never used tools to measure the impact of their followers on a business, then they don’t know how to leverage their audience toward taking desirable actions.
4. Are they connected? This is slightly tougher to analyze, but they need to be connected to and have influencing capabilities with other influencers. Even better is if those influencers are in your industry. It will help spread your message much further, much faster.
5. Does their online personality match yours? This is very important because they will be a very visible part of your company. If their own tweets, Facebook posts and images don’t resonate with you, then anything they do for you will be a challenge. Unless they are a professional actor, it’s hard for people to fake a personality.

Hope this helps you in your search. These days you can no longer ignore social media if you want to grow your organization. This critical role is very important to get right.