So you joined the craze. You finally con­verted to our side and find your­self evan­ge­liz­ing the very net­works and appli­ca­tions you once doubted. You go back to your desk, ready to restruc­ture your Q2 goals in hopes of suc­cess­fully cap­i­tal­iz­ing on social media.

Enter panic. Who should you put in charge of your social media efforts? Do you need an entire team? Should you hire new peo­ple? What qual­i­ties should they pos­sess? Sud­denly you real­ize you are not only out of touch with social media itself you are also at a loss for how to appro­pri­ately man­age the work­load asso­ci­ated with it.

You are not alone. In fact you are the major­ity. Just like all new mar­ket­ing trends before it, social media has brought with it con­fu­sion on how to del­e­gate com­pany resources and struc­ture a suc­cess­ful team. You aren’t sure what qual­i­ties and skills are needed to man­age social media. You aren’t sure if you should be shift­ing the pri­or­i­ties of your in-house mar­keters or if you should you be hir­ing interns. After you have a staff allo­cated you are left won­der­ing how much com­pany time you should be devot­ing. You are lit­er­ally engulfed with ques­tions, with no life­line, no call-a-friend option, and (gasp!) no Google SERPs to scan for an answer.

When faced with this inevitable dilemma, a best prac­tice is to take a step back and ask, “What is best for my com­pany?” Unlike its pre­de­ces­sors social media has yet to pub­lish a best prac­tice guide­book. Instead you need to eval­u­ate a few key ques­tions and when doing so, really try to design a per­son­al­ized approach toward social media management.

Begin by defin­ing your goals

First ask your­self: What skills are needed for your social media ini­tia­tives? There are somegen­eral ones you should be look­ing for—relationship build­ing, holis­tic mar­ket­ing approach, exper­i­men­tal, etc. How­ever, when decid­ing on the skill sets you need to have on your team, you should turn your atten­tion back to the spe­cific initiatives.

For exam­ple, if you are look­ing to infil­trate a rich-media space to attract a new user type, such as YouTube, you should look for a cre­ative mind, with a tech heavy back­ground and an eye for edit­ing or if you are build­ing out groups to attract friends, fol­low­ers, and evan­ge­lists, you should be look­ing for community-oriented types with a strong writ­ing abil­ity. You need to really nail down your goals for social media and assign peo­ple accord­ing to the skills each media chan­nel demands.

After you know the type of per­son you need, you should ask your­self: How much time do these ini­tia­tives demand? In my opin­ion it’s best to start by tak­ing some­one on your team and assign­ing a few smaller projects. Give your­self a few months of test­ing and col­lect some data to help you decide how best to hire for your goals. It’s key to have a more con­crete social media agenda before hir­ing and allo­cat­ing your team.  The trial run will enable you to decide if you need to add an intern, or hire a full-time employee, or a cou­ple. Per­haps you should out­source all together? Once you know what you need, you will be able to stack your team for success.

There is a lot to con­sider. Try to keep per­spec­tive and remind your­self that social media itself is still evolv­ing. Pack­ag­ing together the per­fect man­age­ment team on your first try is unlikely.

Most impor­tantly don’t for­get the qual­i­ties that have always been, and will always be, cru­cial to a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing team—innovation, being aware of the user, and ROI-focused. Social media lends itself to the first two, and it is up to you and your team to trans­late them into a bot­tom line gain.

I’m won­der­ing if any­one out there has any suc­cess with devel­op­ing an inter­nal strat­egy to hir­ing for a social media team? If so, I would love it if you shared, what is work­ing for all of you?
Joanna Lord is a social mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant and founder of Your­Job­Stop, the job resources board. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Joanna or leave a com­ment below.