As a business owner, one of the most important skills you can adopt is the ability to effectively delegate tasks and responsibilities to the right employees. Not only does this free up your schedule to focus on other things, but it also allows your employees to grow.
The Dual Benefits of Delegating Social
In theory, delegating social media to your employees should provide two overarching benefits to your company. Let’s take a look:
1. Allows You to Focus on Growth
There are two types of tasks every business must take on. The first set of tasks is necessary to sustain the business, but doesn’t encourage growth. The second set of tasks is also necessary, but simultaneously spurs growth. As a business owner, you must delegate the former while focusing your attention to the latter set.
Field Trip, a Brooklyn-based beef jerky company, provides a good example of this. In the early days, the company’s co-founders would ride their bikes to local grocery stores and conduct in-store demos in the hopes of signing up new accounts. They successfully signed up 60 stores within the first three months, but soon realized that this wasn’t a sustainable model for long-term growth. They ultimately decided to delegate this task.
“Even though it was a very important part of our business, delegating that job to someone else freed up our time so we could focus on growth and building our bottom line,” said Matthew Levey, one of the co-founders. The company now has products in more than 5,000 stores nationwide.
2. Allows Employees to Grow
The second major benefit of delegation is that it allows employees to grow. If your employees are always handling menial tasks and never given important responsibilities, how are they supposed to improve? By entrusting them with critical tasks, you can effectively mold them into the leaders you want in your organization.
Dragon Products Ltd., a leading manufacturer in the energy and industrial industries, is a prime example of a company that understands the power of delegation in growing employees. As the company’s core values read, “A spirit of entrepreneurship encourages ownership of tasks and processes from the smallest to the biggest and the simplest to the most complex.” In other words, the company believes employees shouldn’t just perform tasks – they should own them.
Tips for Proper Delegation
While delegation happens at all levels, let’s briefly examine what it looks like in terms of social media efforts. Here are some helpful tips:
- Be involved in the big picture. Regardless of how skilled the employees are, you still need to be involved in the big picture of social. Any time major campaigns are being created or launched, you need to be involved.
- Delegate, but oversee. When you give your employees the opportunity to handle social media, you want to make sure you’re still overseeing their work. The viral nature of social media means one ill-timed post can create weeks of backlash.
- Choose someone you trust. Any time you delegate a large task, you need to entrust one person to oversee it. This prevents you from having to communicate with a handful of employees. This individual is your “point person,” so to speak, and should provide you with regular updates.
- Provide support and training. You can’t hand over tasks and then walk away. Provide support and training in the initial weeks so that the employee understands you want them to succeed.
Delegating social media is a smart choice. It’s such a time-consuming task that it prevents key decision makers from focusing on big-picture growth. With that being said, you don’t want to hand off social media without a strategy. Use the tips mentioned in this article, and develop a plan that allows everyone to succeed.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1PMMQ53 via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1TdlkfV
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