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I have been at so many internet marketing events where every other person is a social media consultant. So I ask, "If you hired a social media consultant, what factors or qualities are you looking for?"

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Dani AI

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— good question. Building on ’s point about creativity + execution and ’s warning about polished-but-phony portfolios, here is a compact, practical guide to separate useful consultants from noise.

  • Core skills to expect

    • Strategy that ties to business goals and named KPIs (traffic, leads, sales, not just "buzz").
    • Repeatable content process: editorial calendar, approval workflow, asset specs.
    • Community operations: moderation rules, escalation path, SLAs for responses.
    • Measurement and attribution: knows how to show which actions caused which results.
    • Paid social know-how: testing plan, target audiences, budget pacing.
    • Clear communication and documentation: weekly reports, one-page case studies, and shared dashboards.
    • Data ownership and access: you keep the accounts and raw data.

  • What to ask for before hiring

    • One-page case studies (for each example) with Objective, Audience, Strategy, Tactics, Budget, Timeline, Role, and Measurable Results (numbers and dates).
    • Two references you can contact and one analytics export or read-only view showing the claimed results.
    • A short paid trial (2–4 weeks) with a small ad spend and a single, agreed KPI so you can judge execution and reporting.

  • Simple hiring workflow

    1. Screen by case-study quality, not slide decks.
    2. Interview: ask them to walk you through a real campaign end-to-end, including failures and what they learned.
    3. Run the paid trial with a defined scope and acceptance criteria.
    4. Sign a scope-of-work that specifies deliverables, reporting cadence, access rights, payment terms, and exit conditions.

Red flags: promises of guaranteed virality, reluctance to share references or analytics, focus on vanity metrics only (followers/likes), or pressure to buy followers/engagement.

Short and practical: expect strategy + execution + measurement, verify with concrete case studies and access to data, and prove fit with a small, measurable pilot.

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Member Avatar for Dani

Someone who can understand my product or service and be creative enough to come up with unique ways to spread buzz about it and make it viral ... and then actually execute those ideas with positive results. Or at least (in the hiring process), see an existing portfolio where such was done for other companies with similar business models.

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Well thank you Dani. Very good point. I do wonder how many of these social media consultants actually have a portfolio.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Dani nailed it on the head. As for how many social media consultants have a portfolio, I doubt very many and of the ones that do I would wonder how many of the samples they would show you are actual work they did for real companies or if they created samples to fill their portfolio. As sad as that sounds, it does happen. I used to deal with a similar situation with so-called PR consultants back in the 90's. They would show me samples with company names and dates redacted ' to preserve the privacy agreement they signed with their other clients.' Then when I told them that I would need some references from some of the companies that the samples come from and they start to stammer and stall and I knew they were full of it.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

I think this is an often seen problem among many type of "trends" professionals. There is no official schooling and no licensure so it helps make this issue more prevalent.

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