Contents
A competent social media manager needs to possess a wide variety of abilities to produce captivating social media content that turns followers into devoted consumers, much like any senior marketing position.
Over time, a social media manager’s responsibilities and skill set have grown more intricate. Influencer marketing, platform knowledge, social media outreach, and social customer care are necessary skills for the position. The channel is being impacted by AI’s role in digital marketing, which is something to watch carefully.
We can assist you in determining the fundamental abilities you must develop to pursue a lucrative career in social media management if you’re an aspiring social media manager but are unsure of where to begin.
Topics covered
A social media manager: what is it?
What Does a Social Media Manager Do?
What are the tasks of a Social Media Manager?
Qualifications Required of Social Media Managers
Competencies Required of Social Media Managers
A social media manager: what is it?
A product, brand, business, or even an individual’s social media presence is monitored, managed, filtered, and measured by a Social Media Manager.
This position is sometimes referred to as the “voice of the company” and is also sometimes called “digital and social media manager” or “community manager“. However, the latter term is becoming a little archaic.
What Does a Social Media Manager Do?
Social media managers design and oversee marketing initiatives, company updates, and brand promotions for their organization on various social media platforms. In addition, they are aware of which social media analytics are most useful, how to use tools, and how to reply to inquiries and comments in a way that aligns with the company’s policies and voice. Every day, social media managers create fresh content, pushing the boundaries of new concepts and formats while tracking the effectiveness of those ideas.
They work with other creative departments like marketing and public relations, as well as the sales department, to develop lead-generation campaigns that turn into income. They may report to a Social Media Director (in larger firms) or the Head of content or brand. Keeping up with corporate and industry news, as well as emerging trends, is an essential component of the job.
Qualifications Required of Social Media Managers
A bachelor’s degree in marketing, public relations, or a related field is normally required for Social Media Manager roles, which are in high demand. In the United States, social media managers make an average compensation of more than $57,000, according to Glassdoor.
What are the tasks of a Social Media Manager?
The job is varied and fast-paced, requiring a lot of work in a single day! Among the duties that a social media manager could perform are:
- Create content for several platforms: What you do on Facebook might not translate to TikTok. Examine what content is popular on each platform to see what will fit in there, as well as what your rivals are publishing (videos, gifs, infographics, blogs, etc.).
- Monitor social analytics: To spend your time and money on the correct channels and with the right people, keep an eye on social analytics. Find out whether campaigns are successful (or unsuccessful) across various channels.
- Plan your social media outreach. If you want to advertise a sale or a new product, you might have to start fresh with a campaign.
- Measure and predict ROI: Establish quantifiable objectives for a fresh campaign using pertinent media, then compile results into a report. Utilize a social media campaign calculator to ensure that your goals are met within budget.
- Plan your social media postings. Every platform has a “perfect” time to publish content. For example, Wednesday mornings seem to be the busiest for Instagram users. Planning ensures that content is posted when you’re sleeping and your audience is awake. It also helps to minimize burdens.
- Locate pertinent, well-curated information. A portion of your social media posts ought to address global affairs or breakthroughs that your followers find significant. Investigate and distribute relevant third-party content.
- Interact with your audience: Increasing engagement is the main goal of social media. Thus, address any feedback and answer any questions from clients. Put differently, leverage your social media platforms as a means of providing customer support.
- Review and fill up your content calendar: You must plan your content because life is so fast-paced these days. To remain on top of things, fill up your social media calendar several days or even weeks in advance.
These are but a handful of the duties that you might be required to complete. But keep in mind that every day is different, therefore managing your social media campaigns and content calendar is essential to your success online.
After learning the duties of the position, let’s examine the qualifications that a Social Media Manager ought to possess.
Qualifications Required of Social Media Managers
- Writing
Social media managers write a lot—up to twelve posts a day, at times. Furthermore, writing for each social network calls for a slightly different style. For instance, Facebook can be lighter and more casual, yet LinkedIn demands a more formal tone. Understanding SEO copywriting is also highly beneficial. You need to be able to convey ideas that uplift your audience and are easily understood by them. The Social Media Manager should use writing to strengthen their brand and establish themselves as “the voice” of the business.
Among the significant categories of writing are:- concise and witty headline writing
- captivating openings
- captions for videos and pictures
- Text that is organized for ease of reading—bullets and numbers are essential because customers will skim and scan subtitles!
- Practical tools to improve your writing abilities
- Research
Social media managers need to keep abreast of the constantly evolving landscape of digital and social media. This includes keeping tabs on what your rivals are doing, even daily, and utilizing new measurement and analytics technologies along with global and industry trends.
Social media managers use tools like Feedly, Ahrefs, and BuzzSumo to stay up to date with hot material and set up Google Alerts on popular topics.
In addition to being helpful, the TikTok ‘Discover’ button and the Twitter Trends sidebar can also be used to find relevant topics. - Client Support
Approximately half of consumers who interact with firms on social media do so with reservations about customer service.
Additionally, user engagement varies depending on the platform (albeit social media is often the quickest and easiest way for users to get a response from a brand, thus social media managers should be alert across channels).
Customers frequently turn to social media, particularly with the availability of services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, for assistance in resolving issues or to vent (or praise) about their experiences. Therefore, if no one is available to answer (even on weekends and evenings), their perception of that brand may suffer.
Research Data
In 49% of firms, the marketing team is in charge of providing social customer service.
In a Facebook IQ survey, more than half of participants said they would be more inclined to make a purchase from a business that provides chat customer support.
Messaging platforms save customer interaction costs by sixty percent.
Fifty percent of customers claim that prompt customer care answers affect their decision to buy something.
On social media, 40% of customers anticipate hearing back within an hour, and 79% anticipate hearing anything within 24 hours. - SEO Expertise
In the world of marketing, search engine optimization, or SEO, is now a crucial component of social media and content marketing. SEO can significantly influence your social media material. Understanding this, a skilled social media manager attempts to include SEO in content creation for social media platforms. Including SEO in your strategy can help you reach a wider audience interested in your goods and services, which will increase the number of potential clients.
Think about the following queries when considering a social media and SEO combo:
Are you aware of the link between higher search engine results pages (SERPs) and social media exposure?
Are you familiar with long- and short-tail keywords for search engine optimization?
How are you going to use social media to promote your blog posts?
What kind of material is best for enhancing SEO, do you know?
Are you aware of how increasing website traffic affects sales for your business? - Design & Creativity
Though written content will make up the majority of your social media posts, you should also focus on creating compelling visual content, particularly for platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The correct picture, video, gif, illustration, or photo has the potential to be shared hundreds or even thousands of times, therefore it’s important to learn how to make content for social networking sites that is tailored to each platform.
Design expertise is useful for Social Media Managers in order to produce eye-catching graphics to go along with posts. If Know Your Meme is fit for your business, it can be useful to stay up to date with the daily creation of new memes.
Your social media approach must include video, so developing your abilities in that area will be quite beneficial. With the abundance of video content available (3.7 million videos are reportedly uploaded to YouTube every day), it’s critical to use creativity in your video marketing and to understand the preferences and needs of your target audience.
With the explosive growth of visual platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the caliber of your films is crucial. Make sure you communicate with your audience and convey your business’s message clearly by using brand storytelling on social media. - Analytical data
It’s critical to evaluate whether your efforts are yielding results if you’re investing time and energy in using social media platforms to raise awareness and encourage participation. Here’s where data can help.
Your social media data analysis will enable you to make inferences about each platform as well as the material you share. You could respond to the following questions:
Which social media sites are encouraging interaction?
Which kind of content—images, videos, and memes—works best?
What kinds of posts—such as surveys and how-to videos—get people engaged?
Do you observe periods of increased or decreased engagement?
Which networks should you be spending more or less time on?
You may track data to obtain social media post metrics, carry out a competitive study, and keep an eye on conversations—a practice known as social listening—by utilizing a variety of excellent tools in addition to GA4 and the analytics features offered by each social network. These consist of Hootsuite, BuzzSumo, and SparkToro. - Social Media Know-How
A social media manager must possess excellent social media abilities, even though it may seem apparent! You’ll need a few years of experience under your belt if you’re hoping to work at a large corporation, even though these can be gained through research and experimenting over time.
To surpass your rivals, you’ll need to possess the following kinds of knowledge:
Understanding which content is most effective on each platform
Recognizing the optimal hours and days for every platform, as well as their variations
Being aware of how to optimize content for different platforms
familiarity with social media performance and statistics
Capacity to captivate a crowd using the greatest free audience listening resources - Making a budget
A social media manager must be able to create and oversee a budget for both sponsored and organic media across social networks.
The following are the kinds of expenses you should budget for:
Do you need to set aside money for an outside or freelance content creator?
Influencers: If you use influencers, have you allocated funds for sponsorship or the associated costs?
Paid media: Depending on your audience and degree of involvement, you will need to set aside money for paid media across networks.
Software and tools: Set aside money for any software or tools used for social media monitoring or data analysis.
Your budget should not be fixed; instead, it should be reviewed and examined frequently to ensure that your money is going toward the initiatives that will help you achieve your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as increasing brand recognition or generating leads. - Flexibility
Being adaptable is crucial in any marketing position, but managing social media requires it even more. Because social media is changing so quickly, it’s imperative to adapt.
Posting on a schedule is insufficient. You should be able to experiment with new features and make adjustments in response to trends, ongoing testing, and analytics from your postings.
To make the most out of your social media presence, you must be adaptable enough to attempt new things once you have the analytics. You may rapidly ascertain which kinds of copy and photos are most effective for your business by conducting A/B testing, which involves creating posts in several formats and with various images.
Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash