A social media manager is usually in charge of making a company’s social media strategy and getting more people to use the company’s social media accounts. Social media managers often need to be good storytellers, have an eye for design, and be able to tell what an audience likes and what they don’t like in order to do their jobs well. So, in this article, we’ll answer all of your questions about what a social media manager does.
Creating and managing social media campaigns, providing content, reviewing data, and interacting with important stakeholders in a company are all typical responsibilities of social media managers.
The position of social media manager is exciting and difficult. You’ll be juggling a variety of tasks as you produce, publish, and report on content. They typically include:
- Creative copywriting
- Graphic design
- Videography and photo editing
- Content planning
- Content strategy,
- frequently in collaboration with the wider marketing department
- Community administration, analysis of content performance, and reporting
Although the specifics can vary per firm, being a social media manager frequently involves a combination of education and experience.
Firstly;
Think about a Degree
According to the BLS, social media managers often have a bachelor’s degree. You can get ready for the position by majoring in a subject like marketing, journalism, or communications that can help you develop your business or communication abilities.
Attending college may also open up a variety of options for you to acquire specific professional experience. Search for internships, volunteer positions, or part-time jobs using the resources provided by your career center. Instead, consider joining a club and helping out with their social media campaigns.
Here are the fundamental stages to obtaining your first position as a social media manager, regardless of where you are beginning from or what your ideal position would entail.
You already enjoy using social media. But you really need to have your finger on the pulse to be a professional in social media.
Immerse yourself in the social media world as you look for your first job or customer.
#2. Acquire Expertise
The democratic nature of social media is one of its most attractive features. Everyone may dive in and start trying, regardless of where they are in their path.
To gain experience, you could decide to handle other accounts. Why not collaborate and support your friend’s artistic ceramic or textile endeavors by promoting them together? Alternately, search for co-ops and internships, or try bartering your services for goods from small business owners.
#3. Establish a Portfolio
Showcase your experience in a portfolio to share with clients and prospective employers as you gain it.
Work you’ve done on social media for clients, prior employers, or for yourself can be included. You can also provide “spec work” for companies you respect, which is free, uncommissioned work done to showcase your talents.
#4. Maintain a Resume
Your portfolio performs a lot of the labor-intensive work in the creative industries. Clients will nevertheless request a resume, so make sure it stands out.
Have fun and get creative with the design—just make sure it’s still readable—because the point is to stand out from the pack.
#5. Connect
To locate clients and possible employers, whether you’re a freelancer or an internal social media manager, you’ll need to market yourself. In 2023, attending events with a drink in your hand isn’t the only way to network (though you can certainly do that, too). As a social media manager, social media is the finest place to network!
#1. Developing a Plan
As social media managers, there are a variety of objectives we may choose to concentrate on, including signups, traffic, engagement, and brand exposure. Making ensuring that your social media goals are in line with your entire business goals is another difficulty. A strong social media strategy is essential in this situation.
#2. Active
A high-impact duty for any brand is building a happy and engaged audience in addition to creating and curating content. This makes it easier to build a base of devoted fans who will eventually aid in the social media promotion of your good or service.
#3. Making
Content production is at the core of every social media manager’s job. Your social network content is what keeps users reading, participating, and interacting with your brand. It’s important to get better at making different kinds of content, like videos, GIFs, infographics, and more.
#4. Curating
Curating can have a significant impact on your overall social media results, depending on the different types of content you share on social media. Having a wide variety of sources to choose from and the time to read through them all to find the information that fits your brand the best are necessary for finding and sorting through other people’s stuff.
#5. Planning
Another high-impact chore that has a huge impact on your brand is arranging material in advance. Using a social media management platform that enables you to post even when you’re not online will make your life much easier and increase your results because we’ve frequently discovered that our posts perform best early in the morning, in the evenings, and on weekends.
Do you foresee a career in social media management? If so, you will need to develop some experience. Here is how someone without experience can get a job in social media:
#1. Choose a Platform or Sector that Interests You
For the majority of social media positions, having a specialty can help you stand out in a sea of applicants. You might be an expert in a certain field or industry, or you might become a leader on a certain social media platform.
#2. With Free Resources, Develop Your Fundamental Knowledge
You have a lot of studying ahead of you if you want to work in social media but lack experience. Do not fear; there are many free resources available to you that can provide you with the fundamental knowledge of social media that you will require in order to advance your profession.
#3. Create Your Own Channel or Profile to Work Out Your Skills
Perfecting a skill requires practice, and learning social media is no exception. Create your own social media presence to gain experience. Discover what doesn’t work when it comes to increasing your following and leaving a mark on the social platforms you’ve selected.
Nothing else will accelerate your social media learning as much as this. Also, you’ll have a great example of your skills to show off if you decide to apply for a job through social media.
#4. Enroll in a Course to Sharpen Your Skills
You may improve your fundamental social media abilities by taking free social media classes. But you’ll probably need to at least think about enrolling in a paid social media course if you want to acquire the advanced abilities you’ll need to work as a social media manager without any prior experience.
It’s a good idea to develop your abilities in the following areas if becoming a social media manager is something you’re interested in:
#1. Writing
Good social media writing goes beyond impeccable grammar and spelling, whether you’re authoring posts or creating captions. To create appealing writing that fits within a brand’s story and voice and engages its audience, it will be crucial to strengthen your copywriting talents. prior to putting in a bid to be a social media manager.
#2. Editing
In addition to writing material, you’ll probably need to check the grammar and spelling of your team members’ work. You can acquire the eye needed to ensure a company or brand that they are in good hands by honing your copy editing and proofreading abilities.
To manage accounts successfully, you’ll need a deep awareness of a number of social media sites, including their advantages, disadvantages, and user demographics, among other features. The following platforms will probably be the most crucial to understand: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok are some examples.
#4. A Flair for Design
Be ready to discuss images, infographics, videos, and other marketing-related topics with graphic designers, marketing managers, and other stakeholders. It will be crucial to conceptualize a post and then explain the commercial or strategic implications of your decisions.
#5. Tools for Analysis
It takes a keen analytical eye and the ability to do research to understand which messages resonate with consumers. Understanding how to use social media listening tools is beneficial. A few examples include Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and HubSpot.
#6. Flexibility
The world of social media is one of perpetual change. Social media managers frequently need to think quickly and add originality to their work as a result of new popular hashtags, algorithms, and platform capabilities.
#7. Timeliness
News events may make some posts seem insensitive or tone-deaf, or they may otherwise overshadow your post’s significance. Keeping up with the news and the larger online conversations can help you respond in the right way and protect a company’s brand.
Social media is a field that is still expanding. Since the start of the pandemic, the demand for paid social media skills has increased by 116.4% on LinkedIn, while the demand for Instagram abilities has increased by 28.4%. Between 2020 and 2030, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there will be a 10% growth in the number of marketing, advertising, and promotions managers in the US.
Working as a freelance social media manager can give you independence while allowing you to continue working on initiatives you are passionate about, whether you are trying to establish a side business or make a new career transition.
When a client wants to outsource its social media strategy and execution, they employ a freelance social media manager who is a specialist in social media.
Freelance social media managers typically work with a number of businesses and clients simultaneously.
You’ll need to develop entrepreneurial abilities in addition to your knowledge of social media management if you decide to pursue a freelancing career.
Even if you excel at delivering results for your clients, if your company processes aren’t sound, you can find yourself in trouble.
The following abilities are essential if you want to succeed as a social media manager.
#1. Writing Content
Social media has become increasingly visual in recent years, but an engaging community may still be built with a strong caption.
Since the most successful social media postings are brief, pithy, and witty, freelance social media managers should be proficient in copywriting and editing.
#2. Content Production
Content production is just one of the many hats a freelance social media manager wears. You might frequently be asked to provide graphics, TikTok videos, or photographs.
Also, you don’t need to be an expert in Photoshop. With templates specifically designed for social media posts, tools like Canva make design incredibly simple.
#3. Community Leadership
Several individuals engage with a brand’s social media pages. A social media manager might be expected to respond to every communication they get via DMs, comments, and reviews.
Because it takes time, many brands outsource this part of managing social media. Following the brand’s tone of voice rules, being organized and meticulous (to ensure no customer service issues are missed), and engaging with the community in sincere ways are all necessary for effective community management.
These pointers can help you get ready before starting your new job as a social media manager if you’re unsure how to approach it so that you may be assured and effective in your first few weeks.
#1. Research and Report
You must do an audit of the new company’s social media as part of your investigation, much as the tax office does with businesses. In any new position as a social media manager, this is a crucial first step.
#2. Listen and Take Notes
The ideal people to learn from are the people who already work there because you’ll need to understand the company culture and how the staff members feel about the firm’s social media platforms.
Any interview will frequently begin with this query. Include your name in the first sentence of your response to this query. Emphasize your social media experience, highlight your accomplishments, and add a sentence or two about why you think you’re the ideal candidate. Be as role-specific as you can in your introduction.
Someone has always claimed that managing social media can be done in just 30 minutes (or less!) each day. If you want to be successful, the reality is significantly different, and assertions to the contrary—even those that are really helpful. How to Manage Social Media for Business in Just 18 Minutes a Day—do a disservice to both individuals and organizations. They create erroneous notions of success and the length of time it takes to achieve it.
If you only spend 18 minutes a day on social media, it’s unlikely that your channels will expand, and if your rivals spend more time there, you might still lose clients to them. Although I doubt the “40% of digital shoppers [using] social media to study new companies and products” (Hootsuite) will discover you, you might not be “forgotten.” Why? because building a loyal audience and appearing in searches takes more time than that.
How many channels you have also affects how much time you need to spend. The time commitment will be lower if you solely use Instagram than, say, if you manage Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The time equation is also impacted by the size of your business and the amount of communication required.
Although most people and businesses manage many channels, we’ll limit our discussion to Twitter and LinkedIn for the sake of this piece.
Here is a schedule for managing both in 5 hours per week. Although this investment has the potential to make a difference (I did it for a tiny startup client), the process is substantially slower. But actually, if your firm is B2B, I don’t advise working any fewer than 10 hours per week.
Checking Your Content Calendar: 2 minutes
It’s wise to check your content calendar every day to make sure everything is in order, as Hootsuite advises. Verify the graphics and perform a final proof to look for errors. A LinkedIn post can be edited after it is published, while Twitter does not yet have an edit button. You can either leave the misspelling up or edit and republish, I guess.
20 Minutes for Writing and Scheduling Posts
Scheduling articles using a program like Hootsuite is undoubtedly simple, but it takes longer than the suggested one minute. If you’re just copying and pasting from another source and you have no problems, plan on spending 30 seconds on every post. It will take you between 2 and 3.5 minutes to publish 3 to 5 original tweets and 1 to 2 LinkedIn posts each day.
Conclusion
A crucial component of being a manager in the sector is having experience working with social media. Before attempting to advance into a managerial position if you lack expertise, look for an entry-level job that can teach you the fundamentals of social media marketing.
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