A social media manager’s job is crucial to how the company will look like across social media channels. That is why having the right skills, knowledge, and expertise is key to succeeding in this career field.
Let’s face it, almost all people in the world know now what social media is all about. Needless to say, millions of people across the globe use one or more social media platforms.
According to Statista, North America has been found as “one of the highest social network penetration rates in the world”. Meanwhile, the average rate for global penetration is at 45 percent in 2019 alone. North America’s social network penetration rate is around 70 percent. Surprised? Well, we are not.
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Here’s more from Statista. They reported that in 2018, in the United States, 79 percent of its total population uses social media or has a social media profile (it could be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). This basically means that there were about 244 million social media users across the country.
Wow! That’s a huge number, right? Too big that it places the United States as “the country with the third-largest social network user base in the world, only behind China and India”.
Furthermore, it is forecasted that the number of social media users in the United States will grow to about 257 million by the year 2023.
So much to take in? Well, guess what? We can actually take advantage of those figures!
By what means?
By becoming a social media manager.
Across industries today, companies and businesses require or aim to have at least one social media manager, which is not surprising given the fact that most people nowadays are present on different social media platforms. And hey! We are not talking about just one – because people these days, especially millennials are present in a couple of social media channels.
You see, there are opportunities there! And we are here to share with you some helpful information and insights on how to jumpstart a career as a social media manager.
Today, we are specifically going to tackle the following:
- What is social media management?
- What is a social media manager?
- What does a social media manager do?
- What are the skills required to be a social media manager?
- How much does a social media manager make?
- How to be a social media manager?
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT?
According to Tech.co, social media management refers to “the process of creating, scheduling, analyzing, and engaging with content posted on social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter”.
Social media managers are the ones who are in-charged to manage such processes. She may be employed by an individual, a company, a brand, or a business to specifically help in reaching new online customers, as well as improve and maintain the person, company, or business’s reputation.
In this day and age, social media plays an integral part in the business landscape, actually, even in personal branding.
Imagine, according to the data presented by Hootsuite, in 2019, there are 3.2 billion people around the world who’s using social media on a day to day basis. More so, there are 11 million new users every second! No wonder why businesses, companies, and even celebrities and influencers are working on their social media presence.
Since we are in the digital media age, social media management comes in handy with plenty of social media management tools and services around to help reach a huge audience, and make running a social media campaign a success.
WHAT IS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER?
Basically, a social media manager is “the person within an organization who is trusted with monitoring, executing, filtering and measuring the social media presence of a product, brand, corporation or even individual”. This one is according to the Digital Marketing Institute.
Furthermore, social media managers are usually tagged as the “voice of the company” across social media channels.
The role of the social media manager may sometimes be referred to as “community manager” as well, given the scope of work.
Speaking of the scope of work, social media managers are the persons-in-charge in planning, scheduling, and creating content, as well as responding to comments, and compiling campaigns for the product, brand, and company or business entity.
Generally, a social media manager provides organizations with the guidance they need to help enhance their overall online presence.
Before moving on, we thought you may want to learn some insights from someone who’s working as a social media manager. Thus, here’s a very insightful video from Alex, a video blogger on YouTuber:
WHAT DOES A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER DO?
A social media manager’s job is no ordinary job.
First and foremost, her job includes the implementation of a marketing plan for a product, brand, and company or business entity.
Given the fast-paced environment of the social media world, these plans are or strategies are usually short-term. In fact, most companies do reviews every 90 days. That’s how fast the social media world is.
Although plans vary from one company to another or from a product to another, social managers usually start with identifying the target audience or customers and then establishing a content schedule after.
Apart from these, a social manager may also do the following tasks (these are some of the usual things you will find in a social media manager job description):
- Support the Development of a Brand’s Identity – This basically means showing the “why,” which helps customers resonate with your business or company.
- Take Part in Visual Design Strategies – As a social media manager, it is your job to ensure that your or the team photos are visually matching to your brand — to some extent, this includes profile photos across the team’s social media profiles.
- Key Person in Social Communication – As a social media manager you are the person responsible for determining how often a company should post on every social media platform that it’s into.
- Supports Promotional Strategies – As a social media manager, you are responsible for giving insights regarding paid online advertising, organic traffic, as well as the use of influencer marketing.
- Come Up with Engagement Strategies – Part of the responsibilities of a social manager is to listen, respond, and engage in audiences or customers across all social media channels. This helps increase sales, at the same time, in improving customer relationships through online engagements.
- Create Conversation Strategies – As a social manager, you have to know your followers’ concerns and pain points. This way you get to suggest your clients on how to convert fans into actual customers.
WHAT SKILLS ARE REQUIRED TO BE A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER?
When jumping into any job, it is important to be aware of the skills required for it. This way, you get to assess yourself on whether or not you have what it takes to get the job done and to be able to meet work expectations.
Now, as a social media manager, you have to know that there are certain skills that are highly required for the job.
Having said that, here are the top skills you have to acquire to be highly competitive for the job:
– Excellent Copywriting
Copywriting is one of the fundamental skills for social media management. You have to be excellent at writing copies. It’s perhaps safe to say that it is required in different areas of social media management — from filling up social media profile description to crafting copies intended for tweets of Facebook posts.
Having a good, captivating copy or story into your post is one of the things that drive social media engagements as well as clicks. Having said that, without excellent copywriting skills, the job can be really difficult.
Now, to help enhance your copywriting skills, we recommend studying some copywriting formulas that will help you craft really inspiring and engaging copies for social media release. Finding a copywriting formula that will work for you can help increase your productivity, as well as improve the quality of the social media content that you do.
A quick tip from the Digital Marketing Institute, some important types of writing should be comprised of:
- Short and effective headline writing
- Engaging introductions
- Structuring text for easy only reading
– Excellent Research Skills
As part of your job, you have to be updated all the time with the ever-changing world of social and digital media. Apart from that, you have to be current when it comes to measurement tools, as well as what competitors are posting on a day-to-day basis. This will help you step up your game.
Typically, experienced social media managers set up Google Alerts on specific topics depending on the kind of industry their clients are into. Most of them also use tools like BuzzSumo and Feedly.
Also, Twitter Trends sidebar, as well as Facebook Trending sidebar, are also some of the common useful tools used by social media managers to stay up-to-date.
As a social media manager, some of the recent trends that you may want to check according to DMI include:
- Rise and role of mobile
- Facebook’s “Pay to Play”
- Rise of visual marketing particularly on Instagram and Pinterest
– Social Media Expertise
You would not be hired as a social media manager if you do not have excellent social media skills. It is definitely the foremost skill that you need to have to be able to score a job in social media management.
Social media expertise can be earned through time and of course, extensive research. But take note though that in larger companies, they usually require a few years of experience doing the job to be considered for the position.
According to DMI, some of the common types of knowledge that you need to acquire are:
- The type of content that will work best on each social media platform
- Knowledge on optimizing content depending on the social media platform used
- Ability to engage an audience through posts on different platforms
– Visual Intelligence
Perhaps it is safe to say that these days, people are more engaged in visuals compared to written posts.
Although writing or written posts are essential in social media postings, you should not take for granted the visual content, too. As we just said, visuals are more appealing especially among the younger generation whose retention span is so quick you got to grab them as soon as possible — and the best way to do that is through amazing visuals!
As a social media manager, it is very valuable if you have a general knowledge of design so you get to create visually appealing graphics to complement your copies.
There are a lot of tools, software, and apps that can help you create appealing visuals.
With the rise of YouTube, today, social media managers should also look into short video creation or video content creation. It would be a big plus for you.
If you are interested to be knowledgeable on these, you may check video tutorials or read blogs on how to create visuals or videos, or you may opt to get a crash course on these.
– Adaptive to Change
As someone in that post, you have to be flexible. You have to be adaptive to change. Social media trends change so quickly. So, you have to keep up.
Unlike before, scheduling posts is not enough. You have to try out new features as well as change things up according to the new trends, as well as continuous testing and analytics that should be running on your posts.
Again, as a social media manager, you just don’t have to be updated, but you have to ensure you are the first or one of the firsts to use new trends in the social media world.
– Excellent Customer Service Skills
Remember, one of your roles as a social media manager if to be the representative, the voice of the product, brand, or company that you are working for. You are the one who is on the frontline. You are tasked to respond to customer concerns, answer questions from people, reply to comments, etc. Thus, it is only right that you must be excellent when it comes to providing customer service.
In an article from Forbes, it says that “A successful social media manager knows that your social media presence is your brand’s face online; that everything they say or do on social media is a representation of the brand – for good or for bad.”
– Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization
Technically, SEO is a totally different thing within companies. Someone with the right expertise and knowledge on how this works should be the one in-charged. However, having knowledge of this field will really step up your game if you are aspiring to be a social media manager.
When you have knowledge of this, what happens is, all your copies or social media contents will always contain SEO requirements to ensure that your posts are always optimized. When a post is optimized, you get to hit a larger number of audience, which may be comprised of potential customers.
According to an article by Forbes, “content is the cornerstone of your SEO strategy, and your social media manager is the gatekeeper and promoter of much of this content”.
So, there you go. These are just some of the most important skills every social manager has to have. This will greatly affect how good you are as one and how easily you can land into a social media management job opportunity.
HOW MUCH DOES A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER MAKE?
According to Indeed, the average annual salary for social media manager in the United States is $48,753.
Meanwhile, based on the current data from Glassdoor, the average base pay of social media managers in the US is $50,473 per year. It can go as low as $35,000 or as high as $72,000 annually.
If you come to think about it, social media managers earn a good amount of money.
It’s nice knowing that apart from being able to do something that really interests you, and something that you actually do on a day-to-day basis and on a personal level, you get to earn from it as well.
Well, who in the world thought you can make money from posting on social media sites, right? Although, as discussed earlier, social media managers are more than just posting and interacting on social media platforms. There’s real work behind it.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
Social media management is a totally interesting and exciting job. It’s something that a lot of people do on a normal basis – if you come to think about it, right? With people who are so engrossed on social media, working as a social media manager seems like heaven!
But that’s not how exactly it is – because as we said earlier, there is so much more than posting and talking to people on social media. That’s not just what social media managers do. They are the ones who do stuff from brainstorming strategies, planning and creating written and visual contents to posting them and interacting with people and addressing concerns and answering questions from customers.
You see, the job entails a lot of work – no wonder why social media managers are paid that much. They totally are worth the price. Their work is really real work by all means.
Now, what can you say about social media management? Is this what you thought it would be?
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