Most people assume social media managers spend their days browsing social media and having fun. While the job is exciting for the right person, it does encompass more than just talking to customers online and perusing the day’s top feeds. Many small business owners hire a social media or marketing manager to handle the day-to-day online presence of their site. Truthfully, it is a full time job and the title can encompass a lot of different responsibilities. According to monster.com, “social media managers are responsible for developing and implementing marketing strategies for a business’s social media sites. This might include blogging, creating social media profiles, managing regular posts and responding to followers.”
Social media marketers must constantly evaluate their own successes and tweak their strategy. Because social media can drive quality traffic (which can result in increased leads and sales), it’s important to consider the job requirements of social media managers. These include:
Research
Social media managers need to double as researchers. They need to be able to note new trends, read the most recent and relevant blogs on social marketing, and be able to find answers to questions or difficulties they encounter. This helps ensure they post the right content on all social media accounts. You can visit this page to learn more about tools that can support research.
And it’s not only about researching what to write, but where to write it. In other words, your audience may be different on LinkedIn than on Facebook; it is the job of the social media manager to understand these differences and know how to adapt with content.
Content creation
One of the primary jobs of a social media manager is developing content for your website or blog. You want to post frequently, but you also need to be posting quality content. The ideal blog post length is between 800 and 1500 words, for search engine optimization purposes, meaning that you need to find someone who is a savvy writer and is comfortable developing posts and generating ideas. Unfortunately, 200-word blog posts won’t add much value to your site. Blog posts are great for social media sharing and website optimization—so being a writer is a part of the job description.
Scheduling and planning
Weekly schedules, goals, deadlines, and monthly and quarterly projections are really important in the role of a social media manager. Organization, diligence, and staying on top of things are all a part of the job description.
Developing visual content
While writing is generally one of the most important skills that a social media marketing specialist will have, the ability to develop visual content—like photographs or video—is a major plus. Further, the ability to do graphic design, use Photoshop, or have any kind of video editing skills will certainly set someone apart from the rest. Social media marketers that can develop this kind of content are very helpful in website design, social media post creativity, and developing unique and creative content for your accounts.
Engagement
Part of a social media manager’s job is engagement. This means engaging with individuals who comment and interact on your social media feed and reaching out to similar businesses and other users who interact with industry brands. Engagement is what takes a social media account to the next level. Social media marketers not only have a talent for user engagement, but also very strategic about where they focus their efforts.
Search Engine Optimization
While social media marketers are not necessarily SEO specialists, they typically have some knowledge of how SEO works. When executed well, social media can help drive referral traffic and get new visitors on your website. Even if a social media manager is not at the top of the SEO world, they read the most recent blogs and articles and stay connected to improve their own strategies and efforts.
Customer service
Social media engagement equals customer service, plain and simple. Social media managers interact with people every day, perhaps even more than some of your customer relations staff. Yes, there is a computer screen in between the customer and your business, but that does not make customer service less important. In fact, having someone with a customer service background will be extremely helpful in coming up with new ideas for chat and email responses, post engagement, campaigns, and understanding how people want to interact with your brand directly.
Copywriting
Copywriters know how to take a lot of information about a product or service and condense it into a concise statement—sometimes even a few words. Good social media managers also do a fair amount of copywriting daily. Condensing large blog posts to a captivating sentence on social media takes skill. So does writing a caption for a photo on Instagram or crafting the text for a Tweet. If you have a social media manager that doubles as a copywriter, keep them around.
