Marketing: Skills You Need to Know in Order to Become a Great Social Media Manager

Having a senior marketing role requires a lot of skills. The position of a Social Media Manager requires you to have a wide range of skills, in order to create engaging social content that converts followers into loyal customers. The skills of this role have evolved over the years as many other things are evolving in the digital marketing field.

According to LinkedIn’s ‘Future of Skills’ report, ‘Social Media Manager skills requirements have changed an average of 25% since 2015 in the United States’.

The skills required for the position of Social Media Manager, include social media outreach, social customer service, platform expertise, and influencer marketing. While artificial intelligence has the opportunity to have an impact on the channel, through optimizing social listening and developing social content. If you are already a Social Media Manager or you are planning to become one below, we will list a few skills that you need to know in order to thrive in this role.

The position of Social Media Manager is trusted with monitoring, executing, filtering, and measuring the social media presence of a product, brand, corporation, or even individual. Usually, this position is the ‘voice of the company’.

Social Media Manager’s tasks include:

• Create and maintain brand promotions for multiple platforms
• Monitor social analytics
• Devise a social network strategy
• Measure and prove ROI
• Schedule social posts
• Find relevant curated content
• Engage with your audience
• Review and populate your content calendar

Social Media Managers work daily to produce new content, constantly innovating to push new ideas and formats and measuring how well those ideas had perform.

Additionally, they may report to a social media Director or the Head of Content or brand and collaborate with other creative groups such as marketing and public relations, as well as the sales department to drive lead-generation campaigns that convert into revenue. A key part of the role is to keep up with new trends along with company and industry news. An in-demand role, Social Media Manager positions typically require a bachelor’s degree in marketing, public relations, or any other similar field.

Now that you know what the role involves, we will dive into 5 skills that you need to become a Great Social Media Manager.

Writing

Writing is the first skill. A Social media manager is required to do a lot of writing, sometimes more than a dozen posts each day. Plus, each social network requires a slightly different style of writing.

A few important writing types include:

• Short and snappy headline writing
• Engaging introductions
• Video and image captions
• Structured text for easy reading

Social Media Expertise

The second skill is that obviously, a social media manager needs to have great social media skills. While these can be learned over time through research and experimentation, if you’re aiming for a job at a large company, you’ll need a few years of experience.

The type of knowledge you’ll need to outshine your competitors includes:

• Knowing what type of content works best on what platform
• Understanding the different days and times and days that work best on each platform
• Understanding how to optimize platform-specific content
• Knowledge of social media analytics and performance
• Ability to engage an audience using the best free audience listening tools

Research

Like in any other field in digital marketing, a social media manager must stay up-to-date with the ever-changing world of digital media which means that it needs to do research. This includes research in new measurement/analytics tools, industry and world trends, and tracking what your competitors are doing, even on a daily basis.

Budgeting

The third one is Budgeting; it is necessary for a Social Media Manager to understand how to plan and manage a budget across social networks for organic and paid media.

The types of things you need to budget for include:

• Content creation
• Influencers
• Paid media
• Software and tools

Your budget should not be set in stone, you should review and analyze it on a regular basis to make sure you’re putting your funds into the activities.

Data Analytics

As a social media manager, you should put time and effort into driving awareness and engagement through social media platforms and that’s where data comes in.

Analyzing your social media data will help you to draw insights not only on each platform but also on the content you’re sharing.

Questions you could answer are:

• What social media platforms are driving engagement?
• Which content formats work best i.e., video, memes, images?
• Are there times and days that you see spikes or drops in engagement?
• Are there any channels that you should increase or decrease activity on?

Along with the analytics feature available on each social network and GA4, there are a number of great tools you can use to track data to get social media post metrics, conduct a competitive analysis, and monitor conversations – social listening, for example Hootsuite or BuzzSumo.

If you want to become a successful social media manager you need to have the most up-to-date knowledge and skills available.

Source: Digital Marketing Institute

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