Who Is a Social Media Manager ? 9 Skills You Need to Have

A social media manager can be a marketer, a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, an analyst and a customer service rep—sometimes all in one day. If you are interested in social media marketing, keep reading and learn more about all passive income you can earn this way!

What is a Social Media Manager?

Typically, 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.

Social media managers are often called the “voice of the company.” The social media manager role may also be referred to as “community manager” (though this title has become slightly outdated). Before the internet, the most similar role was “public relations representative.”

A social media manager develops a company’s social media strategy and manages their social channels. This often includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and Pinterest. In addition to being the voice of a brand, social media managers analyze the results of their campaigns by tracking engagement metrics such as likes, clicks and shares.

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What are the responsibilities of a social media manager?

The primary responsibilities of social media managers include:

crafting engaging posts

analyzing campaign performance and

communicating with people via the company’s social channels.

Working on those two things in tandem means always being aware of what users are looking for in a brand and being able to deliver that on all channels simultaneously.

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7 Skills You Need to be a Great Social Media Manager

1. Communication

At its core, social media is a communication platform. So as a social media professional, it’s important to have strong communication skills that can flex to fit any platform, media, character count or audience.

In a given day, you’re often switching between communicating with:

customers in the Sprout Inbox

meeting with our product team to share feedback

writing a brief to kick off a creative project

or compiling a social listening analysis to share with leadership.

You have to be able to communicate ideas to a wide range of stakeholders in both my own voice and in Sprout’s.

Communicating on social

As the voice of your brand for customers on social, you have to be able to drop what you’re doing at a moment’s notice to hop on a trending topic or handle a disgruntled customer complaint. And you aren’t only communicating in writing; you’re also using:

emojis,
video,
GIFs,
pictures,
Also stickers

In Addition to anything else at your disposal to get your message across in a clear and engaging way.

Communicating with your boss & team

Internally, you also have to be able to effectively communicate with your boss, peers and collaborators across teams. It’s particularly important that you can speak to any internal stakeholder about your social media strategy, content distribution plan and impact of your work. The ability to explain how your work on social moves the business forward is one of the most important skills any social media professional can develop.

Last but not least, strong communication skills are key to developing internal education and training. While your social media team might lead the charge for your company’s social media marketing efforts, you can also work to train people from departments like customer support, sales and creative to support—and use—social in their own roles.

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2. Copywriting on social media

Social media managers do a lot of writing, sometimes more than a dozen posts each day. Each different social network requires a slightly different style of writing. Linkedin, for example, requires a more professional tone, while Facebook is more light and fun. SEO copywriting knowledge is also helpful. You must be able to create messages that are quickly understood by your brand’s audience and promote a positive sentiment for the brand. Some important types of writing include:

Short and effective headline writing

Engaging introductions

Structuring text for easy only reading. (Because consumers will be skimming and scanning, subtitles, bullet points and numbering are absolutely necessary!)

3. Creativity Is Essential For Social Media Manager

Differentiation is one of the biggest challenges for brands in the saturated social media space. Every social media manager wants to create content that’s exciting, valuable and buzz-worthy, but it takes creativity to come up with ideas that stand out.

When it comes to social media skills, creativity is particularly versatile. Creativity helps social media managers:

Develop innovative, risk-taking social campaigns

Create visually appealing, multimedia content

Consider every aesthetic detail of a social post, from images to links to formatting of copy Lead productive brainstorms that bring out their teammates’ best ideas

Hone and expand their brand’s voice and persona

On par with being creative is having a sense of humor and ability to improvise in any given situation.

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4. SEO Knowledge

Though SEO ranking is often considered a separate department within organizations. It should have a large amount of influence on other areas of the organization, particularly content and social media. In fact, according to Hootsuite, SEO has great impact on your social media strategy. A great social media manager knows this and strives to always optimize content on social networks with SEO in mind. When you embrace SEO as part of your social media strategy, you attract a larger audience, leading to more potential customers. When thinking about combining SEO and social media, task yourself the following questions:

Do you understand the connection between exposure on social media and increased rankings in the SERPs?

How will you promote your blog content on social media?

Do you know how driving traffic to your company’s website impacts revenue?

5. Customer care

Customer care is a social media skill that combines customer service, people skills and an eye for uncovering opportunities. Developing a social customer care strategy is an integral part of being a social media manager.

When more than 45% of consumers have reached out to a company on social, you need to be able to navigate these sometimes choppy waters. Not only do you have to listen to and understand the concerns, demands and even praise of current customers, but you also have to be proactive about what future customers might say. It’s equally important to be able to read a DM and identify the “why” behind what a customer is upset about, as it is to be able to find a clever way to surprise and delight a long-time fan.

As a social media manager, you are your brand’s biggest champion. Understanding customer care enables you to make a positive impact in the hearts and minds of your community. Personalizing your interactions by referencing conversation history can help take an everyday interaction and turn it into an extra special moment.

6. Visual Intelligence

While much of the content you’ll put on social media will be written, visual content is also crucial. The right gif or photo can be shared hundreds, or even thousands of times, and you need to understand the types of images that work well on each social network. It’s valuable for social media managers to have general knowledge of design so that you can create visually appealing graphics to complement your posts. Know Your Meme can be helpful in keeping up with daily development of new memes (if appropriate for your company).

Video is also an important component, so if you can gain skills in that area, it will be extremely helpful. As Hoostsuite explains, a great social media manager will “know great video when they see it, and most importantly have a firm grasp of social media trends and how they fit into each major network. Certain networks, like Vine and live-streaming tools Meerkat and Periscope, also have a far lower expectation of quality, so the average smartphone user can become a video content creator for your brand.”

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7. Agility

As we all know, the social landscape moves fast and even the best laid plans can quickly become irrelevant.

The ability to quickly pivot and react to a new trend, opportunity or crisis is an indispensable social media skill. In the everyday, being agile and flexible can help you decisively respond to a frustrated customer (or an appreciative superfan) in equally empathetic and personalized ways.

It’s also important to be agile when it comes to your long-term strategy. Social strategies have to be as dynamic and flexible as the platforms they rely on. As a social media manager, it’s important to experiment with different tactics, or even shake up your strategy entirely, to adapt to new trends, to incorporate business changes or to bounce back from subpar results.

Learning from your data, listening to feedback (customer and internal) and keeping a pulse on social trends can all make you a more agile social media manager.

Conclusion

It’s all about being creative and staying on top of emerging trends and technologies. To kill it as a social media manager, you should be able to come up with engaging. You Must sharply written content on the fly. You can be using the next big tool or channel in social media to do it.