What is a Social Media Manager?
Social media managers are in charge of representing a company across social channels as the sole voice of the brand. They respond to comments, compile campaigns and create content. These experts provide organizations with the guidance needed to enhance their online presence.
What is a Social Media Manager
How to Become Social Media Manager?
If you want to learn how to become a social media manager, you’re in good company. Social media has taken the world by storm and changed the way consumers find and buy products and services. As a result, many businesses have also changed the way they promote their brands.
Your duties as a community manager or social media manager will most likely depend on your job description, time, budget and expertise.
There are many places to learn about how to become a community manager or social media manager.
One of the best is a training program from Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare called Social Media Manager School.
How to Become Social Media Manager
To become a social media manager, follow these common steps:
1) Stay Versed in Industry Tools and Tech:
Whether or not you want to pursue a formal education in marketing, you need to maintain your own knowledge of the tools and tricks of the social media trade.
There’s a science to social media outside of the creative and community engagement aspects. To be successful, you need to stay in step with the analytics side of things and be able to leverage the insights and data you glean to reach a larger audience.
Many of these products offer free trials, so don’t be afraid to get in there and educate yourself on what these tools are offering in terms of social analytics and content tracking.
1) Stay Versed in Industry Tools and Tech
2) Build Your Social Media Presence:
The best way to develop your abilities as a social media manager is through your own profiles. Your own profiles also provide an effective way to find new clients.
When you don’t have a big portfolio to wow employers with, the very first thing they’ll do when you apply for a job is Google you. If they see profiles associated with you with little-to-no activity – or, even worse, anything inappropriate – you can bet they’ll be looking elsewhere for their next social media pro.
Whether you plan to work as a freelancer or hold a position with a company, you should create profiles listing your social media services on all the major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
2) Build Your Social Media Presence
3) Learn Advanced Marketing Skills:
Most prospective clients will know the difference between good and bad social media.
You’ll need some advanced skills if you expect to stand out!
These advanced techniques include:
- Optimizing YouTube videos with descriptions, tags, titles, annotations, etc.
- Custom Facebook apps
- Custom Twitterand YouTube headers
- Knowledge of hashtag marketing
- Knowledge of webcasts, Google+ Hangouts, email capture forms, etc.
3) Learn Advanced Marketing Skills
4) SEO Knowledge:
Though SEO is often considered a separate department within organizations, that way of thinking is disappearing as SEO has become an integral part of content marketing and social media. In fact, SEO can have a great impact on your social media content. When you embrace SEO as part of your strategy, you can attract a larger audience with an interest in your products or services, leading to more potential customers.
4) SEO Knowledge
5) Get Creative Social Media Content:
If you’re in the early phases of building your social media following, use this as an opportunity to experiment with what types of content truly connects with an audience. This is also a time to develop your unique voice. Although you might eventually need to adapt to fit the voice of whatever brand or company, you’re creating content for, it.
5) Get Creative Social Media Content
6) Build Your Manager Skills:
Beyond the industry-specific skills needed to support your social media marketing career, being a manager requires its own set of skills. Some of the important abilities you’ll need to master include:
Communication:
As a social media manager, you need to be able to communicate efficiently with both clients and your own team. The ability to explain your work can help improve your relationships with clients, ensuring your projects go smoothly.
Analytical Skills:
Being able to look over data and use it to make more informed decisions is essential to being a social media manager.
This allows you to optimize your marketing campaigns, both paid and organic, by focusing on what is working and making changes to what is not.
Management:
As a social media manager, you need to plan and structure campaigns while leading and executing them from start to finish.
To do this for multiple projects simultaneously, you need to develop processes and utilize tools to keep all pieces moving in the right order.
6) Build Your Manager Skills
7) Build Your Portfolio:
When you interview for social media management positions, you may be asked to show your portfolio of previous social media work. Whether you pick up freelance clients, manage your personal accounts or volunteer to build a page for a non-profit organization.
Marketing coordinator Drew Henry landed his past social media role not because of his experience managing PR and social media for several restaurants but because of a lifestyle blog he launched with friends.
7) Build Your Portfolio
8) Never Stop Learning and Adapting:
“When you’re working across different marketing disciplines, you’ll naturally gravitate to one in particular that appeals to you. It will probably take up most of your time and be the thing that causes you the most stress but the most excitement too. You have to be data-driven, but you have to be creative. You need to plan ahead, but you need to be reactive. It seems that the best social media managers are good at being a lot of different things at once.
8) Never Stop Learning and Adapting
9) Become Social Media Freelancer:
If you don’t want to work with a single company or start your own agency, you can work as a social media freelancer.
Working independently provides a lot of flexibility as you can set your own schedule and work from anywhere.
As a freelancer, you can find your own clients and choose the services that best suit your interests and talents.
There are a variety of freelance platforms you can use to find new clients. Some popular networks include:
- Upwork
- Freelancer
9) Become Social Media Freelancer
