The potential that digital marketing experts saw in social media gave birth to a new career opportunity for the younger generation. Nowadays, you can earn a living as a social media manager if you fit the bill. It’s one of the best entry points to break into the digital marketing field.
A social media manager is responsible for monitoring, executing, filtering, and measuring the social media presence of a product, brand, corporation, or even individual. They do all that after creating and maintaining brand promotions and marketing campaigns across several social media platforms. In addition, they also work with other creative groups or individuals for assistance in performing their roles.
Like any full-time job, companies look for skills in a person responsible for handling their social media presence. While criteria differ from one company to another, you must have a general skillset to get hired and be successful. Read about them in this blog.
Writing
Social media managers write captions and headlines for different social media posts. Each platform requires slightly different styles of both because of their users. That’s why writing is an essential skill for digital marketing agencies that offer social media services.
You must be capable of creating messages that your clients’ target audiences can understand. In essence, you will become the voice of their brand. Nowadays, audiences are attracted to engaging messages, so you will find most companies will gauge your ability to write catchy stuff.
Research
The world of social media is ever-changing; that’s why you need to have research skills and understanding. You will be using information and data to adapt and excel as a social media manager, so you need keen research skills. Keeping up is key to yielding good results from promotions and campaigns, and research is the way to achieve that.
Deeper social media knowledge
You don’t necessarily need to be an expert unless it’s what the company requires, but you at least have to know everything that can help your company’s clients outshine their competitors online. Depending on your experience, the depth of knowledge you possess will increase.
Here are some of the social media know-how you must have:
- Knowing what type of content works best on each platform your company’s clients are on
- Understanding how to optimize specific content on each platform
- Knowledge of social media analytics and performance
- Understanding the best times and days to post on different platforms
- Ability to engage audiences through posts using free audience listening tools
Visual intelligence
While writing is a social media manager’s task, having visual intelligence is a huge plus. Since you have to know which type of content works best for a social media platform, you need to think of ideas to serve as the foundation for content creation. You have to know a great image or video that will fit the platform you will post on.
This means your opinion will matter during content creation. You should be able to make suggestions on making images or videos better for every specific platform and take in all of your client’s good ideas. That way, the creatives you work with can produce better content.
Customer service
Social media managers are also asked to talk to customers and prospects on social media. That’s why you have to know how to engage with different people online. There may be a template on how your clients want you to talk to them, so you must train yourself to use it.
Final word
These skills will be crucial for you to become a social media manager. You should learn and showcase them to excel in this profession. Gain as much experience as well because it will increase your value to the industry as a whole.
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