Essential Skills That A Social Media Manager Needs.

Today, however, social media marketing is an essential to any business online (which, is pretty much all of them). New departments, therefore, need to be managed and thus, the role of the social media manager is born. TADA.

Social media’s need to be able to manage well. They need to be creative, technical, analytic, as well as possessing positive other skills. In, short they need to be some kind of super-geek – preferably bitten by a radioactive share button as a youngling and imbued with unimaginable powers.

If you take the hopefully well thought jump and employ a social media manager for your business, you’re going to need to know what you’re looking for. As you seek for a new padawan, you’re going to need to be aware of the force skills that your social media manager needs in order to separate the dark side from the light.

Key Questions…

1: Strategy

A social media manager needs to have a big picture in mind at all times and be constantly working to achieve it. They need to be able to outline their goals and understand their target demographics. They then need to be able to take this knowledge and apply it to the correct networks in the right manner. You cannot treat this like you would your personal life I’m afraid.

2: Execution, no, not of people, of plans

Once your social media manager has their strategy in place, they need to be able to execute it in the best way possible. This means your new guy must be able to stick to his guns and do what he said he can, otherwise that’s the plan out the window.

3: One of the people

Your social media strategy will be nothing without an active and engaged community to aim it at. A social media manager will be required to constantly be engaging with new influencers, replying to comments and so much more.

Furthermore, you will always have an unhappy customer who will want to kick off and cause you hassle so they must be able to remain calm and professional.

4: Content

You may think that the entire purpose of using social media for business purposes is to promote your various products and services. Well yes, that is your key job but it is never that simple in the modern era if you continually pester your audience with advertisements it wouldn’t take long for them to unfollow your message.

Understanding how each platform works is also key, you CANNOT put the same content in the same format on the same platform, this doesn’t work sadly.  There is no cinderella with a little grow space in this.

What makes you respond and engage with content on Facebook or Twitter? Thinking about this can tell you much about what will work for your business side of life, a common phrase is 3 of your 5 posts a day should be of engaging content, not advertisements.

5: Constant improvement

A social media manager does also need to understand the sales world because after all Marketing and Sales work heavily in sync but sadly they always hate each other :(. Using the sales platform and plan of securing a sale this shouldn’t be forced down their throat, each customer is different and you need to work with each person in their own unique bubble.  Constantly reviewing the results from your previous attempts and seeing how you can improve your methodology.

While it shouldn’t be an in-depth key qualification of a Social Media Manager it helps to have an understanding of SEO and how it works, they should be able to look at Google analytics also as this could tell you a lot about where custom has come from.

6: The Power of Creation.

BE CREATIVE!

7: A Quiller Writer.

Basically, you need to be able to write in the correct grammar and language.

8: A Trendy Marketer.

We have already touched on the need for social media managers to adapt and shift in response to change. They need to be able to see what sorts of things are trending online and be able to respond quickly to make sure that your networks are getting in on the action/striking whilst the iron is hot/insert favourite cliché here.

They also need to be able to spot emerging new trends in the ways in which social media functions and act accordingly. A good example of this would be when Facebook first introduced hashtag functionality. Keen and skilled social media managers would have made sure that they were aware of this new development and ensured that they were amongst the first to incorporate it into their social media strategies.

9: Communications Open

Last, but not least, communication. Your ideal person will need to be constantly excited as their attitude will affect their work, trust me. Written, spoken, video or image it should always be something a little different as people will get bored easily.

Well, hopefully, we have provided you with a handy checklist for you to use when you begin the process of searching for your new social media manager. For the right candidate, it can be a rewarding and action packed avenue of employment. However, get it wrong and it could be a disaster for your business, as your social media accounts are the lynchpin of your online presence.

Please let us know if you have employed a social media manager and how they have impacted on your business. Also, let us know if you think that I have omitted any key skills from my list.

Have fun.