To become a social media manager, you must first develop skills at using social media platforms, business tools, and technology. Even though you will generally require formal education or some kinds of training in social media management, by increasing your social media following and personal brand, you can start down this career path.
Many people are working as social media specialists, and digital marketing courses or bootcamps are the starting point for social media manager jobs today, as these are the fastest and most efficient tracks to a career in social media. However, by experimenting with your own passion projects, you can start on the path to a successful career in social media marketing or by helping small businesses with their social media accounts. That’s a great way to enhance your resume while creating connections that might be beneficial in the future.
What Is A Social Media Manager & What Do They Do?
One of the best careers in digital marketing is that of a social media manager. The influence of social media is excellent, as it allows online marketers to quickly reach a large audience. Due to this, the need for social media management has increased as more companies use social media to reach potential buyers.
As the name suggests, a social media manager is responsible for managing a company’s social media profiles on various platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. You can work as a social manager for a variety of clients, such as influencers, celebrities, small companies, and startups in various industries.
Moreover, one of the best remote-friendly career opportunities is social media management, which offers you the opportunity to work from home or other convenient places.
Social media managers increase brand awareness, customer acquisition, and more for businesses through social networks by setting predefined goals. However, this role does not exclusively involve overseeing social media accounts but also involves a large number of extra features.
What Do They Do?
Social media managers are responsible for developing a strategy to increase followers, creating and managing social media campaigns, creating content, reviewing analytics, and communicating with key stakeholders in a company.
As a social media manager, the size of your company will determine your specific responsibilities. For example, despite the fact that many social media managers at larger corporations typically approve copy or videos rather than creating them, it’s common for social media managers at smaller companies to produce more content.
If working as a social media manager appeals to you, your tasks may include:
Driving engagement and increasing the number of followers:
Boost a company’s presence on all active social media platforms by increasing the number of followers and engagement (likes, comments, and shares). You might be asked to develop either written or visual posts to achieve both.
Strategizing content and campaigns:
In order to increase engagement, you’ll be responsible for coming up with ideas for (and sometimes executing) social media campaigns that complement a company’s more comprehensive marketing strategies. Additionally, you can repurpose user-generated content or come up with ideas for timely and unique content.
Analysing data:
In addition to creative work, you’ll also spend time analysing data to draw conclusions about the performance of a company’s posts and content. This can include social listening—monitoring what people are saying about a brand or its competitors on social media.
Reporting metrics to key stakeholders:
Companies want to know that the work you do has an impact—or that any problems that develop—on your marketing team and even the company’s stakeholders. They’ll probably look to see how you gain followers, increase engagement, and create innovative campaigns and content, among other metrics.
Posting and monitoring social media platforms:
Depending on the size of your team, you might be responsible for updating and maintaining all social media platforms. In that case, you may need to schedule posts and check followers’ responses. You may also be responsible for responding to comments and messages from followers.
What Skills Does a Social Media Manager Need?
Even though social media can be fun, a social media manager’s job requires a lot of hard work. It demands an appropriate balance of analytical and creative skills. If you’re thinking about becoming a social media manager, here are some skills to brush up on:
- Writing skills
You need to create content for social media posts across all platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The descriptions for YouTube videos and other video content are also written by social media managers.
- Visuals and design
In order to share social media pages, you must create digital assets; consequently, having an eye for design is a must.
- Tech savvy
Understanding how the social media algorithms work, using graphic design software and applications, and navigating the internet all require familiarity with technology.
- Video creation and editing
Even if you work collaboratively with scriptwriters and videographers, to ensure that their work complies with brand identity, you need to oversee it. As the trend of short videos increases, additionally, social media managers often have to conceptualise and create videos for Instagram Reels. YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos on their own
- Marketing know-how
Social media managers must be skilled at using their marketing channel. You should understand the basics of social media marketing, including running campaigns and focusing on the target audience.
- Communication
As a social media manager, you must be able to communicate with team members as well as interact with influencers and clients.
- Leadership
In larger companies, social media managers may need to oversee additional content creators, such as graphic designers and videographers. In these situations, leadership skills are necessary.
What Is The Salary Of A Social Media Manager In India?
In India, the average salary for a social media manager is 4 lakh per year (34.2k per month). Salary estimates are based on 1359 salaries from different social media managers working in different industries.
Most Important Skills Of A Social Media Manager
If you’re interested in becoming a social media manager, it’s a good idea to improve your skills in the following areas:
- Writing:
If you’re writing posts or captions for social media, good social media writing goes beyond accurate grammar and spelling. It will be important to develop compelling writing that fits into a brand’s story by improving your copywriting skills and voice, and that inspires its audience.
- Editing:
Along with writing copy, you’ll probably need to evaluate the work of your team members to make sure it’s error-free and grammatically correct. Honing your copyediting and proofreading skills can help you develop the eye needed to reassure a company or brand that they are in safe hands.
- An understanding of social media platforms:
You’ll need to have a good understanding of various social media platforms—ttheir benefits, weaknesses, and user demographics, among other characteristics—to manage accounts successfully. The following platforms will likely be the most important to understand: Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok
- An eye for design:
Prepare yourself to communicate about graphic designers, marketing managers, and other marketing stakeholders, as well as images, infographics, videos, and more. Envisioning a post and then articulating the business or your choices must have strategic reasons.
- Analytical tools:
An analytical eye and the ability to research are necessary to understand which messages resonate with customers. Understanding how to use social media listening tools like HubSpot, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite is useful.
- Flexibility:
Social media is a constantly changing environment. Social media managers are often required for new trending hashtags, algorithms, and platform features.
How to Become a Social Media Manager
Step 1: Learn social media marketing
A successful social media manager requires continuous learning. Beyond acquiring the skills needed to perform the tasks of a social media manager, you need to become knowledgeable about the different social media platforms. This entails developing the abilities to efficiently manage both promotions and unpaid outreach on social media channels.
Paid advertising offers a significant opportunity for businesses to connect with their target audience and grow their customer base while receiving a high return on their investment.
For social media platforms, which typically serve as their own search engines, SEO is also important. Knowing how to perform keyword research and how to structure your social media posts can help you connect with highly relevant users.
Each platform has a unique user base and works best with different types of content.
Step 2: Build Your Social Media Presence
If you’re going to ask for a social media job, you’ll need to have a portfolio, and your social media accounts are the best portfolio that you run. We recommend creating accounts on one or two social media sites and building them from scratch.
Whether it’s a Pinterest, Instagram, or TikTok account, choose a topic and write content for your community. This is a great way to learn how analytics work, fully understand social media algorithms, and start building healthy boundaries on social media.
Step 3: Create business accounts on major social platforms.
As a social media manager, multiple client accounts need to be managed in an effective way. All of the popular social media sites offer business accounts that allow you to keep track of all of your profiles.
For the safety of your clients, business accounts are also important, as they enable you to access their profiles without requiring them to give you their login details or direct access to their accounts.
For social media platforms, creating a business account is simple.
Step 4: Build Your Manager’s Skills
Beyond the industry-specific skills required to support your social media marketing career, being a manager requires a unique set of skills.
You’ll need to develop some important skills, such as:
- Communication
You must be able to communicate effectively with both clients and your own team if you want to succeed as a social media manager.
This implies having a clear understanding of your social media strategy and the methods you’ll use to reach your goals. The ability to explain your work can improve your relationship with clients, ensuring that your projects go smoothly.
- Analytical skills
To be a successful social media manager, you must have the ability to analyse data and use it to make better decisions. This allows you to optimise your marketing efforts, both paid and organic, by focusing on what is working and changing what is not.
- Time management
In order to manage a successful social media strategy, you must be able to effectively manage your time. As a social media manager, you must organize campaigns while overseeing and carrying them from start to finish.
To carry out this for multiple projects simultaneously, you need to create procedures and make use of tools to keep everything moving in the right direction.
Step 5: Define Your Services
Once you have developed your social media skills, you must decide what services to provide and how much to charge for your work. Starting out by focusing on a few services is a good strategy.
Having a specialisation can help you improve your credibility, which will make it easier for you to acquire new clients. This will also help you master certain areas more quickly.
You can choose to specialise in a variety of services, such as:
- Paid advertising campaigns
- Graphic design
- Setting up and optimising profiles
- Customer service and community engagement
- Creating and curating content
Step 6: Learn How To Use Social Media Marketing Tools
It can be challenging to manage numerous social media accounts for various clients. Fortunately, there are lots of tools available to keep you organised and speed up the process.
You’ll want to learn how to use some of the more well-known social media marketing tools listed below:
- Buffer
Buffer is a well-liked tool that enables you to schedule posts in advance for every social media platform, all from a single dashboard.
As you can see what you are posting on each social media channel in one place, this makes it simple to plan and manage all of your content.
You can track the performance of your social media accounts using the useful analytics provided by Buffer.
- Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool that allows you to produce high-quality visual content for your social media channels. It is a popular tool for marketers of all skill levels because, even if you have little design experience, it is simple to use. With thousands of design elements, Canva is free to use. You can add to your graphics or start with hundreds of ready-made templates.
- Sendible
When it comes to managing multiple social media accounts for various clients, Sendible is a powerful tool.
You can use it to create an editorial calendar for your blog and schedule posts across various social media platforms. Sendible also makes it simple to track brand mentions, so you can respond to anyone engaging with your brand right away.
- HootSuite
Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management tool that makes it easier to manage multiple campaigns.
Instead of managing each social media account separately, Hootsuite enables you to oversee them all from a single dashboard.
- Build your client portfolio
Once you acquire a few clients, to highlight your work and share it with other clients, you want to build a portfolio. As a social media manager, the ability to demonstrate your skills is essential to attracting new clients and showing how a company can benefit from your services. Building your own online presence can be helpful in certain situations; however, being able to show potential customers the results you have achieved for other companies is a powerful way to grow your company quickly.
Build a website that describes the services you provide, but if you want to build a solid brand and customer loyalty for your company, make sure you own the domain. You can include their logos and a testimonial on your home page as you gain more customers. Additionally, you can write detailed case studies that go into the success of your projects in detail and add them to your blog.
Step 7: Start Applying for Social Media Manager Jobs
If working for a salary is more appealing to you than working on your own, as a social media manager, you can work for a company or an ad agency.
You can use a variety of online job boards to look for open social media manager positions. Popular options include:
- Indeed
- Glassdoor
- ZipRecruiter
- Google for Jobs
- American Marketing Association
- com
- WeWorkRemotely
- AngelList
To see if any of your connections can help you secure an open position, you can also make use of your personal network.
A college degree is not always required to work as a social media manager, but it can significantly improve your chances of securing a position. Marketing, communications, and business degrees are the most popular among social media managers.
You can also obtain a variety of social media marketing certifications that will make you stand out from the crowd. This includes lessons from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as popular tools like HootSuite.
Conclusion
A social media manager is the artist behind the technique used to make online content go viral. There is no proper way to do it. Everything depends on what works for you. Some people only share content on social media. While other managers focus heavily on advertising, creating original posts, etc.
Like most things in life, the effective approach lies somewhere in the middle. You should have a head start on social media management after reading this post. Mastery of a skill is achieved when one is persistent and gradually builds on ideas. The same is true for becoming a successful social media manager.
