What does a social media manager do?

A social media manager provides support building your online presence and generating engagement. One of the pros of managing your own social media is that you know your product inside and out. This makes it easy to chat about it, answer questions and build direct relationships with your clients.

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However, many entrepreneurs find the process time consuming and it’s difficult to maintain the consistency required to see results. As a company grows, it can be difficult to scale social media management with other duties.

At some point many companies look at hiring a social media manager. Then the issue becomes, what does a social media manager do? What is the job description? How do you measure whether or not you’re getting your money’s worth from a social media manager or company?

Campaign planning

Before your social media manager can get started they will need to know everything about the brand’s missions, values, culture, ideal customers, competitors, etc. They should know the problems faced by your customers and how the product or service solves those problems. They should understand the audiences you want to target on social media whether they are funders, clients or potential clients, buyers, potential employment recruits, etc.

They will understand the different social media platforms and how or if they connect with your ideal audience’s demographics.

The social media manager should understand your challenges as well. What has been your past experience with social media? What worked and what didn’t? What are the obstacles you want to overcome with your social strategy? The social media manager should be able to address these problems in the strategy he or she proposes.

Similar to any kind of marketing, your social media campaigns should have a voice that’s consistent with your brand. A financial or legal service may want to cultivate a serious and authoritative tone, while a lifestyle brand aimed at young people will have a more casual tone.

Your brand and audience will also predetermine where you want to post, what you post, what curated information you share, like and comment on, the times of day you are active, how you respond to people and what images you use.

A social media manager should develop a plan, including goals, and be able to explain how they arrived at it.

Social media practices are always changing. A social media manager should stay on top of the latest trends. What worked five years ago may not be the best strategy today.

In order to create a strategy, a social media manager may need to collaborate with senior management, marketing managers, public relations managers, communications specialists, graphic designers, community managers, outreach coordinators, sales managers and anyone else in the organization who is involved in messaging and spreading the word.

Social listening

Once the social media manager has had a chance to spend some time on your social networks, they should be able to add to your business intelligence. You may discover new challenges that your product can solve. You may learn more about your followers’ interests and demographics. For example, if you find that many of your target customers are also engaged in NHL hockey conversations, you can target your next Facebook ad to people with the interest of NHL hockey. You may realize that your ideal audience doesn’t like something about your business or your marketing.

Polls provide an excellent opportunity for companies to better understand their audiences. They are fun to complete and provide more insight into demographics as long as you have a large and active audience.

The social media manager should be able to identify insights and communicate them to you.

Analytics

A social media manager will monitor your performance and make recommendations based on data.

Online positioning

Creating profiles for your business can boost your SEO by helping you own the entire first page of organic Google search results. Avoid letting your competitors sneak their listings under your company name. A social media manager will optimize your profiles to show up on the first page.

A social media manager will need to have some knowledge of SEO because, even if they aren’t writing content for your website, they will be optimizing your social profiles, writing descriptions, and adding tags to your online assets.

Content development

A social media manager will plan content to share on social platforms. If you don’t have a regular blogger, this may fall under the social media manger’s job description.

In addition to sharing blog posts, the social media manager will need to write posts, descriptions, offers, company profiles and other information.

Sometimes a social media manager will create an offsite blog to complement your main website, address a particular issue, share information that doesn’t strictly fit with your website and send traffic to your main site. For example, an immigration firm may run a news-based site about the latest court decisions and government legislation. A craft store might run a DIY blog. Platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger allow people to interact with other bloggers in similar niches and build relationships similar to how relationships are built on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. These platforms also tend to do well in search results.

Some social platforms will have options for original content. For example, you can post articles on LinkedIn and create presentations on SlideShare. There are live video options in Facebook, SnapChat and Instagram. Of course, YouTube is a place to post lasting video content. Instagram has also added a video feature. Your social media manager may play a role in creating this content, requisitioning it, or making recommendations for content that could be developed.

Visual content

Photos and graphic imagery are increasingly important in the Web 2.0 age. You can’t just rely on the logos and branding you paid a designer for when you first set up your business.

A social media manager will curate images and design graphics for your social media. This can include blog label images, stock photos, infographics, graphic calls to action, profile images and more. They may also contract paid freelance designers and oversee the work.

Funnels

A common practice on social media is to attract new leads with free offers, contests and signups. A social media manager can help you plan a campaign that adds to your list. Contests are also used to generate more followers on social media.

Paid promotions

Some social media platforms may provide better performance than others for your brand. You might consider running paid advertising campaigns to better target your ideal clients.

In fact, organic brand presence on Facebook is extremely limited these days and most businesses and organizations that are successful on Facebook are relying on paid reach.

Public relations

Social media is called social for a reason. People will comment on posts, ask questions and make complaints. A social media manager will be able to respond professionally and help resolve any problems that come up. For example, they may need to respond to an unhappy customer by acknowledging the feedback and sending the person to an offline conversation.

Positive interaction will also provide opportunities for customer service. If a person shows enough interest to turn into a lead, the social media manager should be able to respond quickly and direct them into the funnel.

If you are in the unfortunate position of having a communications crisis, social media is one of the most volatile spaces for it to blow up. It’s also a good place to respond because you can share your side of the story in real time and communicate directly with your customers. A social media manager can help you come up with a strategy to help moderate the situation.

Social media managers may also do social outreach by connecting with key influencers with a goal to developing partnerships, guest postings and mentions.

Social media managers also monitor review sites like Yelp and respond to both positive and negative reviews.

Local SEO

Local businesses will need a presence on review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor. A social media manager can also optimize your Google My Business account and post to it regularly with photos, events and updates. This listing needs to be optimized so that when the local community and visitors search for your service because they need something close by, you can be found.

How do you measure success?

The success of your social media campaigns can be measured in the traditional way: traffic, leads and sales. Just remember that a person who visits your Facebook page may not become a lead right away. It may take several touches before they start interacting with you directly.

One of the benefits of social media is that a consistent posting strategy can provide those multiple touches at little cost.

Are you ready to get started on a targeted plan to managing your social media strategy? Book a call today to talk about how Words Plus Design can help you reach your customers through social media marketing.

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