5 Essential Skills To Being A Great Social Media Manager
Uma Bhat
Wed, 07/18/2018 - 14:11

When we refer to social media manager, the image that appears is a person with multiple roles that includes content creation, time management, design visual content, post content, engage with audience, planning social media campaigns and so on. With social media becoming an important marketing strategy, the role of a social media manager is growing multiple folds thereby adding many more roles. 

But do you know if your social media managers have the required skills to manage your social pages? How do you really assess if your social media manager is ready to take your brand ahead in competition.

Here are 5 essential skills to being a great social media manager:

Passion for Content Writing

“Each piece of content should create an experience, using emotive, inspirational, suspenseful and personal stories” says Andrew Davis, Author Brandscaping.


A social media manager is under tremendous pressure to create quality content to engage with social media audience. Content creation is all about creating useful stories and sharing information for your customers.

Your writing should pass on your passion to your readers. Your writing should be full of emotions and inspiration that compels your readers to not just read it but also share it and further push them to take actions or do something after reading the content.

Always remember, good content is a result of effective planning and execution of the content strategy. Start the content journey with your passion until it drives real revenue for your brand.

The below content is an example from @cooksmarts of how you can bring emotions and inspiration by adding emotional quotes from the famous personality herself.
 

Understand content curation
In very simple terms, content curation refers to the act of selecting content, organizing it and presenting it in a way that is relevant and informative to your target audience.

A social media manager should have the ability to identify content that will drive social traffic to your website. To identify your target audience, it is essential to know your social media target audience thoroughly, so that eventually you will end up selecting content the resonates well with your audience.

As a social media manager, you should curate content by separating out the junk and to pick up the most valuable piece of content for your audience.

Here are four simple steps for content curation:

Identify the topic of relevance for your audience
Search for the content relating to this identified topic
Review the content for sharing with your audience
Shortlist and share the   best content that is most relevant and informative to your audience.
With the advent of social media automation tools, content curation has been made easy for social media managers.

Smart and intelligent tools such as Cloohawk, identifies the best posts from your followers, influencers and leads which you can retweet. Retweeting the right informative posts helps you to engage with your audience consistently, thereby growing your network.
Related Content: 6 Reasons To Have Content Curation in your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ability to think graphically
Social media today is all about pictures, videos and infographics. This makes it much more important for a social media manager to possess skills to create eye catching visuals for the social media content.

A social media manager should have skills to visualize and embed graphics into the content that is shared on social media.

There are numerous free tools as well as paid tools that come to the rescue of a social media manager in creating impressive content.

With the help of the tools, a social media manager can create personalized and branded content easily. Using tools such as Canva, you can create your own designs, modify pre-existing designs and can easy choose from a variety of pre-designed templates that will fit well into your content.
 

Knowledge on Social media Promotion
After having created content with passion and adding great visuals, you can’t just post content, hoping that it reaches your target audience.  A social media manager should have solid skills to promote content in the world of social media.

Knowing which social media will work for your product and knowing what type of promotions work for a particular social platform is essential skill for a social media manager.

You should know exactly where your ideal customer would hang out on social media; their demographics such as their gender, age, location and interests will help you to craft promotions that will target your social media audience.

Conduct extensive promotions on social media channels where your customers are likely to be. Choose a combination of promotion activities such as social media posts, paid advertising, contests, social media campaigns, quizzes, celebrity interviews, etc. are different ways to promote your content.

See how Wix rolled out ‘Melt the Ice campaign’ to encourage people to enter into the superbowl contest.


Perform Social media analytics
A social media manager no doubt has to create and publish content on social media. But do you really know what type of content should be created and when to share with your audience on social media.

Social media manager should be able to identify the different kinds of content that is working and connecting well with your audience.  Social media manager should be tech savvy and should be able to run performance metrics to analyze further the social media activities.

Social media manager should be able to understand each action on social media such as likes, comments, tweets, retweets and of course to measure big social media campaigns.

With the help of analytics a social media manager will be able to target customers better, introduce marketing innovation, gain competitive advantage and learn the behavior of customers on social media.

Social media tools such as Brandwatch will offer a data driven user interface to monitor and analyze social media behavior. 

A social media manager will bring in a lot of difference to their marketing strategies and tactics just by monitoring your social media analytics.


Conclusion

It was not long ago when the role of a social media manager was overlooked. But now, it has taken over as one of the most important marketing role in a company.

Just like a lot of other roles that require specific skills, a good social media manager should possess or learn a diverse set of skills that allows them to identify target customers, create content and run successful social media campaigns.