Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.
David Alston
A social media manager is much more than just someone who hops online and makes a few tweets or Instagram posts. Content creation is a big part of the job, but successful social media managers wear an entire entourage of hats, and it can be a bit stressful juggling all the different duties that come with the title.
It’s a crucial part of any social media manager’s success to perfect every role they’re expected to take on. Luckily, this large variety of roles can be broken down into six different tasks.
The following list of tasks sums up the many hats of a social media manager fairly accurately. Each of these tasks will be a part of nearly every project you take on. So, it’s essential to spend some time getting to understand each one and committing to developing a schedule for the more predictable tasks each day.
This will help you perfect each role, and you’ll have a much easier time managing multiple clients’ social media presences.
Let’s get started.
Strategist
When you first get started with a client, you’ll quickly find out that they’re not the ones putting the bulk of the energy into planning a social media campaign or developing their unique online presence.
Instead, that will be you. Upon partnering with a new client or handling a new project, you’ll need to take an in-depth look at their brand and goals to develop a bulletproof strategy that guides every step after this.
Content Creator
This is the most prominent role for any social media manager, and it will encompass the bulk of your time. Luckily, it’s the most exciting hat you can wear.
The content you create will need to coincide with the social media strategy you’ve developed for each client, but it gives you the creative freedom to design and implement content that pushes your clients’ goals.
Community Manager and Engagement Specialist
You can create and implement tons of high-quality content, but the content won’t do all the work generating much-needed engagement.
As a social media manager, it’s up to you to generate engagement via participating in the conversation surrounding your client’s brand. Beyond that, you’ll also need to answer questions from followers and function as an on-platform troubleshooter.
This can be difficult since many customers rely on a brand’s social media pages to find answers to their questions, but some chatbots and macros make responding to such high-volume queries a breeze.
Presence Analyzer
Another crucial part of managing a social media presence is analyzing its data and determining its level of success. This allows you to tweak strategies, launch campaigns, or capitalize on significant achievements.
To do this, you’ll need to fixate on each social media page’s post engagement, likes, comments, shares, and other forms of follower engagement daily for each client.
Content Curator
Pulling in content from third-party creators is a great way to flesh out a client’s social media backlog, and it’s up to you to curate that third-party content in a way that elevates your client’s social media presence. This requires sifting through third-party content, analyzing it, and finding ways to effectively present it to a page’s following.
Improvement Strategist
Finally, the last hat that a social media manager wears is that of an improvement strategist. Using the information gathered through your engagement analysis and communicating with a page’s following, you will need to organize that information and find ways to implement it into an improved social media strategy. One that engages followers more effectively, caters to their needs, and pushes your client’s goals.
Social Media Management isn’t a Simple Job
Being a social media manager looks like playing on social media all day for many outsiders to the industry, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Effectively doing your job and satisfying your clients’ needs will require you to take on these six roles in various ways, and at times, you might need to execute related tasks simultaneously. With that being said, a social media manager enjoys unlimited creative freedom, flexibility, and a true sense of fulfilment. So, don’t be afraid to put the time into mastering these roles.
Is your business using social media’s full potential?
At Brieffin, we use our expertise to unlock everything social media offers your business or personal brand. We use our experience in content creation, strategy and planning, and social media management to help build consistency and deliver marketing success. Let’s talk.
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