Today, social media can dictate the fate of a brand. Social media marketers and managers create and schedule content across platforms; in doing so, they learn how to nurture their customers, address their pain points and needs, and adapt to change. These activities are crucial for growing and keeping a business relevant to its target audience.
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This article will cover tips and tricks to be an effective social media manager, make the most of social media in 2024, and drive insights from your results to improve performance.
What Is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of building a social media strategy, creating and scheduling content, and constantly evaluating its execution. Tasks within social media management include crisis management, community management, and paid media or campaign management. Social media management is usually overseen by a social media team led by a social media manager.
What Does a Social Media Manager Do?
A social media manager is a highly skilled and specialized marketer who is responsible for managing a brand’s presence across social media. Social media managers are vital in driving one of the most essential and visible marketing channels available to businesses.
As a social media manager, responsibilities include planning, creating, and posting content that is aligned with the brand’s values and identity, monitoring how content performs, and readjusting the strategy as required.
The typical duties of a social media manager include:
- Creating a social media strategy
- Managing a social media team
- Working with design, video, and content teams
- Community management
- Monitoring posts
- Analyzing and reporting on content performance
As a bridge between the brand and the audience, the role has been elevated over the last couple of years, and most businesses now have at least one skilled social media manager in-house. In fact, over 27,243 social media managers are currently employed in the United States.
Social Media Manager Tips for 2024
A social media manager’s ultimate goal is to positively grow a brand’s online presence. This can be accomplished through engaging content, such as posts and videos that increase brand awareness, as well as other tasks that encourage customer loyalty and retention. For example, running community competitions, driving UGC, and addressing customer queries.
Besides completing their everyday managerial activities, a social media manager can benefit from others’ experiences to sharpen their skillset.
Here are some top social media manager tips to ensure you nail your social media strategy this year:
1. Expand Your Social Media Knowledge
Chances are you love social media, but being a channel manager also involves constant research, certifications, and getting formal education to remain at the top of your game as a social media professional.
Leverage your experience as a social media manager so far by making a list of your achievements, identifying short and long-term goals to address any gaps in your resume, and plan your social media career accordingly. You’ll notice growth opportunities more easily if you keep track of your progress.
Keeping on top of changes within the industry and platforms is essential as a social media manager to maintain your career and keep developing as a practitioner.
Also, improving your social media knowledge can help you land new professional opportunities as a manager inside a company or as a freelancer.
2. Network With Others in Your Industry
Networking is vital for a social media manager, especially when a business is in its early stages or if you’re looking to grow your brand or professional profile. Join relevant organizations and attend networking events to connect with other professionals, as well as potential clients.
How should you go about it? There are three ways to network:
Join Social Media Manager Communities
Source: LinkedIn
Joining communities of social media professionals will bring you closer to people with shared interests, goals, and a wide range of expertise. In these forums, you can get tips for your day-to-day job and broader professional advice regarding your role and performance as a social media manager.
- Social Media Manager Support Network on Facebook
This group is for you if you have questions about social media marketing and advertising. The group is open to anyone looking for mentors, advice, or help to achieve their goals as social media manager.
- Social Networking Forum on TechRepublic
This community of experts focuses on questions for people utilizing social networks as marketing tools. Questions and discussions are on various topics, including channel growth, hashtags, keyword research, traffic, and technical issues.
- Social Media Managers Group on LinkedIn
This open network is a space where social media managers and marketing professionals can connect and share tips and ideas.
Attend Networking Events
Attending social media networking events is great if you want to meet other social media experts and explore common challenges. Interacting with peers can help you understand how others build new strategies and enables you to seek advice on how to incorporate them into your own social media plans.
Look for Collaborations
Teaming up with other social media professionals can be a win for everyone involved.
Look for brands that align with yours. Partnering with other social media managers on campaigns or initiatives can help you expand your audience, reach common goals, gain a new perspective, and learn through collaboration.
3. Keep Up With Social Media Trends
Source: Envato Elements
As a social media manager, you need to stay on top of the latest social media trends to plan and create content that resonates with your audience and potential customers.
Staying ahead of the curve will enable you to increase the opportunities to connect with your target audience and allow you to adapt your tactics to what’s coming. Additionally, discovering new trends enables you to respond quickly to the fast-paced social media landscape.
There are plenty of online tools for finding and identifying trends, including:
- Google Trends. This tool enables social media managers to get a broad picture of what’s trending using search data. If you want to watch a specific keyword (e.g., “Instagram”), you can set up a Google Alert.
- Hootsuite. This platform includes a set of social listening tools that let’s you monitor trends based on keywords. For example, you might monitor mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry keywords to keep an eye on emerging patterns.
- Top Hashtags. This tool monitors trending hashtags on Instagram and TikTok. You can also see hashtags’ popularity, even if they’re not trending.
- Feedly. This newsreader can also point to which topics are most trending. You can use this to inform your next content planning session.
4. Understand Social Media Metrics and Analytics
Social media metrics include leading and lagging indicators that your social media activity is performing as required. As a social media manager, you must learn to use and read these metrics to measure and evaluate if your social media content is working.
To master the art of effective social media measurement, understand which metrics are the most valuable to your business based on your goals.
There’s a long list of potential numbers to track, including:
- Reach. The number of people viewing your content.
- Impressions. The number of times people view your content. This can be higher than reach because the same user can view your content more than once.
- Audience growth rate. The percentage increase of new followers you acquire within a specific time frame.
- Engagement rate. Total number of engagements, divided by total reach – then multiply the result by 100.
- Video views. How many people are watching your videos.
- Video completion rate. How many users actually watch your videos all the way through the end.
- Click-through rate (CTR). The number of total clicks divided by the total number of impressions, then multiplied by 100.
- Conversion rate. Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period.
Tracing this is possible using UTM parameters to track conversions, which are short pieces of code you add to links, and make them easier to track with analytics programs.
5. Get Certified As a Specialist
As social media constantly evolves, you should keep up with what’s new. Certifications are a way to demonstrate your expertise and credibility as a social media manager, and they make a great addition to your CV when you’re searching for new employment opportunities.
Make time to explore and choose from many certifications and courses that are available on reliable platforms such as Coursera, HubSpot Academy, Meta, or the Social Media Marketing Institute.
What Skills Does a Social Media Manager Need?
Your role as a social media manager is ever-evolving, but if you master the following skills, you’ll remain at the top of your game.
1. Flexibility
Flexibility means conducting yourself with an open mind and a willingness to change. This skill is crucial as a social media manager because platforms – and users – can bring unexpected issues that often drive changes to your strategy or output.
2. Communication
Communication is an essential skill for any type of manager, but this is especially true for social media managers.
Strong communicators are better at delegating tasks, managing conflict, and reacting to unpredictable situations.
3. Technical Skills
A wide range of technical skills will lead to success as a social media manager. Knowing how to use social media platforms, tools, and software from a business perspective will benefit your everyday job, even if you’re not creating or posting the content yourself.
Other technical skills, such as video content creation or keyword research, will get you bonus points, as they’re becoming increasingly important in the world of social media management.
Source: Envato Elements
4. Stakeholder Management
As a manager, you’re responsible for organizing, prioritizing, and monitoring your team’s output and ensuring the right stakeholders are involved in every project or activity. Excellent stakeholder management requires confidence, influence, communication, and negotiation to ensure your team receives the right input and resources it needs to succeed.
What Are the Best Social Media Management Tools
Besides skills, numerous platforms can be used to help you manage your social media content while providing your team with the tools and features they need to execute daily tasks.
Here’s a short list of some of the best social media tools:
- Sprout Social
Source: Sprout Social
Spout Social is a powerful tool for analyzing data and scheduling using an all-in-one platform. The most popular Sprout Social plan is the Professional, which allows you to schedule and track unlimited social media content each month. However, the Advanced plan gets you access to automated chatbots, link-tracking capabilities, and demographic and geographic information about followers.
Pricing: US$249 to US$499 per month.
- Buffer
Source: Buffer
Buffer is the perfect tool for small businesses that need to schedule multiple posts across social media channels using one dashboard that is easy-to-use.
If you go for the paid version, you’ll also get analytics reports for various channels, as well as data storage.
Pricing: Free (14-day trial) or US$5 per month per channel.
- Hootsuite
Source: Hootsuite
Hootsuite lets you schedule social media content via an interactive planner. This tool offers analytics data and integrations, depending on your plan’s tier: Professional, Team, Business, or Enterprise.
All of Hootsuite’s applications are available as open source, which means the platform is compatible with multiple integrations and can work smoothly with various software – that’s more than 250 apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Pricing: US$99 to US$739 per month.
- SocialPilot
Source: SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an affordable option that integrates with all social media platforms, including TikTok. This platform includes a drag-and-drop social media calendar, making scheduling and rearranging scheduled posts easy.
Pricing: US $25.50 to US $170 per month.
Wrap Up
Being a social media manager requires more than setting up social media accounts and planning daily content. A successful social media manager must stay curious, be willing to learn new skills and adapt to upcoming social media management tools, trends, and features.
If you have additional questions or would like to share your experience as a social media manager, go ahead and drop a comment below.
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