Employing a social media manager to handle the social media accounts of your brand is important, especially when you have other responsibilities to handle, and you need the hand of a professional to drive engagement with your audience.

When choosing a social media manager, you need to ensure he or she has the appropriate skills needed to handle the position effectively.

Essential Skills of a Social Media Manager

Here are some of the essential skills your social media manager should possess:

Copywriting skills

The main purpose of employing a social media content manager is to create contents that will help to increase your brand’s awareness, engagement and drive more traffic to your website, and probably boost sales. All these things can only be achievable if your social media manager possesses top-notch copywriting skills. 

The social media manager would have to create compelling Facebook and Instagram posts, tweets, and so on to capture the minds of your audience and pass important messages to them. Also, they should now how to write for different social platforms because the number of characters that drives engagement on Facebook is different from that of Instagram. And then there is also the responsibility of composing emails to your audience in a strategic format that will help with conversion.

Design

A social media manager should be a good designer even if not professional. They need to know how to create great visual contents such as photos or videos because most social media users will pick these two over long plain texts. We are not referring to boring and poor quality visuals but high-quality ones that will create a tinge of excitement in the mind of the users and encourage engagement.

Since a social media manager would be managing customers online, they should have empathy, conversational, and conflict resolving skills to be able to communicate effectively with customers and ensure they don’t get discontented in any way. 

Conversational skills

Leaving a customer angry or dissatisfied is the fastest way to get a bad review, which is why your social media manager must ensure to meet the customers halfway always if there is a misunderstanding. 

The manager should also be able to ask the right questions that will drive engagement with your audience and also have the right answer to questions about your products and services. He or she should be able to communicate using emojis or stickers.

Social media psychology

Every social media manager should have a level of social media psychology where they can use data and analytics to find out which of their posts performed better in the past and why it did. They should also be able to follow and understand trends to quickly incorporate in their posts. 

They should be able to know what kind of posts increases engagement; if it’s those with images, videos, graphs, or plain texts. Every brand is different, so what may drive engagement with one may be different from others. Being able to stop, observe, and think is the basis of psychology, which is a skill your social media manager should possess.

Analytics skills

In social media terms, being analytics means the ability to interpret available data to measure the performance of all your social media marketing efforts through the use of metrics which includes likes, comment, shares, website traffic, conversion, and so on. 

Your social media manager should be able to know the important metrics to use when measuring the performance of your social media platforms and how they are contributing to the overall marketing effort.

Budgeting

Another important skill your social media manager need is budgeting skills, which means he or she should have some basic financial knowledge. They should know what needs to be in the social media budget, the top priorities before others. A social media manager should know the importance of paid advertisement, social media management tools, designs, and so on.

Learning skills

Social media is ever-evolving with new tips and tricks on how to increase engagement with your audience and drive traffic to your website. 

Your social manager should be able to keep up with all the new developments, learn and implement the essential ones so that your brand is not left behind. For example, there has been a recent increase in preference for videos on Facebook rather than plain texts or photos. The ability for your employee to track this trend, implement them, and measure their performance is what makes them useful to your marketing strategy.

To achieve this, he or she should be a naturally curious person that will want to know why competitors are getting more followers and engagement than your brand. They will also want to experiment different trends on the social platforms to see which is working. 

They should also be continuous learners who can easily get a hand on any skill related to social media such as graphics design, video making, and so on.

Creativity

With the over-saturated social media market, it is now difficult to stand out due to the availability of stock photos and other curated contents. But some brands still stand out due to the creativity of their social media managers. 

You need a manager who is innovative and can brainstorm with other team members to create the best contents, which include visually appealing, and emotionally provoking contents. He or she should also be able to add a bit of personality that matches the brand voice, which could be cheerfulness, seriousness, humor, etc.

Organization

There are lots of responsibilities involved in the social media management which ranges from social media marketing plans to posting, campaign ads, tracking metrics, and so on is why your preferred manager needs to have top organization skills to be able to carry out duties efficiently and effectively.

He or she must know different social media tools that help in easing the workload, such as a social media calendar, post scheduling, design tools, and so on.

Overall business skills

The social media manager should be able to work towards ensuring that social media plans match the overall business goals. He or she should know when there is a need to use the traditional form of marketing to reach target audience and when to go online. The manager should also know how to incorporate both traditional and digital marketing skills to reach business goals.

Other skills your social media manager needs to have are project management, funnel marketing, strategy planning, and market analysis.

Do you need a social media management agency for your business? Trust Authors Guilds, a leading social media management service provider with more than 21 years of experience and an award-winning team of savvy social media specialists