What is a Social Media Manager?

What is a social media manager? The Social Media Manager is responsible for a brand’s online presence, with an emphasis on social platforms. The Social Media Managers job can scale from being the only person in charge of a small brand’s entire social platform presence, creating all of the content and posting it; to managing huge companies online presence. In recent times more and more companies are understanding the vital importance of having an effective online presence, making SMM (Social media manager) one of the most sought after professions in digital marketing. 

What does a social media manager do?

Social Media Managers are in charge of the maintenance of the businesses online presence. So what are the responsibilities of a Social Media Managers? Some of a SMM’s tasks are monitoring, moderating and responding to audience comments; manage social media partnerships with other brands; and creating and posting sharable content such as videos and images. So what makes a good SMM? Communication, good copy, creativity and time management are all great skills to have as a Social Media Manager. This article gives a deeper explanation of the each skill set a SMM should have! Great read too!

Other skills you can work on to optimise your SMM skills:

• Literacy, and the ability to understand analyse

An obvious one. As a social media manager, you live in a world made of photos, but also of words. You have to be able to have a good command of the language, create engaging and interesting copy quickly. Another aspect you need to be aware of is your grasp of the language your brand uses to be aware of implications or be able to play with it. You will also need to know how to quickly research and analyse data, both from yourself and your competitors. being able to successfully analyse events and situations will allow you and your brands to keep up with trends.

• Being able to understand the various social media platforms and their analytics.

As a Social Media Manager, your sole job is to increase the effectiveness of your and online presence. There are four main sets of social media metrics that aid in evaluating the success of your online presence. 

Conversation rate – The number of conversations per post. On Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn comments and on Twitter replies.

Amplification rate – The number of re-shares or retweets per post.

Applause rate – Retweets, Likes, +1s, etc.

Economic value – The sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings.

Evaluating the success of posts depends on the purpose of the post. Some posts are aiming to have a high reach. Other posts aim to have high link clicks or signups. 

• Being able to use at least one graphics package

This is another obvious one, you are working in the area of brands and branding is a heavily visual art. There are plenty of graphics packages out there, ranging from the simple, like Canva to the complex such as the Adobe suite.  You have to be able to make effective visual displays for your online presence. 

• The ability to plan.

When you are running social media for brands it is very important to have a plan for your content. This prevents you from posting low-quality content, running out of content to post, being unprepared and being unable to reach goals, or even have useful goals. When working for a brand, you have to plan your social media ahead of time so you can show it to your client for approval and have enough time to revise and change it. The interesting thing about social media marketing, unlike normal sales,  is the appearance of being new, unplanned, fresh and up to date. Social media managers have to hit a careful balance between appearing new, fresh, and off the cuff, to the customers and being carefully planned and true to brand with the company.  

• SEO knowledge.

Search Engine optimisation. This is thrown around as mysterious hard understand. It isn’t, it is mainly to do with websites and blogs. There are even plugins to sites such as WordPress who will help you with it. It is less important if you are only running on social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.  

The best social media manager is someone who understands the platforms, the brand, and is flexible enough to mould both into a successful and engaging presence. It is a modern much more fast-paced version of traditional sales.  

• Being flexible/ spontaneous

As much as we have mentioned the benefits and importance of planning, we have also mentioned the necessity of also being a little spontaneous and taking risks. Sales live off this, you might accidentally create a viral trend, and become very important, or you could terminally embarrass your boss and be forced to put out an apology. Again here experience will help.  

• Valuable content 

Lastly, this is maybe not a skill but more of a statement, this is where social media sales is different from traditional sales. There are a lot of different marketing rules, but there is a general rule which is the 80/20 rule. This rule is 80% useful content talking about something other than yourself, and 20% talking explicitly about yourself. There’s another rule 70/20/10 rule. This rule is a refining of the 80% rule to help you narrow down what you need to post. 70% value, 20% promotion, and 10%, human. 

So, 70% of what the brand is going to post should be of value to its audience. Educational, funny inspiring etc. 20% promotion, discounts, sales, promo codes, giveaways etc.  10%  is the “personal touch”. These posts are often about things the brand cares about, brand values, or seemingly relatable personal things. (a good example of this maybe would be Wendy’s Twitter account when its creator took to roasting people for a few weeks).

In conclusion, a Social Media manager is a person who is responsible for a brand’s online presence. They are a combination of creatives, organisers and salesperson. The job is a flexible multi-faceted sales job, they must be able to understand the basics of advertising, like what campaigns are, but they must also understand the day to day stuff that goes into running a social media presence.

You can be your own social media manager as a business owner, but often that work can get too much for one person to handle. At Byter we specialise in Social Media Management, from content creation, strategy, management and audience engagement. If you need to alleviate some of your work load with social media marketing, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email (Contact page) 

You can also reach out to us on any of our Social Media platforms, we are more than happy to have a chat!