What are the social media management skills you need as a social media manager? The answer to this question is what we’re going to place our focus on in this article!
Before we proceed, let’s recall that just a decade ago, the role of a social media manager might not have existed or was not even considered a job or a career. At that time, Facebook was barely existing and of course, just a way for people to connect with other students online.
But here we are today, where almost every company is involved in social media one way or another with an increasing demand for a social media manager. However, whether full-time or part-time, becoming a social media manager comes with a price. You must possess some essential social media management skills as one.
Meanwhile, a social media manager can be anything from a marketer to a strategist, to a copywriter, and to a customer service rep, which could all be challenging if you don’t have an adequate skill set. Besides an effective social media manager brings both hard skills and soft skills to the table, with hard skills referred to as skills such as data analysis and copywriting. At the same time, soft skills are the more difficult kind of skills to learn, such as organizational skills and the ability to make connections. All, of which are essential social media management skills.
So without much ado, let’s proceed to see those essential social media management skills one needs to have as a social media pro.
Essential Social Media Management Skills Of a Social Media Pro
When it comes to choosing an ideal social media manager, I feel you should be looking for the right mix of hard skills and soft skills, as highlighted above. And if you’re one, below are the key social media management skills you need to drive real results, realize the true business impact, and level up your own abilities as a pro.
1. Communication Skill
Communication is one of the basic social media management skills one needs to have, going on the fact that social media is a communication platform. It is necessary that as a social media manager you have strong communication skills that are appealing to any platform, media, or audience.
As a social media manager, you’re the voice of your brand for the customers on social media. Therefore, at any given time, you need to be on top of a trending topic or a disgruntled customer complaint. And as the case may be, you should be aware that you won’t only be communicating in writing; but also with emojis, video, GIFs, images, stickers, and other resources that you can use to get your message across to the brand audience engagingly and clearly.
Plus if you have to tap into the live video trend on social media, you have to be confident enough as a social media manager to go live on social to connect with your audience. Hence, having good communication skills will help you to present your ideas, interview guests, answer impromptu questions, and chat with your followers in real-time.
On the other, communication is a key part of social media management skills because you equally have to be able to communicate effectively with your boss, peers, and collaborators across teams. Of course, you will have to speak with an internal stakeholder about your social media strategy, content distribution plan, and the impact of your campaign. Also, strong communication skills are needed to effect internal education and training, as you can work to train people from departments like customer support, sales, and creative support.
In the end, keeping the management informed, the team motivated, and customers excited and engaged means you know the art of communication as a social media manager.
2. Creative Skills
One common thing is that every brand wants to stand out in the saturated social media space. As a result, every social media manager wants to come up with content that is exciting, valuable, and engaging, which leaves creativity as one of the major social media management skills a social pro needs to possess.
Over the years, social media has evolved, and users have moved from mostly plain text-based updates toward more visual content such as images and videos. And study reveals that social posts with images receive more engagement and 43 percent of consumers want to see more video content in the future.
When you’re creative as a social media manager, you can easily create compelling visual and multimedia content, develop innovative and risk-taking social campaigns, and so on. Moreover, social media marketing and management are not just cold hard tactics any longer. Hence, understanding the creative process that provides creative content which engages and excites your audience is the key to a standout social media campaign.
As a social media manager, you can improve your creative skills through online classes such as LinkedIn Learning and Skillshare, along with several other services, which offer everything from writing to mobile photography. You can equally consider Canva for its basic design classes for non-designers as it can help you to improve your graphic design skills online.
3. Writing Skills
Writing could easily be considered as one of the top social media management skills to have as the bedrock of communication on social media falls back on written words. The best social media managers are arguably excellent copywriters and bold digital conversationalists, who enhance and embody their brand’s voice on social media.
From writing a catchy social media profile description to attention-grabbing ad copy and crafting tweets and Facebook posts, writing a good and concise copy is necessary to keep your audience engaged. Meanwhile, to drive much traffic and engagement, you should know how to write good copy that elicits emotion from your audience.
Also, good social media managers should know how to tailor their writing to different audience groups and platforms. For instance, even though you can use up to 2,200 characters in an Instagram caption, data has shown that Instagram captions between 138-150 characters are often most engaging.
In fact, writing is one of the most important social media management skills because sometimes, a social media manager might be asked to contribute to the company’s blog. So if you have little knowledge of writing such times could be very challenging for you. Images, videos, and other visual contents are essential for every brand, but writing is as much vital too.
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4. Organizational Skills
How can you manage multiple social media pages if you can’t manage your time and stay organized? This question literally says that organization and efficiency are among the essential social media management skills one needs to have. As a social media manager, you have to determine campaigns and content distribution tempo, as well as lead and execute your team’s plan from start to finish.
However, to achieve the above, you will need to be very organized and will also need the help of some tools, policies, and processes to set the scores straight. Thus, you can fall back on a social media calendar if you want to keep your content organized and plan.
The truth is that you don’t need a degree or high level of expertise to be organized. All you need is to pay attention to details and understand the right tactics you need to execute and the perfect time to execute them. Time management is another important part of being organized. A good social media manager needs to be sensitive to time, especially in terms of being responsive to the customers.
Obviously, you can’t do it alone, that’s why you need tools such as Buffer to automate some of your social media activities.
5. Analytical Skills
No second thoughts on this one, every social media manager needs to be analytical and thoughtful, possessing the ability to analyze social media metrics such as likes, comments, shares, etc., and business metrics, including traffic, leads, conversions, revenue, etc. Once a social media manager can understand both types of metrics, he can tie them together to give a detailed report of the brand’s social media campaign performance against business goals.
In most cases, brands are familiar with end-of-month reporting. However, as a skillful social media manager, you should be looking at data and turning it into action more regularly than just once a month.
On the other hand, why analytical skill is one of the essential for social media management skills because it’s everything from reporting on social performance to looking at your data and being able to identify trends, develop recommendations, and communicate a plan to execute. If you’re analytical, you can always have solid feedback to bring to your boss, your collaborators, and as well as other departments.
Today, the social media scene has evolved so well that you don’t need to analyze your campaigns by mindlessly monitoring the streams, posts, and pages. Instead, you can fall back on some social media management tools out there to help make a light work off your shoulder.
6. Customer Relationship Management Skills
A social media manager is the face of his company on social media. As a result, he ought to have a good conversational skills and empathy to help the customers on social. Customer relationship manager skill is an important social media management skill because it’s one of your duties as a social media manager to be responding to at least some of the messages your brand receives on different social channels. Hence, it’s a necessity to develop a social customer care strategy for every social media manager.
Sometimes customers can be quite nervous, but irrespective of that, you need to be able to read their feedback and understand the reason behind what the customer is upset about. While you listen to and understand the concerns, demands, and even praise of current customers, you also have to be proactive about what prospective customers might say.
Meanwhile, no matter how annoying customers might be, customer care skill means you can never be rude to them. You have to come up with the right questions to facilitate engagement from your audience and always answer their questions about the company or its products. Plus you have to understand your customers to enable you to make a positive impact that will be appealing to them, including how to respond to trolls and negative feedback.
Automate your connections with your customers with the help of these chatbot platforms
7. Good Understanding Of Traditional And Digital Marketing Trends
Social media will continue to evolve and as a social media manager, you need to see your role as more than just focused on accomplishing social goals. So you need to stay on top of the trends as it matures and evolves.
Today, social media is the intersection of marketing, customer experience, and sales; likewise, the source of several valuable business intelligence. This means that you must have the ability to link up your social strategy to larger marketing and business goals.
Therefore, to create a social strategy with a business impact, it’s important to understand the trends, such as; the rise and role of mobile, the rise, and role of visual marketing, and the emergence of business promotion, with most social media channels reducing their organic reach. Understanding other traditional and digital marketing approaches, including email, events, lead generation, PR, etc. will also help you structure social media within the bigger context of how your brand connects with its customers, drives sales, and ultimately generates revenue.
8. Ability To Make Connections
The ability to make the right connections for your brand is one of the key social media management skills every social manager needs. You should be able to establish and build digital relationships to bring new opportunities for the brand you represent. The secret is that there are always new connections to be made on social media, and social media managers with this skill are always proactive and creative when it comes to building them.
According to SproutSocial, 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them on social media. Out of that number, 57% will increase their spending with that brand when they feel connected, while 76% will choose that brand over a competitor.
Moreover, it’s a different kind of show when it comes to making connections and engagement. Everyone doesn’t have that same comfort and skill level. Therefore, as a social media manager, you should feel comfortable implementing your brand voice when building your connection and engaging with your customers and potential ones.
9. Budgeting Skills
Definitely, you’re going to be allocated a budget to work with as a social media manager. So how would you manage it if you don’t have good budgeting skills? This aspect is one of the social media management skills you can afford to overlook in any way.
When a budget is allocated to you, you might have to pay for resources like social media management tools, designs, images, or even courses to improve yourself – that’s after paid advertising expenditure. Whether the budget at your disposal is small or large, you can always make better use of the wealth given to you if you have some basic financial and budgeting knowledge.
To improve your financial and budgeting knowledge, you can pick up one of the best social media marketing budget templates out there to keep yourself informed.
10. Content Optimization Skills
The last but not the least in our list of must-have social media management skills is content optimization skills. The social platform today is an ecosystem of search. So the ability to know how to guide a customer down a sales funnel from discovery, engagement, and follow-ups to sales requires some skill sets.
Firstly, you should be able to optimize your social media content for SEO. With that, search engines can rank your content high for the keywords and phrases you optimized for.
Again, it would help if you showed your expertise in converting traffic when they arrive on your landing pages so that customers can register for webinars, download ebooks, and share your content across different social channels. Content is still the “King.”
Take Away
Life is a learning curve, and the longer it goes, the better it should become. With that being said, you can still be on the receiving end even if you already excel at all of these ten social media management skills.
No one is perfect, and social media is a career path for lifelong learning. Thus, continuing to hone these skills will benefit you at every stage of your career as a social media manager. It would be best if you looked to develop each skill every time you feel you’re becoming obsolete.
In summary, these ten social media management skills are the ones we found so essential for every social manager; they’re just must-haves! However, it doesn’t mean you should not develop in other areas of management as a social manager to keep your career on top at all times.
What are the social media management skills that are of most importance to you? Feel free to share them in our comments section below! Thanks for reading!