What Is A Social Media Manager?

Short Answer: An individual who knows the ins-and-outs of specific social media channels while monitoring, measuring, educating, and following all brand guidelines.

Just, creating and scheduling posts doesn’t mean you’re a social media manager.

When you are hiring a social media manager, these are the top 5 things to look for…

1. Brand Voice A social media manager is someone who can follow your company’s voice and your brand personality. They know or have done enough research to speak the language of your industry.
2. Social Media Channels There are roughly 22 social media channels. Some are better than most. Be certain the person you’re hiring will be able to provide sufficient evidence of their time and experience with the channels you will be using for your company. This could include a portfolio, testimonials, data reports, references, and others.
3. What To Expect Where some companies can go wrong is hiring a social media manager and not sure what to expect from them. Leads from social media are never promising. It is important to define what your expectations are going to be from the start. Whether it is more leads, followers, likes, shares, retweets, brand recognition, or engagement. Setting expectations will allow your social media manager to know where to focus their attention the most. If your goal is to increase your followers, then paid advertising is the best way to go. If your expectations are customer engagement, then expect to do giveaways and live videos.
4. Reporting Do you want to know where your money is going?
   Whether you hire a part-time or full-time social media manager, it’s important to receive weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reports. Reports can be generated directly from the social media channels. The most important reports are from paid advertising, which lets you see user behavior and the cost per click. However, if there are no advertising campaigns, then good reports can be created based off your established expectations.
   Let’s look at an example. A Beauty Spa’s wants to engage their customers.Your social media manager needs to create a report of that month’s posts, videos, giveaways, shares, likes, and comments. Some other great things to see in your manager’s reports are what projects were completed that month, what did/didn’t work, and their marketing strategy for the following month.
5. Social Media Strategy- To make a large impact on your business, it’s important to make sure that your social media goals are aligned with your business goals. Strategies and goals are not the same things. There are multiple social media strategies to use (enough to write a separate blog post about). Having a sensational strategy that works for your company is important because the company’s purpose can easily get missed if you have many different marketing systems. Once you’ve translated your company goals into social media goals, the next step is to map out the specific actions you need to take to accomplish the goals you’ve set.

Duties of A Full-time Social Media Manager

• Daily monitoring
• Daily or weekly posts
• Create and run social paid advertising
• Client accounts set-up & profile completion
• Branded, targeted, photographic posts
• Audience building & client targeting
• Reputation management
• Response or re-direction for questions & comments
• Growth monitoring (with weekly or bi-weekly reports)
• Hashtag research
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase online engagement
• Increase website traffic
• Create marketing strategies
• Live video
• Video ads

A Part-time Social Media Manager

• Weekly monitoring
• Weekly or monthly posts
• Minimal paid advertising campaigns
• Branded, targeted, photographic posts
• Redirection for questions & comments
• Growth monitoring (with weekly or biweekly reports)
• Content generation
• Website traffic

Social media channels are constantly coming out with new updates and new processes. Therefore, when you are looking to hire a social media manager, it can be difficult to gauge somebody’s talent. The best thing to do is interview them, ask questions, see a portfolio, and confirm your expectations in the beginning.