Top Social Media Skills & traits: Social media managers need a wide range of skills including hard skills as well as soft skills to attract a target audience and build strong relationships with their followers and loyal customers.
With the significant increase of social media users in different social media platforms nowadays, businesses and brands are forced to have a strong social media presence to thrive in the market. Therefore, many companies offer social media management jobs for creating and managing their social media strategies.
If you’re an aspirant for becoming a social media manager, but don’t know what skills you need to develop, this article will help you recognize the vital skills you should develop to succeed in a social media management career.
Based on my research, here are the must-have skills for every social media marketer:
- Communication: As a social media marketer, you need to be able to convey messages effectively and interact with audiences in a clear and engaging manner.
- Writing: Good writing skills are crucial as content creation forms a major part of social media marketing.
- Creativity: This is important for generating unique and engaging content, as well as coming up with innovative marketing strategies.
- Efficiency and Project Management: The ability to manage multiple tasks and platforms efficiently is vital.
- Marketing Strategy: Understanding how to create and implement effective marketing strategies is essential.
- Customer Care: Social media is often the first point of contact for customers. Therefore, good customer service skills are necessary.
- Audience Research: Knowing your audience and what they want to see is crucial for successful social media marketing.
- Strong Visual Sense: Being able to understand and use visuals effectively can make a big difference in the engagement levels of your posts.
- Awareness of Trends & tools: Staying updated with the latest social media trends and leveraging them effectively is another important skill.
- SEO Skills: Understanding SEO can help improve the visibility of your posts on various platforms.
- Design Skills: Whether it’s creating graphics or videos, design skills are becoming increasingly important in social media.
- Public Speaking: Confidence in front of an audience, even if it’s a virtual one, is a valuable skill.
Remember, these skills can vary depending on the specific role and company. However, these are generally considered important for most social media marketing roles.
Who is a Social Media Manager?
A social media manager is a social media expert within a company or individual, for creating, executing, and optimizing the social media presence of the company or individual. The role of a social media manager is very similar to a public relations representative. A social media manager performs various public relations responsibilities through different social media channels.
Different Roles of a Social Media Manager
A social media manager performs diverse social media activities like creating a social media campaign strategy, promoting brands, measuring ROIs of campaigns, and so on. A social media manager engages the audience by responding to queries and comments.
A social media manager leverages several paid and free social media tools to ease and automate social media marketing tasks. Social media managers always keep the audience updated with industry trends and offers.
Related reading: Best Content Automation Tools
What Skills Do You Need for Becoming a Successful Social Media Manager?
Becoming a successful social media manager requires a diverse set of skills. Firstly, excellent communication skills are essential as you’ll be the voice of the brand you’re representing, interacting with users and building relationships.
This extends to writing skills, as you’ll need to create engaging content that captures your audience’s attention. Creativity is also vital in order to develop fresh ideas for posts and campaigns. Efficiency and project management skills will help you juggle multiple tasks and platforms simultaneously.
Understanding marketing strategy is crucial to align your social media efforts with broader business goals. Customer care skills are needed as social media often serves as a customer service platform. You should also be adept at audience research to understand what content resonates with your followers.
A strong visual sense can help you select or create compelling images and videos. Being aware of the latest social media trends and how to leverage them effectively is key. Lastly, a grounding in SEO can improve the visibility of your posts on various platforms.
Now you have an overall idea about a social media manager and its role, here you’ll learn about the skills social media managers should have to produce the best results. I’ll discuss top social media skills in 2 different stages.
In the 1st stage, I’ll discuss some hard skills and in the 2nd stage, I’ll discuss some soft skills or personality traits.
Hard Skills Social Media Managers Should Have
Social media managers require a variety of hard skills to perform their diverse social media activities in their career. Some most important hard skills are as follows.
Writing
Writing is one of the key skills in the entire marketing industry including social media marketing. Writing good content is required in almost all social media job roles, whether you want to create a social media ad campaign or you just want to engage your audience.
You can’t attract or engage your target audience without an appealing conversation and story and you need a great writing skill to create captivating conversation and story.
Communication on Social Media
Social media platforms are nothing but platforms for communicating with each other. Therefore, a social media manager should have strong communication skills that can fit in audience and platform.
You have to learn different types of communications like one to one, one to many, public speaking, communication in front of a camera, and many more. As a social media professional, maintaining good internal communication with your team and higher authorities of your company is also very important for your career growth.
Design
Social media content with images or videos are getting more engagements nowadays. You’ll need to learn good graphic designing and video designing to create and design highly impactful visual content.
Several tools are available on the internet for creating and designing visual content. Some tools are free and some are paid. Creating impactful videos are becoming an essential skill for marketing professionals as well as social media professionals.
Related Reading: Video Marketing Guide
Planning
“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought” – Sun Tzu in his book “The art of war”
Creating a proper plan and strategy is a major skill you require to be a social media manager. The success of social media campaigns always depend on proper planning and strategies. Budgeting is also an important part of an effective plan.
As a social media manager you’ll often need to balance multiple tasks at the same time throughout multiple platforms. You’ll need to plan out everything in advance. Several tools are available to make social media content calendars and automate repetitive tasks.
Community Building and Management
When it comes to developing a brand awareness, it’s very crucial to create a community of your target audience. This is actually how influencers do their jobs. If you have a large group of followers who are highly interested in your products or services, it’s very easy to grow your business faster.
As a social media manager, you should have skills to build a community as well as skills to manage a community. You’ll have to capture leads and nurture them in effective ways. Always, you have to focus on creating a strong relationship with your community. The stronger the relationship, the better the opportunity.
Customer Support
In recent years, social media became consumers’ first choice for getting customer support. But a very few businesses leverage social media for customer care.
There’s a huge chance to provide a satisfying customer support experience and create social proof for your business and brand through social media platforms. This strategy will help you gain more authority and trust in the industry.
Research
Social media managers need strong research skills. As a social media manager, you have to validate data and protect wrong information. You’ll need to remain always up to date with the fast-changing world of digital channels.
You’ll often need to research competitors’ activities and analytics. You’ll also need in-depth research skills to understand consumer psychology and laser target your prospective customers.
Content Marketing
For making an effective social media campaign, social media managers obviously require integration of other online channels. To create an impactful social media business strategy, you’ll have to understand integrated content marketing approaches through several online channels like website, email, blog, etc.
In-depth knowledge of content marketing will help you attract traffic, Convert traffic, generate leads, build relationships, and ultimately convert them into sales.
Data Analysis
Though web / data analysis is a part of research, I’m mentioning it separately for its incredible importance in social media marketing & Marketing Analytics. Nowadays, data science is a separate domain in the digital field. All social media managers should have strong data analysis skills. Social media managers often need analytics and reports for optimizing their campaigns.
You may also read: Social Media Marketing Tips , Social Media and Branding
If you want to build an authority in the social media management field, you’ll have to understand which campaign patterns are working well and which patterns need more optimization.
Every social media platform has a dedicated feature to track your social media performances. For example, Facebook insights, YouTube analytics, Twitter analytics are very useful for tracking your social media performances. You can also use third-party social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, QuickMetrix, HubSpot, BuzzSumo, etc.
Expertise in Social media tools
Social media managers often need different social media tools to create and maintain social media campaigns more efficiently and accurately. Therefore, social media managers should have in-depth knowledge and expertise on multiple social media tools.
As a social media manager, you’ll need to learn about the latest tools, how to operate them, etc. Different types of social media tools are available including –
- Buyer persona tools – Social bakers, Socedo
- Lead generation tools – Audience, OptinMonster
- Analytical tools – Agora Pulse, CrowdBooster
- Security tools – LastPass, ZeroFOX
- Content creation tools – BuzzSumo, Tailwind
- Graphic design tools – Canva, Visage
- Content curation tools – Hootsuite, Buffer, SocialFlow, Everypost
- Sharing and monitoring tools – Brand24, Sprout Social
- And many more.
Related reading: Digital Marketing career in India
Soft Skills or Personality Traits Social Media Managers Should Have
For becoming an authority in the social media marketing field, some soft skills or personality traits are equally important in combination with hard skills. Though it’s necessarily not possible to discuss all the personality traits in a single sitting, here’s a few traits you must have as a social media professional.
Creativity
In recent times, social media channels became overwhelmed as many brands are competing with each other to attract their target customers. On social platforms, grabbing attention and standing out in the crowd is the biggest challenge for brands nowadays.
Your creativity will help you think out of the box and come up with different ideas to stand out in the crowded social media channels. As a social media manager, creativity will help you –
- Create visually impactful and compelling content
- Create an innovative advertising campaign
- Laser target with psychological hacks
- And so on.
Tech Savviness
Using technology is compulsory for social media professionals. A tech-savvy social media manager can understand which software, tools, or platforms can generate more results in a shorter period. The more you become tech-savvy, the better decision you can make for your organization.
Entrepreneurship Mindset
Doing a job as a social media professional is good, but developing an entrepreneurship mindset is even better. No matter if you take a job or start your own business, an entrepreneurship mindset will help you maintain consistent workflow and improvement.
Purposeful Patience
Like every industry, having patience is an indispensable trait for a social media career. You can’t see your expected results overnight in social spaces. You have to keep patience to see results.
Make sure your patience is purposeful. As a social media manager, you’ll need an aligned balance between your expectations and your performances.
Flexibility
Social media channels are always changing with the advancements of technology. You should adopt the latest techniques to achieve your social media goals faster. Though your goals and marketing principles will remain the same, you’ll need to be flexible in your techniques and strategies.
Agility
For social media management, it’s mandatory to respond to queries immediately to create a wow feeling experience and build a strong relationship with the audience. The faster you respond, the better.
As a social media professional you should always be ready to connect your audience as well as your internal team. You’ll need to develop a 24 hours working mindset with do-it-now activities.
Related reading: Online Reputation Management
Final Words:
It’s not mandatory to have all skills at a time to become a good social media manager. Being proficient in some fundamental skills will be enough for you to become a social media manager at the starting point. But if you want to establish yourself as an authority in the social media field, you’ll need a lifetime learning and executing practices.
Our digital marketing course includes all the social media marketing strategies that will help you become a successful social media manager for any brand or business.
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