HOW TO BECOME A SOCIAL MEDIA manager (2024 Guide)

Skills For Social Media Marketing

BrainStation’s Social Media Specialist career guide is intended to help you take the first steps toward a lucrative new career in digital marketing. To start, find out what skills you need to be a Social Media Specialist.

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The top skills for social media marketing include writing ability, a strong knack for visuals, and a talent for community management.

Content marketing and social media are crucial in establishing a brand image. Social Media Managers and Social Media Specialists are the main voice behind a company’s social channels, and much of the job is about telling that brand’s story. Therefore, strong writing, editing, and storytelling abilities are crucial to setting the right tone across platforms that truly represent the company.

In social media, the visual aspect is also integral to defining a presence. Storytelling isn’t just about words. Social Media Marketers must create a cohesive aesthetic presentation across platforms. So a good eye for design and the ability to create eye-catching content is a must. It’s also good to have experience using content creation tools such as Adobe Spark, Giphy, and Canva.

Another major goal of social media is to engage with a community effectively. But it’s not easy to get people to respond. Discovering how a brand’s audience communicates helps to better understand their comments, questions, needs, and concerns.

Other important social media marketing skills include trend awareness, determining KPIs, and understanding SEO.

What Skills Do Social Media Managers Need?

Though the specifics vary with different jobs, there are some skills that every Social Media Manager needs to have:

Strong visual sense

A Social Media Marketer must have an eye for design. It helps if you have experience using content creation tools such as Canva, Giphy, or the Adobe suite so you can create eye-catching visuals for your social media posts.

Good customer service skills

Whether community management is a specific part of your job description or not, most Social Media Managers will be interacting directly with the public, which carries a lot of risk for a company.

Awareness of trends

Social media professionals are always on top of the latest trends and news, and they know how a brand can best interact with what’s happening.

Embracing channel diversity

One of the essential skills of social media management is understanding the unique advantages, features, and user bases for all the top social media channels. No two social media platforms can be approached the same way.

Understanding SEO

Although the debate rages over the relationship between social media and SEO, any Digital Marketing Specialist needs at least an understanding of both, as well as how search engine optimization principles can be applied for successful social media marketing strategies.

Mind for numbers

Most social media platforms and third-party tools offer robust data analytics, so determining the most important metrics and KPIs is a huge part of effectively steering social media strategy and an increasingly important social media marketing skill.

How to Be a Good Social Media Manager

A good Social Media Manager needs skills like data analysis, a strong writing and storytelling sensibility, an awareness of key trends, and the ability to create effective social media strategies.

A Social Media Manager is like a marketer, a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, an analyst, and a customer service rep all in one. That requires a social media professional to develop a number of crucial marketing and marketing-adjacent social media skills. The best Social Media Managers combine both hard skills – including data analysis, marketing strategy, content creation, and writing – and soft skills, such as staying organized, having a way with people, and strong communication skills.

Because really, social media is a communication platform — so as a social media professional, it’s important to have good communication skills that can be applied to fit any platform, form of media, or target audience.

The best Social Media Specialists and Managers are also excellent writers who enhance their brand’s voice. You should know how to write concise copy that elicits emotion from your intended audience.

Another crucial soft skill in the social media world is creativity. With a growing number of competing voices, it’s not easy to stand out. Outside-the-box thinking is a must.

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