Skills Your Social Media Manager Must Have

​Social media management is not as simple as it sounds. It has become a complex, multi-faceted role that operates to help a business achieve its highest-level goals. The hardest part of it is there’s not one secret to becoming an amazing social media manager. One needs to have both hard and soft skills to run social media pages.

​However, making sure you have the full range of essential skills to do the job will certainly help. Take a look at these skills that can lead to the success of any social media manager. This can be a good base for what to look for when looking for a social media manager to manage your accounts.

1. Customer Service Skills

​With more customers than ever using social media to get assistance from brands, your social media manager must be customer-service minded. Contents will not make up for bad or no customer service.

​A “customer first” mind set, is important aspects of social customer service. Being able to provide empathetic care in a short, digital format is different from in-person customer service. A social media manager should be able to clearly articulate a solution for the customer while making the customer feel heard. A successful social media manager knows that your social media presence is your brand’s face online; that everything they say or do on social media is a representation of the brand – for good or for bad.

2. Eye for Creativity

​Visual contents play a significant role in social media management. Thus, having an eye for creativity is helpful. This can mean being a decent photographer, videographer or graphic designer. At the very least, you should be able to distinguish between a great and poor design. That’s right, you don’t necessarily need to have a degree in graphic design to create awesome visual content for your social feeds.

For you to improve your creativity, you can take online courses to learn photography, videography and others. You can also try to learn how to use tools for creating social media visual contents.

3. Copywriting Skills

​While visual content attracts the attention of your audience, a great copy leads them to read all throughout. Copywriting is an essential skill for a social media manager. They should know how to write short copy that can grab your audience’s attention. Social media is conversation-driven so you don’t want to hire someone who is only familiar with writing marketing copy. Sometimes the best ad is the one that doesn’t market at all.

4. Strategic Skills

​Being creative is not enough. Your social media manager needs to know how to create a strategy to make social media work for your business. Being strategic in your posting includes noting the best times to post, balancing marketing campaigns and keeping an eye on what everyone else is talking about. A social media manager should be able to present their strategy to you before you get into a deal. This also includes strategically analysing the social media pages of your competitors.

5. Organized and Efficient

​You certainly want to invest on a social media manager who can deliver the agreement efficiently. A good social media manager needs to be task- and goal-oriented to accomplish all the items on the checklist. Some of them use tools to schedule posts individually throughout the day or in batches. However they do it, they need to make sure it’s organized so that your page will not be a chaos.

6. Analytics and Reporting Skills

​Social media management is not just all about posting and attracting customers. Businesses after all, are after the ROI. So being able to prove a return on investment is a must-have skill for social media managers. Therefore, they need to know how to use social analytics tool and be able to report the result. They should be able to accurately measure the ROI of social media across social channels. You need to go for a social media manager who understands how to prove and improve return on your investment.

7. Updated and Adaptive

​What’s in now, might be out tomorrow. We all know that social media landscapes move so quickly, being up to date and adaptive is an important trait for a social media manager. They need to do their research and be able to willingly try out new features and change up posts to fit with what’s being discussed in the timeline. An outdated post is a major turn off for followers so make sure your social media manager knows what’s trending.

8. Analytical and SEO Driven

​The goal of each social media manager shouldn’t end with earning followers and getting engagements. They should also have the drive to use social media to rank well in search engines. Paired with content marketing, search engine optimization skills can be handy in writing the best copy for your brand. Take a look at your posts that gained good engagement and examine why it performed well so you can replicate the effect.

9. Community Management Skills

​At the end of the day, social media was built on is being inherently “social.” This means that establishing and building a digital relationship is still a treasured attribute. Community management is being able to navigate the online sphere of promoting your brand while engaging with your customers. It can mean slowly converting an observer into a customer by patiently answering questions. It can also be showing off what your customers are talking about when they post on social media.

​You need to see these essential skills on your next social media manager. They need to show that they are qualified to handle your business. After all, you did not just invest money on your business but also your efforts and even your name. A social media manager can help you attain your business goals but at the same time, they can also mess things up if they don’t have these skills. Once you know these skills by heart, you can start looking for competitive social media managers for your business.