The Guide to Becoming a Successful Social Media Manager
The Guide to Becoming a Successful Social Media Manager
When you’re starting out on your social media manager career, you can get caught up trying to build your business and forget that the top priority is satisfying your clients. When you’re trying to become successful in your career in social media management, you should be constantly focused on delivering results for your clients. This post is written for social media managers who want to take their business to the next level and become truly successful!
Develop a social media strategy that works with the business’ objectives
When
businesses ask for your help with a social media strategy, they often don’t
have a plan in mind. While you’re an expert in social media, you won’t be an
expert in their business. It’s important that you understand their overall
business strategy before creating a social media strategy. Find out what they
sell, and to whom, their price points, where their competition stands, what
their goals and objectives are, and their values. All of these aspects will
help you build a unique social media strategy.
Put your strategy down on paper
A successful social media manager doesn’t keep the whole strategy to themselves, in their heads. The strategy must be written down and reviewed for approval by the client and the marketing team. According to Philip Keyes, a social media writer at Brit Student and Write My X, the strategy “should include a summary of the target audience, and buyer personas, what social media channels will be used, what content will be developed for which channel, approved hashtags and sources, a plan for the management of each channel, and more.”
Establish lead capture systems if there are none
A successful social media strategy will direct traffic to a website, but if the business doesn’t have email marketing setup, there is no way to capture leads that aren’t yet customers. Before you start directing all that traffic to their site, figure out a way to convert the traffic into email subscribers, either through a guide or webinar.
Create content in batches
It
can be distracting and time wasting to produce your content while on social
media because you can start going down rabbit holes of other profiles and content.
To stay on track and save time, create your content offline from social media
platforms. Prepare it in batches for a whole week or more and schedule them to
publish at certain times.
Build relationships with influencers and other brands
A social media manager must interact with more than just customers and potential leads but also with other businesses. Your strategy should involve building relationships with other brands that are relevant but non-competing and in time create a partnership for content marketing. The same goes for influencers in your target industry.
As per Maggie Fielding, a marketer at Australia 2 Write and Next Coursework, “some partnerships can include swapping shares, guest posts, sponsored blog posts or social media posts, and more. This is valuable for increasing your audience and building trust in your brand.”
Work with the content marketers
The
social media manager will often learn more about the target audience by
spending time on their social media channels than any other marketing team.
That means that you should be sharing what you learn with the content marketing
team, including what kind of content they’re looking for.
Stay on top of your responses
It’s
important to be able to respond quickly to comments, mentions, messages, and
retweets. Develop guidelines for response time and follow them closely, and
include how you will interact with each. Consider using a tool that helps you
manage your digital assets including reposting. Because there’s so much content
out there and it takes a lot of time to create good content, get a tool that
lets you re-share posts later or images with different captions or across
different channels.
It’s
exciting growing a social media management business, but don’t make the mistake
of not prioritizing your clients by focusing too much on your own following.
You want to build a reputation as a social media manager who cares about the
company and is invested in results. If you do that well, you’ll have companies
lining up to work with you.
Michael Dehoyos, a content marketer and editor at PhD Kingdom and Academic Brits, helps companies develop social media and digital marketing strategies. His focus is helping small businesses and start-ups build their online presence. He also writes for Origin Writings.