Social media has taken the entire world population by storm ever since it became a fad, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that it’s going to stop soon. In fact, we’re all so enamored with being able to share our personal lives with each other over the web that there are even high paying jobs dedicated to managing social media, with one of them being the social media manager.
This job usually involves managing the online activities of a company or an entity on all the various social media networking sites currently available. Specifically, a social media manager needs to ensure that the company’s image is always friendly and positive in the public eye, while also using social media to advertise and promote the company’s product and services.
It certainly sounds like a cushy job, and it can be quite lucrative if the account being managed is a huge or highly-popular one. So if you’re looking for a change in careers and want to get in on this social media craze in a big way, then read on as we give you everything you need to know about being a social media manager.
Good social media managers use proposal templates
Let’s say you’re a social media manager looking to provide your services for a huge client. The first step here is to usually create a social media marketing proposal to present to that client. Doing so makes your approach more professional and formal, while also increasing your chances of locking the deal down.
However, creating a proposal from scratch takes up a lot of time and effort. Not only do you have to come up with the content of your proposal itself, but you also have to make sure everything is laid out in a pleasing and professional-looking style. This can be onerous, especially if you’re just working solo or have no staff that can do it for you.
Cut your work in half by using a competent proposal template instead. There are many available online for free, and there are some that can be generated on the spot with proposal software. Once you’ve picked one out, all you need to do then is to fill in the blanks with your own proposal content, such as your pitch, description of your services, and service pricing tables.
Of course, you may feel that it seems cheap to use a proposal template. After all, wouldn’t a proposal look better and read better if it’s done from scratch? Obviously, it will. However, it’s not going to be efficient for you when it comes to time and resources spent. Good social media managers use proposal templates so that they can manage their bandwidth a lot more effectively. They just mitigate the factor of using a template by ensuring that a.) their brand is highly visible in the proposal, and b.) the content in the proposal is the highest quality that they can put out.
Having a degree on Marketing or Communications will help you out immensely
Being a social media manager involves a lot of communicating as well as marketing, so it comes to mind that being a degree holder in any of those (or even both!) will easily help you get ahead of your competitors. Studying communications would allow you to craft your company’s messaging on social media in a way that comes across as genuine and sincere, while marketing would allow you to know all the tricks in being able to “sell” the image of your company better and more efficiently.
With that said, if you don’t have a degree in either of those, then don’t lose hope. You don’t necessarily need them to be good at social media managing. Some of the most successful social media managers come from completely unrelated professions and educational backgrounds. All they did was to build a foundation of marketing and communicating from the ground up, either through their own life experiences or simply by learning from the wealth of information available freely online. You just have to know how to run and grow a social media account, and the rest will follow.
You will always need to be careful about what you say on social media. Always.
Another thing about being a social media manager is that you must absolutely be careful about posting on social media, even if it’s on a personal account. You need to be aware that social media is not your private journal, even if a lot of people use it in this way. Everything you publish will be broadcast to the world, and it’s going to stay there once you publish that post. As such, you may want to keep your most private thoughts to yourself, especially if it could be construed as somewhat controversial or offensive.
When in doubt about something you want to post, always keep in mind about being empathic to the feelings of everyone who may catch wind of your post. Say, for example, you want to complain about the shoddy service you received in your favorite coffee shop this morning. While it’s common to complain on social media, if you word that complaint too harshly, it can be interpreted as a personal attack on the coffee shop’s staff and you will get crucified over it.
But the attacks won’t just stop with you. If your critics—and there will be a lot of them, once they catch wind of your complaint—manage to track you down and see that you’re a social media manager for a big client, then it’s very possible that they will also criticize your client. This could easily end up with you losing your contract or being let go, never to work again with that client. They will see you as a liability.
Of course, that’s the worst case scenario. Everybody messes up every now and then, and you can defuse a potential crisis due to a misinterpreted tweet or post by simply apologizing and owning up to your mistakes. But it’s better to avoid that completely than having to go through that, so always think before you post.
You can pick up a lot by following your favorite social media accounts
Social media managing isn’t like any other profession where things generally stay the same. Things are always changing, trends are always coming and going—and since it’s all on the internet, it’s all going to take place very quickly. As such you may find it hard to come up with new ideas and approaches in promoting your client, especially if your current one isn’t doing too well.
This is where you should definitely follow your favorite social media brands and see what their social media managers are doing with their promotion efforts. By doing so, you can get an idea of what kind of subject, topic, or approach is currently trending at the moment. It allows you to see what has the potential to go “viral”—meaning, being so popular that it garners thousands, if not millions of likes and reposts. Best of all, you don’t even have to worry about seeming like you’re just plagiarizing somebody’s hard work, as putting out something similar to those viral campaigns can just be seen as you joining in the trend.
Play your cards right here and foster a sense of camaraderie with other competing brands online and you will easily garner a lot of attention and good will from your brand.
Conclusion
Being a social media manager sounds like a dream job—after all, isn’t it basically all about posting on social media all day? The reality, however, is that it requires hard work and dedication like any other job, along with a healthy dose of creativity, energy, and innovation. You also need quite a bit of patience, especially when you’re tasked to communicate with your client’s social media followers, as you could be the target of complaints and ire. However, if you keep at it and keep the above things in mind, then you’re sure to find it a very rewarding and very lucrative profession.