Social media has been one of the most influential innovations in the last decade. Its popularity is ever-increasing and ever-growing. It has moved from merely being a fun platform to increasing brand awareness. Social media powerhouses like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn have become business portals for various brands. These platforms form connections, make sales, and boost customer loyalty.
A decade ago, the social media manager’s role might not have even existed. However, today, almost every company is involved in social media one way or another. The need for social media managers is rising as more brands seek to reach their audience online. An efficient social media manager should have diverse hard and soft skills to determine opportunities and curate engaging content.
Social media marketing demands you to generate leads and drive conversions. But what skills are you required to excel at social media marketing? In this blog, we will cover the top social media marketing skills you must hone so you can get to work! Let us begin.
Who is a Social Media Marketer?
A social media marketer is a marketing specialist who uses social media platforms to promote products and services, cultivate a brand image, and build relationships with customers. Many organizations across all industries prioritize their social media presence, allowing them to reach their target audience via a platform they frequent.
A marketer specializing in social media typically works freelance or as part of a more extensive marketing department to develop an effective social media strategy. They are responsible for running an organization’s social media accounts, attracting new customers, and retaining existing ones to increase company sales constantly.
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What are Social Media Marketer Skills?
Social media marketing can be an exotic fit for you if you enjoy a challenge. So today, we will talk about the 12 social media marketing skills needed for social media marketers so that you are prepared for success.
1. Communication
One must speak clearly to be a social media marketer. It’s like you fear heights but want to be a pilot.
Social media marketing is your profession if you enjoy communicating with others, especially strangers, and are eager to learn. You must communicate well to represent and promote a company or brand on social media.
How to develop communication skills?
- Practice active listening to improve your communication. Follow up with questions to demonstrate that you notice what others say rather than nodding while thinking about what to say next.
- Practice social listening, an extension of active listening to social media. Take the time to consider what the person is saying while reading communications from your brand.
- Determine whether you have enough knowledge to react. Ask a question if you don’t know.
2. Creativity and Innovation
One of the most essential characteristics of social media marketing abilities is creativity. Users likely follow a brand that shares interesting or exciting content on social media.
Marketers must constantly develop new and lively ideas, creative projects, and campaigns to keep people interested and hooked on social media. You must develop creative ideas, including interactive material, contests, and viral videos, to distinguish yourself from the millions of other social media users.
How to improve creativity skills?
- Creativity requires practice. Whether you are a beginner or not, you need training and patience to develop these abilities. The more you engage in creative practice, the better prepared you will be for success in future creative efforts.
- Perfection is not the goal of creativity. So, feel free to create fantastic ideas for everyone and explore many ideas before settling on the right idea that sparks additional inspiration.
- When it comes to creativity, collaboration has major ramifications. There are several ways to work with artists and creatives who can inspire you. Your mental blockages get removed by brainstorming with others and working together to develop original ideas.
- Creatively marketing your content helps you get an edge over your competitors. For example, nowadays, marketers use a social media QR code to share their content offline at an event or offline marketing campaign.
- Self-assurance in your profession fosters creativity. It is tough to be creative if you are unwilling to try or experiment with new things in your art.
- Taking a step back from your project sometimes might be the best approach to get fresh ideas.
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3. Copywriting
This is one of the most crucial yet overlooked skills. Why? Because this portrays your brand to your audience, give it a voice.
Social media experts work hard to design original copy that is instantly recognizable as the brand’s fundamental voice. They achieve this by improving their copywriting skills.
Also, they adapt their writing to connect with various target audience subgroups across social media platforms. Realizing the content style and duration that will reach the other segments of your audience on each platform is part of this.
How to develop copywriting skills?
- The best thing you can do to improve at writing is to write daily. Anything is fair game for writing about, so do it!
- Ensure you create the same material or content you consistently write. Just be careful to perform it every day.
- Enroll in copywriting courses for hands-on ideas and more excellent knowledge to sharpen your writing skills further.
4. Graphic Designing
Graphic design uses visuals to convey certain concepts or thoughts. Most marketers consider visual marketing extremely important to their strategy because people consume things better visually than through text.
How to develop good design skills?
- Start by observing what others in your field are doing. Learn the current design trends and hacks from professionals by subscribing to YouTube channels, courses, etc.
- You can gain hands-on experience using social media graphic design tools like Canva.
5. Video Production
Do you know people watch more videos on Facebook than on YouTube? Today, having a solid video marketing plan for social media is vital, given the slow but steady growth of social media over platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
How to develop video production skills?
- Practice storytelling.
- You must know how to set up a camera using a tripod in video production. Many video creators use their smartphones to record videos. Also, it would help if you had knowledge and hands-on practice with video editing tools and software.
- Learn the keyboard shortcuts in order to speed up the editing process.
- You must choose the best video distribution methods and target the proper audience to increase engagement. Upload your video to as many platforms as possible for an efficient marketing approach. Use video ads to expand your reach.
- Engage with your viewers and observe the statistics and metrics for the video. Keep track of the best videos and find the traits and components shared by the best-performing videos. Consider those conclusions when making future videos.
6. Project and Time Management
Social media marketers require strong project management skills due to their prowess at multitasking. You must handle ad budgets, interact with writers and designers, and run reports.
Additionally, if you have good project management skills, you must stay on top of all tasks, know when material must be released, what to plan for, and how to keep track of all the social media conversations.
How to improve management skills?
- 2 things you may use to stay organized and manage your time more effectively: List and Timetable
- List everything you need to do at the beginning of the day.
- Schedule how much time you will devote to each task throughout the day.
- Develop and maintain a social media calendar to keep your content structured and help you plan and prioritize your tasks.
7. Social Media Management
Since social media is available around the clock, learning tools that simplify your job enable you to set better boundaries outside the workplace. It allows you to deliver and amplify the brand’s and its community’s content.
As a social media marketer, you must understand what content works and what doesn’t on social media. Also, it entails deciding which media formats, such as text (articles), images, video, and podcasts, resonate with your niche.
How to improve social media management skills?
- Instead of juggling multiple tasks, schedule certain times to focus on the social media content management strategy.
- A few tools are available to help you manage your social media accounts better. It enables you to create carefully curated social media feeds, efficiently schedule, organize, track your posts and comments, and compare your performance to your competitors.
- You can also access daily analytics and insights to know what’s working and how to improve your campaigns.
8. Relationship Building
A key component of every social media marketer’s job is to establish connections and develop relationships. Relationship building is important as most customers trust businesses if they have connected with them on social media.
How to improve relationship-building skills?
- Establish connections with your audience on social media, colleagues, and influencers.
- Recognize emotional intelligence and cultivate it.
- Practice empathy and think from others’ points of view.
- Improve your listening and communication abilities.
- Ask for feedback.
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9. Social Listening
Posting on social media platforms on time is only one aspect of getting attention. Also, you must track how your customers and competitors perceive your brand in the marketplace. This is where social listening becomes crucial to preserving your brand’s reputation.
Social listening is all about monitoring your brand’s mentions across social networks. Discussions can occur on forums or social media channels or be as simple as customer feedback. It allows you to find opportunities by monitoring and analyzing such feedback, which can be extremely helpful when developing a social media strategy.
How to improve social listening skills?
- There are tools available in the market that make things easier for social media managers, including determining what social attention your brand is getting and how to increase it.
- You can analyze your competition, track significant hashtags, monitor, and adapt to what works well for your target audience.
Also Read: 9 Latest Social Media Marketing Trends in 2024 (Top Predictions)
10. Customer Support
Good customer support reflects a company’s culture; the two go hand in hand. Customers notice your company culture if you provide astonishing customer service.
However, offering admirable customer service has effects that reach beyond company culture. You can retain your clients and earn their loyalty, boosting your sales, keeping your employees happy, and enabling you to remain competitive.
How to provide good customer support?
- You must delve deep into data to understand your audience better by paying close attention.
- Constantly monitor your online brand’s activity and respond to positive or negative comments, feedback, or criticism. Also, make use of trends that are relevant to your community.
- Customers expect you to respond to their queries through several channels, such as social media, email, phone, and chat. A suitable customer service software tool that offers multiple ways to communicate with customers can help immensely.
11. Strategic Thinking
As a social media marketer, you must be able to see the large picture to keep ahead of opportunities and obstacles. Strategic thinking can help in this situation.
Identifying, gathering, and interpreting information about your followers are the key components of strategic thinking. This helps you develop social media plans and methods to raise brand exposure, boost sales, and grow traffic to your website by giving you a much better understanding of your customers and how they move through your marketing funnels.
How to sharpen strategic thinking skills?
- Take initiative. Be prepared for the future. Do things before you are asked to. Respond quickly and smartly.
- Never believe that your ideas alone were always right. Your strategic thinking skills advance due to developing an awareness and appreciation of competing ideas, arguments, viewpoints, or stances, as it will help you see the big picture.
- Look for methods to optimize and enhance your work, no matter what task or project you are given.
- Keep updated with news and trends. Join networks, read widely, interact with members from different teams within your company, and seek hints of upcoming trends and concepts everywhere.
12. Analytical Skills
You must assess if your marketing is effective in the long run. For this reason, one of the most valuable and advantageous social media skills is analytical ability.
You will be inundated with data daily if you engage in social media marketing. But how to use such information? You need analytical skills to process the data you get and transform it into something you can use to create better social media ads.
How to increase analytical ability?
- Social media platforms grant a wealth of data to support marketing efforts instead of relying on conjecture. You can use Google Trends, Google Analytics, and many other tools.
Social Media Marketing Skills for Resume
You need a solid resume to get your dream job in Social Media Marketing. Highlighting the skills used in a marketer’s day-to-day life helps you bag the job faster.
Glace through these quintessential social media marketer skills for a resume:
1. Planning and Strategy
The life of a social media marketer revolves around making strategy and growth plans every month.
2. Research-oriented
Social media marketing professionals derive all the insights into what’s happening in marketing through solid research. Good research skills are a must to make a monthly planner.
3. Community Building
Social media marketing is like building a community of potential customers. Hence, these professionals should know how to engage with the right people.
4. Content Marketing
Everyone likes quality content. The chances of your posts reaching more people increase if your content is solid and stands out. Thus, this social media marketing ability in your resume can do wonders!
5. Analytics Skills
Everything we do in marketing is supported by analytics since it’s the only way to measure the impact of your inputs. So, you have the right social media marketing skills if you are good with numbers!
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Social Media Marketing Skills An Employer Scouts
Companies look for targeted skills in a social media marketing applicant. To beat the competition and excel, here are some skills you can collect that make a solid resume.
1. Planning & Strategy
Employees who can prove their quick and innovative strategizing skills are preferred by organizations. Planning includes prioritizing, meeting deadlines, scheduling meetings, and more.
2. Commercial Awareness
Knowing industry trends, patterns, and analytics is a desirable skill. Knowing what factors increase business success and client satisfaction means implementing them for your brand.
3. SEO Proficiency
Understanding what keywords, meta descriptions, and algorithm-friendly marketing mediums impress employers. Proficiency in search engine optimization also involves creating backlinks and SEO sites and having more technical skills.
Research and Development
Analyzing and collecting data requires strenuous research. Improving your research skills means familiarizing yourself with the landscape, making it effortless to do in the future. This implies maximum productivity and time spent developing the project.
Teamwork
Project and product development takes more time than a social media marketer. Teams of experts from all fields work together, so cooperation and in-house communication is critical.
How to Become a Social Media Marketer?
1. Learn Social Media Marketing Skills
You must polish specific skills as you begin your job search. Learn these skills with a social media marketing course or online digital marketing course.
The required skills include:
- Social Media: Knowing various social media platforms is crucial. Facebook is the most popular platform in India, followed by Instagram. However, companies may also use WhatsApp, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, depending on their audience. You must know what kinds of posts do well on each platform, the audiences’ differences, and how to capitalize on trends.
- Analytical Tools: Social media marketing analysis tools track performance, analyze trends, and mitigate digital risk.
- Content Creation: Creating content for social media looks different based on the platform, but generally, you need some design sensibility and a strong grasp of writing skills.
2. Look for Entry-level Opportunities
Entry-level opportunities include jobs, freelancing, or volunteering. Explore several options to see what fits your needs.
Entry-level Jobs: An entry-level position requires less relevant experience and can allow you to learn about social media marketing on the job. During your job search, keep an eye out for entry-level titles such as:
- Marketing Intern or Social Media Intern
- Social Media Specialist
- Social Media Coordinator
- Social Media Analyst
- Social Media Associate
Freelance: Consider freelancing to develop your experience. Build a portfolio on a freelance website like Upwork or Fiverr.
Volunteer: Volunteer opportunities may have fewer requirements. Look for remote opportunities through volunteer search sites like VolunteerMatch.
Build your Social Media Pages: Sometimes, jumping in and doing it yourself is the best way to learn. Build your own Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook business page to discover how each works and the best practices in content creation. You can point to these accounts in job applications also.
3. Expand your Professional Network
Networking might be intimidating—but it is an excellent way to learn much more about job opportunities, get job-search advice, and gain knowledge. Your network might include family, friends, or old coworkers.
If you need help figuring out where to start, join groups for social media professionals on Facebook or LinkedIn. This can expose you to job postings, familiarize you with the job landscape, and help you research how people landed the jobs they have.
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Conclusion
Social media is constantly changing. Platforms and trends come and go. Algorithms evolve. Current events spark new conversations. Staying up to date on new channels is essential, but it’s even more important to lay a good foundation.
Being a social media manager requires creativity, technical skills, and the ability to connect with an online community. From developing engaging content and data analysis to staying updated with the current trends and platforms, these social media marketing skills help you create social posts that resonate with your audience and drive results for your business or clients. As the role of social media continues to evolve, most social media managers must learn and adapt to stay ahead of the game continuously.
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