Social media managers are ultimately responsible for all social media activities including marketing, advertising, keeping followers engaged and setting your business apart as an expert within the industry of products or services that your business sells. While large businesses have specific social media professionals on staff, smaller businesses are trying to manage the many tasks involved in successful social media marketing on their own.
If you are one of those businesses you may not know all the skills needed to keep up in the ever changing marketing environment. Along with the obvious customer service, sales and marketing skills needed to succeed with social media events, there are also additional skills that will determine how effective your efforts will be. This makes it important to develop ongoing training for yourself or the staff members who are acting in part as the social media management team.
Writing and editing skills are needed with social media management due to the importance of creating and marketing high quality content. While a social media manager isn’t necessarily a content developer, they do have a hand in the content strategy and how it comes into play with social media marketing. They also need writing and editing skills to be able to communicate with followers on the variety of social media sites your business is working to create an online presence with.
Research and the ability to run and review analytics reports are other important skills, in fact they are probably the most important skills. Research is a never ending task with social media in order to stay up to date on the latest methods, keep competitive analysis up to date and stay abreast about what others are posting on the social media sites about your business. Analytics is crucial in measuring what works, what doesn’t work and how to make the proper adjustments to bring in the best returns on investment. Research and reporting is also important in knowing what to post, what times to post it and what the most beneficial social media sites are going to bring your business the best return.
If you aren’t sure you are using the right skills you might consider hiring a social media manager or at least a consultant to help you learn what you need to do to make sure your business stays competitive with social media activities. Because social media is such a huge part of marketing today, the return on investment will be well worth it.
