12 Must-Have Skills For Every Social Media Manager In 2024

In 2022 alone, there were 4.55 billion active users across all the various social media platforms. Most of these users spent an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes every day on social

Brands have to be present on a variety of social media channels to grab these users’ attention and convert them into leads and paying customers.

With the right strategy and execution, the possibilities you can unlock with social media marketing are truly endless. You can build your own strategic narrative and establish a direct relationship with your customers.

So getting your social media marketing right is a high-stakes game as your brand and promotional strategy depend on it. But how do you do it correctly? By hiring the right person to manage all your efforts.

In this post, we break down the 12 essential skills that every top-notch social media manager should have.

Let’s dive in.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to build your brand, increase conversions, and drive awareness, traffic, and sales. It involves a variety of activities including publishing content, engaging with your audience, analyzing engagement, and running ads.

The major social platforms you can leverage are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat, to name a few.

Ok, but how does one go about doing all of this?

That’s where you need a social media manager to step in.

What does a social media manager do?

A social media manager’s job is to overlook all your social media channels, from strategy to execution, as well as reporting. They’re in charge of developing tactics, creating compelling campaigns, publishing frequently, and reviewing the analytics and performance of each campaign.

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They are also responsible for communicating with designers and content writers and making sure that everything is aligned with company-wide goals.

So, what are all the skills a modern-day social media manager needs to be successful?

Top must-have skills for every social media manager

Your ideal social media manager needs to be good at several skills, to truly succeed in driving favorable outcomes for your business. They need to know copywriting, strategy, design, as well as understand analytics, data and be able to learn tools quickly.

Let’s talk about each skill in depth.

1) Graphic design

Graphic design is one of the most important skills for any social media manager to have. In the age of TikTok and infinite feeds your post only has a few seconds to catch the attention of the user.

Studies show that the average user’s attention span has decreased to somewhere between 1.7 seconds to 2.5 seconds, depending on the device you are using. So your social media manager needs to be able to master graphic design to create aesthetic social posts and videos that capture the attention of your target audience.

According to a recent report by Hubspot shows that 43 percent of consumers prefer video content. So if you’re not already creating videos, you should start.

So when you look for a social media manager (especially if you’re looking for a Pinterest marketer), you must definitely vet for graphic design skills and an innate eye for aesthetics. Both these skills will go a long way to help you build a strong brand presence.

2) Analytics

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is especially true for your social media strategy.

Each social media platform is getting increasingly crowded, with a lot of brands competing for the same eyeballs. One way for you to have a clear edge is to analyze the performance of your social media activities regularly, understand what works, stop what doesn’t, and improve anything else.

To be able to do this, your social media manager should acquire analytical skills to study the performance of your campaigns, and derive insights to inform future decision-making. They should study metrics like reach (impressions and views) and engagement (comments, likes, shared, etc.) as well as data from tools like Google Analytics, that track website visits from social media.

They should also use social media analytics tools like Hootsuite and Buffer.

3) Customer Service

Your social media manager is the face of the company on social media. They should have good communication skills and empathy because they would be likely to respond to some of your customers on social media.

Studies show that social media is increasingly becoming a popular channel for customer service. According to a study done by Sprout Social, social media has become the go-to channel for sharing feedback about a product or service and for reaching out to customer service with an issue or question.

When you interact with your customers on social media regularly, it leads to enhanced customer experience. An ideal social media manager should have a good background in customer success, so they can tie social media strategies to driving better customer satisfaction.

4) Community management

Your social media manager should ideally also double up as the community manager of the online community you have built for your brand As your audience starts seeking advice and asking questions, you will have built a community of loyal followers.

The social media manager must engage with the audience you have built, otherwise, your content creation efforts will go in vain. This is where community management comes into play.

For effective community management on social media, they should be able to:

• Prioritize incoming communications, and reply appropriately - this can be customer feedback, complaints, appreciation, or simply conversation around your brand and social media campaigns.
• Engage with loyal customers - social media managers should be able to identify the most engaged followers and loyal customers, to turn them into brand advocates. This can entail brand mentions, and direct customer testimonials, as well as user-generated content.
  
  This will help humanize your brand online and build a community your customers can trust.

5) Adaptability

Adaptability is another key skill to have as a social media manager.

Social media platforms change their algorithms all the time to stay current with consumer demand (or to stay profitable). New features pop up (like Instagram Reels and LinkedIn carousels) and your team should be able to jump on these new trends to stay competitive.

An experienced social media marketer should constantly evolve your brand strategy and experiment with new tactics.

6) Curiosity

Another essential skill in the toolkit is curiosity. Your social media strategist needs to constantly experiment with different features, use social listening, and understand what your competitors are doing.

“We really look for people with their finger on the pulse of how social is changing. It is one of the most rapidly changing industries right now, and I want someone who is paying attention to it, who is enthralled by it and fascinated by it. … Things shift so fast.

If you think about the social media channels that were dominant two years ago and the social media channels that are dominant today, it’s just a totally different world.”

- Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of marketing at Jasper, while highlighting the prerequisites of a social media manager.

7) Creativity

Creativity is at the heart and soul of all marketing campaigns. Being a visual-first medium, this is especially true for social media platforms.

You need to stand out and consistently create engaging posts, ads, collaborations, and contests.

Your social media manager can use their creativity in the following ways:

1. Make a unique content strategy and help the team deliver out-of-the-box visual content.
2. Jump on current trends. This can be the Fifa World Cup, a new meme, a new trend, the latest news - you name it!
3. Conduct frequent content brainstorms with the team.

And it’s a bonus if your social media manager has a good sense of humor and improvisation skills.

8) Digital Marketing

A social media expert also needs to be a well-rounded digital marketer. Social media in a silo can deliver only so much. The ideal candidate needs to have marketing management skills to be able to sync with the rest of your marketing team & channels.

To truly unlock the power of the audience you have built, you must align your social media marketing efforts with other channels like email and SMS marketing, your influencer promotions, and various advertising campaigns.

The right person for the job should also be good at exploring different social media management tools, evaluating different factors like pricing and features offered, and choosing the tool that helps the team the most and comes at a reasonable price.

The person you ultimately choose to hire must have a combination of these myriad skills under their belt to elevate social media as a channel and move the needle on your business growth.

Want to level up your marketing knowledge? Check out our list of the top digital marketing books to read.

9) Strategy and planning

A manager who isn’t just an executioner, but can also think fast on their feet, and strategize for the long term is a great asset to have.

The ideal person will set up frequent meetings with the management and the marketing head to understand their vision and start aligning all social media campaigns in the same direction. Every campaign should be tied to a business objective and fit into the overall strategy.

10) Tactics and execution

Having a great strategy is not enough. The right social media expert needs to be able to execute every campaign.

They should have top-notch attention to detail and involve themselves in the execution process from start to end, including –the copywriting, design, publishing schedule, and timing, as well as running paid ads.

11) Knowledge of the latest social media trends

Your social media manager must be aware of what’s trending on social media every day. They should be constantly searching for the latest trends and seizing those opportunities.

Social media trends are also beneficial for making moment marketing memes like the one above. Memes put a smile on the consumer’s face and bring them closer to the brand.

The more customers talk about you, the more your product and service are top-of-mind when they are ready to buy.

12) Top-notch organization

Social media is one of the channels which can have lots of ad-hoc campaigns (and sided quests). Your social media manager should be super efficient and extremely organized.

They need to manage the team and maintain a social calendar as part of the larger social media marketing plan to align all campaigns with business objectives.

Takeaways

Social media can be a huge growth lever for your product or service. Any good founder knows that they cannot-do-it-all. In order to truly scale your social media presence, and create a strong brand identity you need to get the right person on board.

Your ideal social media consultant must possess a lot of different skills including – adaptability, strategy, and planning and execution.

In the world of ever-changing algorithms, you need the right hire, with a handle on all the new features, the knowledge of how to leverage them, and the ability to consistently be creative with all your social media campaigns.

Need help finding the perfect candidate? We can help. Get started today.

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