Become a Social Media Manager with zero experience
– A detailed idea
Did you hear the word social media manager a decade ago?
No, right? So, it is one of the most flourishing and demanding jobs nowadays. Specially for those who are more interested in social media networks and tired of their 9 to 5 jobs.
Just imagine sitting anywhere with an internet connection, managing a business while doing your favourite things on social media and earning. How amazing is that!
If you are interested enough but thinking “ How can I be a social media manager? Neither I have any experience nor any guideline”.
You are on the right page. So here I am going to give you a complete idea about the job of a social media manager. And how can you be one with no experience but just with some basic idea about social media sites? Hope this article and your fascination together will bring out something positive for you. And who knows might even change the track of your life!!!
But before starting the journey, remember no experience may work but you have to be devoted and have passion for the job to succeed as like as other jobs. There a lot of interested people let me help you to know and achieve more than them.
Who Are Social Media Managers?
Social media managers are professionals whose responsibility is to monitor, measure, engage, and guide the social wing for a brand (It might be a business or any individual). They are in charge of representing a brand or company.
They work from backstage. But it is their effort that makes a brand presentable in front of you. They provide guidance to businesses, so that, they can enhance their online presence.
If you don’t know what we are talking about then you should know first what is social media marketing?
A Social Media Manager’s Duties
If you think posting relevant pictures and videos or schedule is all the things an SMM (social media manager) does, you are in big misconception. The duties are way beyond that. They literally have to juggle a log of hats. They are responsible for around 20 kinds of functions.
So, what do they really do???
Starting from setting goals to tracking progress they are also responsible for ROI(Return on Investment) of a client.
They also recruit team, collaborate, Advocate the brand for better online appearance and brand awareness.
According to Digital Marketers, social media managers have four roles:
Social Listing: In simple words, understanding how people feel about your brand. It refers, tracking the social media platform to observe the conversation or mentions related to a brand. This includes monitoring keywords, competitors or products related to a specific brand on different social media sites. And then analyzing the information to put into action. In simple word, how people feel about a brand.
Social Influencing: Simply the way of influencing customers decision or intention. More precisely, building authority on social media sites by distributing and sharing comments.
Social Networking: Associating with influential individuals or brands to increase brand recognition.
Social Selling: Raising sells volume from the existing and new customers using social media sites.
In brief, a social media manager’s key responsibility is to help businesses to boost their social media presence. And they do it by connecting with people and providing value in exchange for their interest.
How Do Social Media Managers Proceed To The Job?
Every social media manager needs a perfect social media to plan to achieve success. Hootsuite defines social media management as: “a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It pilots your actions and let you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.” Now let’s talk about the most common social media management you must have to know.
1. Brand developing:
Find out why would the customer want to get interested in your brand. And how you will do it. Do something new that will attract the customer towards your brand.
Tips that will help you:
Have a consistent logo with a tagline, Maintain a constant colour palate and a related bio on every social media platform. Over time, this will help your audience to identify your brand among tons of other businesses.
Ensure maintaining the same type of graphics, fonts, for similar kinds of posts. This will enhance the visual experience and will create a unique identity for your brand.
Develop your marketing persona depending on the social site. Different social media sites are popular among the different age group. So the same content might not work for all the social networks.
Ensure to post with the same voice and tone.
If different people are managing your social media accounts, provide them with a guideline including personality traits, vocabulary, persona etc.
These help to gain brand awareness among followers.
2. Try to find out who your target audience will be:
Social media managers community with customers on behalf of the company. If you have a particular target customer in mind, then you can think about what will be attractive to them.
Choice of audiences can be varied depending on their age, occupation, sex, geographical area, etc. Create the content based on the preference of your target customers. Focus on the feature of your brand which is most demanding or attractive to your target customers.
3. Your goals should be realistic:
As a social media manager, you must have to set a realistic goal for your company. Otherwise, it will bring bad results for both you and your client. The important factor that will help you to set the goals are the challenges your client may face. The 5 most common challenges of brands are :
a) Lower traffic on the page
b) Low brand awareness
c) Lower number of customers
d) Negative online reputation
e) Low sale rate
Set your goal to eradicate these problems. Opt for making a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time bounded) goal.
4. Make more visual branding:
Creating a visual strategy is imperative for developing your business. Specially in these days when people are more involved and engaged with visual contents. Research shows that visual content is crucial to attracting the customer towards your brand. You have to focus on well quality images, GIF, infographics & videos, etc.
5. Make a good content strategy:
Content is king. So make the king a powerful one.
You cannot just post whatever or whenever. A single post sometimes can make huge engagement on your page. So, create content that can attract your customers. While creating content you have to be careful about its purpose, optimization, objective.
It should be attractive, informative & unique. Content with these qualities will increase your brand awareness. You also have to keep an eye on what customers want from your kind of businesses and recent trends relevant to your brand.
Pro Tips:
Before creating content ask yourself :
1. Why you are creating it
2. For whom you are creating it
3. How would it act as a factor of the buying process
This is will help you to understand which type of content will be the most effective.
6. Increase Your Conversation Rate With Customers:
Communication is a big factor that can determine the attitude of customers towards your brand. So a social media manager definitely needs to build a quality communication culture with the customers to listen to their needs.
He needs to know about the marketing process and built an engaging conversation with potential customers. Bringing a crowd to your brand is not an easy job. You have to proceed according to a plan.
Pro Tips
-
- Be Responsive
- Let the customer say
- Create a social media community
- Keep things social not always promotional
Show that, you do care about customers satisfaction.
7. Judge your performance and result:
Select a time period and check on the result of your efforts. You can check either monthly or quarterly as per your business requirement. If the strategy turns out to be effective than keep moving on. But If you find your time and efforts are not bringing enough positive result, change it.
A Social media manager should have the courage of accepting mistakes and rectify it. You need to have a lot of plans in your mind. And have the idea of assigning each plan on the proper time.
What Skill Will Make You A Pro-Social Media Manager?
Here are the skills you need to develop, to be a pro SMM (Social Media Manager)
1.Copywriting
Copywriting refers to writing advertisements or promotional materials. Social Media managers have to write contents with a view to turning followers into loyal customers. Sounds simple, right?
Honestly, it is something easier said than done because you have to impress and convince the followers through your contents. And there a lot of SMM’s who are doing that. So, you definitely have to stand out among them with your contents.
Here I’m giving a few tips to create high-quality contents:
Audience oriented:
Write keeping the target audience in mind. Write as easily as possible. People do not like to read rocket science on social media.
You can tell stories ask questions such as-
- Tell us your idea,
- What do you think?
- What is your struggle with…
In short, you have to encourage the audience to talk and have their thoughts which involve their participation. Do not just write about your brand. Real talk really works to keep the audience remember about you. Simply be social. Tell, ask, and listen too. This works amazing for creating credible content. And make the brand more trustworthy.
Visual Impression:
People nowadays are more into images, and videos rather written content. Use some heart-warming or thought-provoking captions related to your visual content. This will make the content more worthy, and you can share the thought easily.
You can also share industry news, statistics, the latest affairs and ask thoughts of your followers about these.
2. Time Management
Time is the most crucial thing to maintain as an SMM. You have to master in making schedule and deadlines. Good content can face lower reach or engagement just for poor timing sense.
You can take help of social media calendar here. It allows you to stay on time. It helps a manager for prior brainstorming and saves from the last minute hassle. Besides, you can consistently share well-organised and engaging contents.
3. Exploring and learning
Trends are not constants. Specially trends of social media keep changing frequently. Even a month old strategy might not work for today. So a social media manager have to be updated with the recent craze. As an SMM you need to explore the social network, find out the trend and follow that according to your marketing policy.
Pro Tips:
To track the recent trends, you can use-
- Hootsuite
- Tumblr
- Geofeedia
4. Customer Service
Forbes stated that a customer-oriented attitude is a must-have to resonate social media posts with the readers.
Social customers service contains a lot of aspects like the quick response to complaints, answering questions, issuing refunds. In short providing service to a customer via social media platforms.
Quality customer service helps to build loyalty and trust developed between the brand and customers. Hence, better engagement, an important aspect of building a brand.
5. SEO and Content Marketing
SEO plays a vital role in a brand’s social media strategy, and it is a crucial part of social media marketing. Optimizing the contents on social media sites with SEO is a must-do for social medial managers. As a social media manager is the one handling management, promotions, and distribution of contents, they need to know how to optimize the posts.
So that they can reach higher and engage more followers.
Ensure that you:
- Know the interconnection between social media exposure and rankings
- Learn the way of boosting blog contents on social media
- Know how to drive the traffic that impacts on your revenue.
6. Visual Intelligence
It is quite powerful stuff. To be a good social media manager, you must know which types of visual content will work right on the different social media platform.
It does not mean, you have to be a Photoshop master or have profound knowledge on editing pictures and videos. Basic ideas will also work. You just need to create some eye-catching images. That enables a user to think or remind your brand.
Over time you can build up this skill. And the more you will be doing this, the better you will get.
3 Personality Traits That Great Social Media Managers Have
Curious mind
Curiosity or thirst for knowledge motivates a social media manager to keep himself/herself to stay updated with recent trends and development. They will keep experimenting with new techniques and marketing strategies.
A lot of Industries opened up about their hiring requirements.
They search for individuals who have the latest news on social changing. Just look two years back, you will find how evolving this digital platform is! This is one of the industries which move a mile a minute. So, automatically they seek managers who are attentive about the changes and can adapt quickly. So curiosity and passion is a quite essential quality for this job sector.
Adaptability
Adaptability completes the result of curiosity. You can say it complements the curiosity of mind. To step ahead, after finding a new trend or anything new you have to adapt it real quick.
For instance, texts were the most engaging type of social media content in previous days. With the passing time, it has shifted to images, and now the most engaging contents are videos (either recorded or live).
Mark Zuckerberg has said in an article that,
“Ten years ago, most of the content was text, then it shifted to photos, and now it turned into videos,”
Zuckerberg also said that he thinks people are going to be in a world where people will opt for video contents within a few years.
So, a great social media manager is able to cope with such changes and catch up the most essential skills (for instance: graphic design, video making, etc.).
(Can you imagine, virtual reality might become the most popular content type in the near future!)
Business Savviness
The ability to generate reacts, comments and shares are brilliant but knowing the way how social media will fit in with your business strategy is more important!
That is why being business-savvy is an important quality of a social media manager. They can imagine the most probable future and understands well the role of social media networks in the business.
A business-savvy manager understands the importance level of different metrics. Based on the business type which metrics are most relevant and important to the business and the way to push them higher.
As for example A B2B (Business to Business) type company’s social media manager might concentrate on generating leads for the sales team whereas a B2C (Business to consumer) social media manager might emphasize more on increasing direct customer purchases.
This kind of decisions spread his/her impact not only the social media networks but also to the entire company.
How Will You Become A Social Media Manager:
Some people have natural social media skill when some other people need a bit of work to become a social media manager. Most of the company hires a person as a social media manager who has an active online presence. So at first focus on your activity.
Here is some friendly advice for you that can bring the job!
1. Market Yourself:
Make your profile attractive on whichever network you are. To show your skills and expertise create a portfolio. And to reach a mass, drive traffic to it. Be your first client. Test if your strategies are working or not.
2. Find Your Client :
Try to attend network gathering, and industrial conference to make more connection to people. Follow some brands. You never know when they are hiring. So keep yourself alert. Regularly visit freelancing website where maybe you can find your first gig. When you will start first it will be hard. But after some time, it will become easier for you.
3. Time Management:
You cannot afford to lose time. Aimless scrolling is an awful habit and going to cost you a lot. You can create a social media calendar. It will not only save your time but also keep things organized.
4. How Much To Charge?
Most of the new Social media manager get confused with the charging amount. Generally, markets vary depending on location, industry type, etc. But you can check what your competitors are demanding. You may set up your rate close to them. Sometimes working with less may count as your investment initially. As you also need to build your experience.
In addition, if you can show your excellence, it may give you more offers. But make sure to charge considering your time and effort.
5.Advanced Marketing:
Give your clients the best. Learn to optimize videos with tags, titles and keyword-rich descriptions. Try adding customized Facebook tabs, Twitter header. Make sure to keep yourself updated with new marketing techniques.
It is not as hard to become a social media manager what many of the people think. But when you are representing a brand it will be a little hard. But promoting a brand and draw traffic is a rewarding job if you want to take the challenge.
Career of a social media manager is quite thrilling, flourishing, and also beneficial. With the right set of skills and strong motivation, it is one of the most satisfying job, anyone can have.
One does not necessarily need a marketing degree to take a job as a social media manager. But having one enhances the power of the resume. All the same, mostly employers look for social media managers who have the ability to blend business strategy with preceding technology.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, this is a skill set that can provide you with 19,700 job opportunities in marketing and promotional sector from 2014 to 2024.
Tools To Rock The Position Of A Social Media Manager
There are plenty of tools available online that help a social media manager to carry out the job more smoothly.
The more functional tools you have the more you will work better. Here are some suggested tools to work without any hitch.
Lumen5
Nowadays text-based content does not gain attention like video contents on social media. Lumen5 is a kind of tool that can make your life easy in terms of video contents.
It is a video maker which uses AI technology to turn your text into a video within a minute. It is absolutely easy to use.
You just have to enter on a blog post or RSS feed, Lumen5 will help you to summarize your content with relevant videos & images.
Buffer
It is one of the famous schedulers on market right now. Every social media manager needs a way to schedule posts otherwise he/she has to remain in front of the computer all day long.
Buffer helps to control social media platform and plan for their platform with the help of just a tool.
It also has an analytics option by which you can analyse what will work best for your social media client. Which will allow you to understand the best content type.
Grammarly
It is an online grammar checking, spell checking & plagiarism checking app that will help you to check your content before sharing it in social media platforms. If you want to start professionally, you will need this tool.
Canva
Those who have no idea about graphics design can design anything with the help of Canva. You can also publish it anywhere. The process is very simple. Choose a design for your content. Drag & drop tool to make a perfect design for your content. You can also choose your design for Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc.
Social pilot
This is not just a social media management tool. With its help, you can schedule your social media posts, improve traffic, analyse your work etc- and it will not cost you any penny.
Post planner
When the best social media managers struggle to find the right content to share, post planner is there to help you. It analyzes websites to identify which content is perfect for the audiences.
Infogram
Infogram helps to create infographics. Because it has built-in templates to create good looking charts, maps, graphics & dashboards that you can or want to share.
Crowdsignal
Crowdsignal helps social media managers to create polls & surveys on social media. It also allows engaging readers with a brand or a company. Besides, you can also make logos with it. In free plans, you will get unlimited polls & surveys.
At The End
The career of a social media manager is quite thrilling, flourishing, and also beneficial. With the right set of skills and strong motivation, it is one of the most satisfying jobs, anyone can have.
One does not necessarily need a marketing degree to take a job as a social media manager. But having one enhances the power of the resume. All the same, most employers look for social media managers who have the ability to blend business strategy with preceding technology.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, this is a skill set that can provide you with 19,700 job opportunities in marketing and promotional sector from 2014 to 2024.
By this time, you know pretty much everything about being a social media manager. The responsibilities, and the way to be one.
So, what are you waiting for? Start a new journey with a job that not only gives money but also keeps you motivated and updated with the world.
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