17 Mar What does a Social Media Manager Do?
Social media can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses looking to directly engage with clients and increase brand awareness. Granted, it can be time-consuming and challenging to keep up with basic best practices, let alone top strategic tactics. Like many marketing tools, your ROI is greatly increased when you partner with an expert – like a social media manager. A social media manager helps maintain the presence and voice of your company across online platforms. Today, we’ll be answering the question, “What does a social media manager do?”, as well as what they do not do. Plus, we’ll be diving into the benefits of outsourcing your social media management.
Responsibilities of a Social Media Manager
Provide Consistency
The primary role of a social media presence is to boost your brand awareness. Social media provides an opportunity to be found outside your website and to connect more directly with your audience – so your brand identity will play a big role. It is what will draw people in! A social media manager will help uphold, and even refine, your brands’ voice to better attract your target audience. As well as help retain your existing audience (even evolve them into evangelical fans!), by establishing trust and positioning you as a resource. Juggling this task that can be difficult as a business owner with a long list of jobs to tackle. By passing the role off to a social media manager, versus posting yourself(when you can fit it in), you’ll be able to focus your energy elsewhere. All the while reaping the benefits of an improved online presence.
Boost Engagement
The most successful social media managers are the ones that boost engagement – the number of comments, likes, and shares your receive. When your audience is engaged, it’s a good indicator that people like what your business is putting out. And in the off chance that they don’t, it still provides valuable insights into how your business may need to adjust in order to grow. The thing is, to get good engagement you have to consistently be engaged – an extremely time-consuming task. A social media manager is a worthy investment when you have bigger fish to fry yet need to maintain an active and engaging presence online.
Create An Effective Strategy
Social media isn’t just about posting photos and getting likes. You should have goals. Whether you want to generate new leads, drive traffic to your website or shop, build your brand awareness or confirm legitimacy. It is your responsibility to set these goals and a social media manager’s responsibility to help you meet them. This is achieved by creating and implementing a social media strategy, or a plan. To create this plan, a social media manager will audit your social media profiles to learn about your competitors and your target audience plus find gaps in your existing strategy. Note! If you need help defining goals or which platforms to focus on, you may need a social media strategist. Some social media managers & agencies will offer big picture strategic planning (like Path & Compass). Others are solely focused on implementation – posting and engaging.
Market Your Business
Ultimately, this person will help market your business using social media platforms. There is however a limit to this marketing tool. You will need to bring in other people to support other parts of your marketing & create a comprehensive strategy or manage those things yourself. So while your social media manager is an important part of your company’s marketing – they are only one piece of the puzzle. And there is a limit to what they can do to market you business.
Social Media Managers Don’t…
Increase your Follower Count Overnight
Too many businesses make the mistake of banking their success on a follower count. And demanding unrealistic growth. A high follower count is great, but only if your audience is engaged. And obtaining high-quality followers, the ones who will actually invest in your business takes time. If you want to see real results that help grow your business, then you need someone who understands these platforms, can create consistent content & updating best practices as things change.
Work 24 Hours a Day
Right off the bat, expecting any singular person to work 24 hours a day is unrealistic. Not to mention disrespectful of their personal time. If you are expecintg your social media profiles to be monitored around the clock this requires a team of people and a sizeable budget. Not one social media manager. (If you’re trying to pay one person to maintain your online presence around the clock perhaps you should check out our 10 Do’s & Don’ts of Building and Ethical Business).
So – Should You Outsource Your Social Media Content?
With constantly changing best practices and the need for daily posts, keeping your feeds consistent & fresh is not easy. Unless you love engaging and posting on social media, and have the time to do so on a near daily basis, adding someone else to your team can be a lifesaver. Not to mention outsourcing content from someone much savvier in this area is a huge bonus. But how do you know it’s time for your business to outsource your social media?
- You’re posting last minute (with no strategy)
- Your results have flatlined
- You don’t have time to learn a new platform
- You’re out of touch with current best practice
At Path & Compass, we are proud to offer Marketing Partnerships that include social media management. From strategic planning to full-service implementation, our team can manage your whole marketing strategy from start to finish. Fill out the form below to contact us & schedule a consultation to learn how we can create & implement a strategy tailored to your business goals.