What does a social media manager do?

What is a Social Media Manager?

A social media manager is someone who makes social media decisions for a company, and is considered the voice of a company on social and digital media sites. They will use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Four Square, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc., to link a company, brand or product with a targeted audience for the purpose of driving engagement and creating a community. This results in subscribers and sales for a company.

What does a Social Media Manager do?

If you've ever liked a company on Facebook, that account is probably managed by a social media manager. In order to create and implement a social media strategy, the social media manager not only needs to understand the company they work for, but needs to have a good understanding of the industry that the company is in. The strategy they come up with needs to be in line with the company's goals, brand identity and target audience. Social media managers often coordinate with a company's marketing team to promote paid advertising, campaigns, product launches and events.

A considerable portion of a social media manager's role is creating content and choosing images for the specific social networks. This includes creating variations of existing content to adapt to specific networks, or creating content from scratch. Content may only be 140 characters in length, or be a wordy and engaging blog post. Regardless, the purpose of any content is to grow a subscriber following, and to get more clicks and leads.

A social media manager will also use A/B testing to help with optimizing each platform in order to drive engagement and results. Marketing is undoubtedly becoming more data-driven, and it is important for the social media manager to be comfortable with looking at, analyzing, and taking actionable insights from data.

An incredibly important part of a social media manager's role is to create a community - a community where followers connect with each other. This is not an easy task to accomplish and is quite complicated and work-heavy. In larger companies, there are specific 'community managers' that only deal with this area. They will facilitate the community by asking engaging questions, seeding discussions, and moderating spam or inappropriate comments.

What is the workplace of a Social Media Manager like?

The workplace of a social media manager can be either in an office environment or a home environment. Because the job involves so much computer-related work, it is easy to work from home. Larger companies generally prefer to have their social media manager work at the office, in order to collaborate with the advertising and marketing team when necessary.