As most of the social media managers know that their job is constantly in flux. For them, it sometimes feels that they are switching between multiple hats in one day like from marketing to customer service to sales. Some companies have multiple social media managers while some of the companies outsource the work.
These social media manager’s skills are a combination of hard and soft skills, though the descriptions do not necessarily mean one is more difficult than the other. Both types of social media marketing skills and attributes take time and effort to develop. Hard skills like programming and copywriting are technical in nature. Whereas soft skills like being empathetic (share the feelings of another) and organized may be more difficult to analyze but just as useful in work.
Following are some of the traits which are a mix of skills that can be trained and are essential to the success of any social media manager.
- Community management:-
- Establishing and building a digital relationship is still a treasured attribute.
- Community management is being able to navigate the online area of promoting your brand while engaging with your customers.
- It can mean slowly converting an observer into a customer by patiently answering questions.
- It can also be showing off what your customers are talking about when they post on social media.
- So, community management should be there in the social media managers.
- Creative in nature:-
- Since, a large part of social media involves visuals in some form or another, having an eye for creativity is helpful.
- At the very least, you should be able to distinguish between a great and poor design.
- This can mean being a decent photographer, videographer or graphic designer.
- On the other hand, being creative is also having a sense of humor and ability to improvise in any given situations.
- Organized and efficient:-
- In today’s world, everyone is being lost in the social media cycle.
- Sometimes you might find a funny video on Facebook and then 30 minutes later, you realize that you have spent a bunch of time by clicking around and getting no work done.
- A good social media manager needs to be task and goal oriented to accomplish all the items on the checklist.
- So, a good social media manager should organize each and everything effectively and efficiently.
- Adaptive in nature:-
- Being able to adaptive in nature is an important trait for a social media manager.
- It is not enough to be able to schedule posts. You should also be able to willing to try out some new features and change up your posts to fit with the latest technology or what is being discussed in the timeline.
- It is also a good idea to check a hash-tag or news story before interjecting into it.
- Decisive:-
- A social media manager should have a good decision making power while speaking directly to customers.
- If there is a customer complaint about a meal and that went wrong, give the manager an option to provide a gift certificate to that customer.
- Consumers expect that brands respond to messages in less than four hours. However, brands only respond only some of the percent of these messages in about 10 hours.
- Thus, a good social media manager must be a decisive i.e., he/she has the ability to take decisions immediately rather than delaying for some time.
These above five skills are the ones that will definitely make up the most effective social media manager. If you have the resources, these can be divided up and specialized.