Social Media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have become platforms for organizations and companies to have access to a larger audience. These companies hire social media managers who are skilled in the management of social media platforms to attract new audiences, maintain the existing ones, make sales and generate profit.

Source: Hootsuite

With the above number of people on social media, reaching out to potential and new audiences is possible.

As a social media manager, you are a jack of many trades shouldering lots of responsibilities. Building a social media presence requires some critical basic skills.

Below are 6 basic skills you need to function as a social media manager: 

1. Writing skills

Writing is an essential part of social media management. It embodies both content writing and copywriting.

You need a good copy for social media profile descriptions, and crafting captions and posts. The heartbeat of social media posts is engagement. To gain engagement, you need to attract your audience through videos, text, graphics, and images.

However, you need to sell a captivating story to your audience. If you don’t have basic writing skills, especially content writing, it becomes an uphill task.

As a social media manager, you must command attention, enhance your brand’s voice, and elicit emotions from your audience. The various social media platforms are different in the way they function. For example, not all platforms require long texts. An effective writer can tailor content to suit a specific audience at any time.

The above image is a sample of a post from our Instagram page. 

Writing skills stretch further into blog posts and emails. The ability to craft attention-grabbing newsletters, presentations, and strategies is important in social media management.

Some of the resources you need to create an engaging copy or write-up include Grammarly, Hemingway, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Empty space, drag to resize

2. Creativity

Every social media manager must be creative. You must have the wits to create contents that are engaging, educative, valuable, and buzz-worthy. Content creation needs in-depth innovation.

Bringing ingenuity into social media management helps you to create visually appealing content, expand your brand’s voice and persona, brainstorm ideas, and consider aesthetics while creating content.

Creativity also involves knowing trends and structuring those trends to suit your business type before jumping into them.

Creativity stems from inspiration. It is synonymous with inventiveness. Yes, there may be no new ideas according to Mark Twain. But, who says you can’t repurpose content to suit your needs? The repurposing of content still needs creativity.

In texts, videos, images, and graphics, this ingeniousness is a sure goal. If you don’t possess a creative mind as a social media manager, you are on the verge of losing both new and old audiences.

Empty space, drag to resize

3. Customer Relationship Management

Social media is an avenue for brands to reach out to their customers and clients and vice-versa. Look at platforms such as Twitter. Customers can lay out their complaints and await responses from brands. Brands in turn offer solutions through the platform and reassure their clients of their efficiency.

As a social media manager, being helpful is more essential than going viral. If you possess a good customer care service attitude, it will attract more customers and retain old ones. Imagine, you don’t know how to address your customers. There are chances that you lose those customers whether you’re on the path of error or not.

Source: Google

Yes, customers can be annoying and sometimes out for your blood. However, a good customer attitude is the best medicine for such a character.

Community Management is an aspect of social media management that requires great customer care. In this role, you must be able to ask the right questions to facilitate engagement and answer questions about the product or service.

Know this, as a social media manager, you foster digital relationships between brands and clients. You further extend these relationships into engagement and form a community where people share their problems.

Empty space, drag to resize

4. Agility and Flexibility

Every social media manager must be flexible and can quickly adapt to new trends. These platforms are prone to changes at all times. For example, Instagram has shifted from favoring texts and images to videos. Then, the latest is the reels. In using reels, you also need to understand the latest trends in songs and voice-overs to use for your engagement.

“Most of the content 10 years ago was text, and then photos, and now it’s quickly becoming videos,” Zuckerberg said, justifying Facebook’s aggressive push into the area. “I just think that we’re going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.” (Source)

As a social media manager, you must have the tenacity to quickly react to any new trend or opportunity on social media. Sometimes, these plans shake up your already-designed content calendars.

An agile social media manager learns from feedback, and data and keeping a track of social media trends.

Empty space, drag to resize

5. Design (Graphics and Videos)

You must not be a professional graphics designer or video editor to be a social media manager. However, you do need basic knowledge of them.

Are you aware that 43% percent of consumers want to see more video content? Social media platforms are gradually steering away from regular texts into videos and images. Designing and editing these content types becomes a necessity for social media managers.

As a social media manager, having and knowing a few design tricks under your sleeves saves you time. It also helps with the elimination of dependency on designers.

Source: Freepik

An application such as Canva is an effective and easy-to-use tool for graphics design, carousels, and video editing. It is an all-purpose application that doesn’t need you to be a professional before usage unlike other applications such as Adobe Photoshop.

Photo editing is not left out in the design category. Some photos you may need to post may require little touches which a photo editing skill is good for.

The various kinds of graphics and videos social media platforms require, include infographics, animations, live videos, short stop motion videos, and informative videos with texts.

Empty space, drag to resize

6. Analytics

Analytics help you to know your current state and performance. It keeps track of things you need to change to perform better. 

Most of these platforms such as Facebook and Instagram give you insights into your performance. Some other websites and applications such as HubSpot, and Sprout Social can also help with insight analytics.

Source: Google

Empty space, drag to resize

These analytics open you up to posts that are doing better than others, the right time for you to post (from when your audience is online), your hashtag usage, and general post-performance.

Analytics is all about the experiment. The qualitative and quantitative analytical data obtained help in understanding the full performance of your social media platforms. In analysis, you can look at the data, identify trends, develop recommendations and communicate a strategy and feedback plan.

Conclusion

The above skills are essential skills for a social media manager. If you possess these skills, strive to know more as social media evolves. If you are not familiar with these skills, you should acquire them to maximize your duty as a social media manager.

Remember, being a professional at the above skill is not mandatory. Being good at a few of those skills will make you a great social media manager and a valuable asset to your employer.

Are you willing to learn and grow as a social media manager? Are you in search of a place to grow your skills as a social media manager? Search no longer. 

More Techies is here to help you accomplish your goal.

Sign up for the social media management course and see your dreams come true.