The social media landscape gave birth to the significant rise of interesting social media careers we know today. To name a few, we have the exuberant bloggers, the analytical app developers, the creative UX/ UI designers and last but not least—the tech-savvy social media marketers.
Some titles are synonymous to one another like virtual assistant for social media marketing and the social media manager. Sometimes they’re referred to as social media strategists, digital media assistants, or social media experts. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
The key roles and jobs entailed with being a social media marketer, along with its participation in helping your business get leads, convert them into sales and improve your ROI, will all be discussed in this blog.
Without further ado, it’s time to delve deeper into this and get to answering the question.
Who is a Social Media Marketer?
At its core function, social media marketers exist to lift the heavy weight of promoting your company across multiple social channels, so business owners like you can devote your time focusing on your key functions to drive business goals. Social media marketing specialists help ease the load in planning, implementing and monitoring a company’s social media strategy across different social platforms and campaigns.
You obviously don’t have all the time of the day to think whether your next post will be engaging enough for your Facebook followers or not. Similarly, you don’t want to spend countless hours wondering if your post will be appealing enough to the visual taste of your Instagram followers. Add to that, you wouldn’t want to get sored debating about the relevance of your content to the discerning eyes of your B2B network on LinkedIn.
Imagine doing any of that daily amid other important business stuff.
As a business owner, you can definitely perform those tasks on your own. However, even if you can, your hectic schedule simply won’t permit it. In prioritizing the simpler tasks, you may end up sacrificing more highly significant goals. It would be best if you sought ways to delegate or outsource the work to specialized individuals.
That’s when the skills of a social media marketer come in. Listed below is an in-depth discussion that’s focused on the question, ‘What does a social media marketing specialist do to support this growing demand?’
Key Responsibilities of a Social Media Manager
What does a social media marketer do for business? Here’s a list of the many responsibilities performed by social media manager:
1. Manage Social Media Platforms
The following are the hallmarks of a social media manager’s responsibilities:
- Schedule and create posts
- Create an editorial calendar for each social media platform
- Document social media campaigns
- Monitor activity and engagements
- Grow follower count through marketing campaigns
- Respond to the audience’s comments and questions
2. Boost Brand Awareness
The goal of any business is to boost brand recognition to increase leads and reach potential customers. A social media manager fosters customer relationships by providing exciting content to keep the audience engaged. This can be done in the form of images, videos, blogs or live streaming, all of which are geared toward social sharing. “Newsjacking” is another strategy they use to align a brand with a popular news or current event to capture media attention and increase brand exposure.
3. Promote Products and Campaigns
Social media marketers find ways to position products in front of the right audience. They’re in charge of finding the most popular hashtags on different social platforms to place their products to willing customers. They’re also responsible for producing useful info to encourage discussion and not just directly promote products.
4. Identify Social Media Influencers
Social media is all about getting social. More than increasing the number of likes and shares, social media strategists aim to build a community of loyal followers. To help establish that, they prospect influencers that align with their business objectives. Influencers with great following help speak to a brand’s target audience.
5. Track Social Media Trends
Trends don’t go unnoticed in the eyes of a social media manager. As such, they adopt social media monitoring tools to know social metrics and trending topics to gauge the performance of their campaign initiatives.
Social media marketers see to it that the marketing strategies they promote are directed to audiences who are likely to convert as customers. Part of their role is to research and perform competitive analysis to understand how a business is faring in social channels compared to its competitors.
Key Benefits of Outsourcing Social Media Marketers
Nowadays, finding a social media expert with relevant skills and background in handling multiple platforms is daunting if you limit your search to a single location or area. There is also the dilemma caused by the ongoing pandemic. Business transactions and in-house hiring have dramatically dwindled, following the strict implementations of social distancing and community quarantines across the globe.
The better alternative is to outsource these skills. Outsourcing social media marketing pros provides several benefits for your business:
1. Time for more significant tasks
Assigning the work to outsourcing agencies gives business owners the freedom to do more of their core business functions. That means, no more overthinking about your next tweet.
2. Ready access to social media experts
This is especially beneficial if a business is not an expert in social media marketing. Freelancers or agencies offer expert advantages which are readily available for use.
3. Consistent posting
One of the benefits of having someone handle your social media marketing is the consistency of posting. They specialize in content curation and adopt scheduling tools to guarantee that contents are posted regularly and in a timely manner.
4. Updated with social trends
Researching trends or pooling content ideas is definitely time-consuming. Outsourcing allows you to have focus on core business activities since you’re delegating demanding tasks to people who are best at what they do.
5. Cost-effective
This is especially true if a business can’t hire a full-time employee. Outsourcing saves money on staff, recruitment and training as outsourced staff are already experts in their field.
6. You get things done quickly
Talk about efficiency gain. You can expect a faster and better service from a trained and experienced specialist.
7. Leverage tech toolkit from outsourcing agencies
You can benefit from the technology that outsourcing agencies use. Some of these advanced tools cover SEO, project management, and web monitoring, all of which are essential to help do the work efficiently.
8. More targeted campaigns
Social media marketing requires a continuous and consistent effort. A third-party business or agency has streamlined work processes that can target and scale marketing campaigns effectively.
9. You can share risks
Since you’re designating the role to experts in their field, you can expect that they are the best at addressing the risks that come with their responsibilities and are therefore capable of exercising accountability for their actions.
Final Thoughts
In the world of social media where customers are in relentless need to be served efficiently, businesses can turn to outsourcing as a means to strategize their workflow and manage their social media campaigns. It’s a great resource to achieve the desired outcomes without any compromise.
When the competition is tough and everyone in the industry claims to be the best, how do you make sure your company stands out? You have two options: One, you either do all the work yourself, or two, let experts work their magic for YOU to reach your social media goals.