Social media has made such a tremendous impact and gained such wide adoption. For this reason, many people that do business on social media work with a range of professionals that are in social media career channels.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Monster data, support there are many social media jobs in the digital marketing space where you’d spend at least part of your 9-to-5 scrolling, liking and sharing with the world.
Hence, if you spend a lot of time on social media, you can turn it from a habitual practice to a profession wherein you get paid for doing what you love.
What Skills Are Vital For Social Media Careers?
The experience of being a social media user for years isn’t enough to find success (or a job) in the social media world. If you want to achieve goals beyond “get likes for my puppy,” you will need the knowledge to execute strategic campaigns.
A list of the key skills for professionals in social media career channels include:
Social Media Platforms Knowledge
It is important to keep in mind that each social media platform has its own set of best practices, rules, and mistakes to avoid.
To learn how to become a social media marketer, take a look at these examples:
- The algorithm for each platform’s content ranking
- The state of organic reach across each platform
- The type, performance, audience, and audience size of platforms best suited for your client’s business
- The platform’s approach to inbound and outbound links
- Features that should be utilized (such as Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Pages)
A comprehensive social media education or experience are the only ways to acquire this knowledge.
Strategic Skills & Experience
What is the best way to determine how to get where a client wants to go by looking at their current performance, their audience, and their goals?
As a social media marketer, you must have this skill because more than just posting daily is required in these positions.
A diversity of content for each of the platforms you use must be included in your content calendar. It’s also a good idea to know how to set up contests for brand awareness, use influencer marketing, and go live to nurture relationships.
Familiarity with Native & Third-Party Business Tools
Are you familiar with Facebook’s analytics tools, or with scheduling posts to Instagram in advance? Have you ever considered setting up an Instagram shop or setting up Rich Pins on Pinterest?
Can you accommodate the use of third-party tools, such as Hootsuite and Agorapulse, as well as contest software, such as ShortStack?
Learn how to use native as well as third-party tools on each social media platform to their full potential.
Social Copywriting Skills
What is the maximum character count for a Facebook post on mobile? Which hashtags should you use and which should you avoid?
The skill of writing for social media is especially crucial for social media marketers, and you need to write copy that maximizes exposure and engagement simultaneously by writing short and character-constrained social copy.
Make your copy easy to read, intuitive to write, and without repetitious, overly cheesy, “salesy” terminology like “It’s Your Last Chance to Buy Now!”.”
Graphic Design Skills
Using drag-and-drop design software is an advantage for social media marketers who do not have design skills.
Business owners may want to create original graphics and images, even if they are just quotes on backgrounds or a simple infographic.
Despite not being a necessity for every position, it is desirable, especially if you are working alone instead of in a large team.
Basic Copyright Knowledge
Even though it seems small, it plays an important role in your job.
It is forbidden to simply post an image on social media that you find online? On all platforms, including YouTube, you must be careful about the things you use in your video content, such as music and video clips.
You should consider copyright, as all original work published on the Internet is protected.
Here’s more information on this, but understanding it before you start could save you (and your employer) from trouble.
Best Social Media Career Channels For Beginners
To get into a career in social media, it’s essential to understand the roles and place them side-by-side with your interests, competence and a lot more. Therefore, some of the best social media career channels include:
Social Media Manager
As the name implies, social media managers tend to be hands-on in managing social accounts, which includes everything from updating accounts to monitoring engagement. A person with this title may head a department in their company, or they may work for an agency handling a variety of client accounts.
The entrepreneur must also establish and build a community, sometimes online and sometimes offline. Taking advantage of Facebook, the social media manager at the gym club might create a group exclusively for members with training tips and health information.
Social Media Consultant
Consultants in social media are often freelancers or employed by agencies (which makes it difficult to find official job listings for this title), and they’re usually Consulting around strategy will be offered frequently by experienced professionals. Clients may or may not retain consultants on an ongoing basis, and consultants will often work with companies that are either brand new (and choose which platforms to implement) or those that want to extend their reach.
Brand Manager
Social media managers typically have responsibilities inside and outside of social networks. Besides working with other digital marketing staff members, they will make sure that every touchpoint users may encounter the business on is defined or refined. You may want to include your website, email campaigns, and social media campaigns as well. Strategists are often heavily involved in tactics, but they are primarily concerned with creating and promoting brands audiences will love.
Social Media Analyst
Data is the lifeblood of social media analysts. It is usually their job to assess current and previous campaigns in order to determine their effectiveness. The team will determine what’s working and what isn’t by looking at engagement online and offline.
Analysts usually provide suggestions about how to improve campaigns besides just creating reports, which are a necessity when running expensive PPC campaigns and spending a lot of money on advertising.
Digital Marketing Specialist
Digital marketing specialists can end up wearing a lot of hats, including social media practitioners. They’ll often be responsible for executing multiple cohesive campaigns at once, which may involve things like content marketing campaigns, PPC campaigns, and organic social campaigns that all weave together well.
This professional can also design, create, and deliver marketing programs to support the expansion and growth of the company services and products. They can also be invested in developing, managing and designing layouts of communications such as presentations, newsletters, event support materials, research papers, and brochures.
Social Media Strategist
Unless the job description specifically says “social media strategist,” it’s looking for someone who is able to help develop and execute cutting-edge strategies to liven up or maintain social media. A strategist may pitch contest ideas or launching an awareness campaign using a branded hashtag.
In some departments, strategists will have a boss, but they often work with another person as well.
Art Directors
Art directors oversee the visual aspect of an advertising or media campaign and work with other artists and designers, such as graphic designers. Publishers typically assign art directors to oversee page layouts of books, magazines, newspaper articles, or catalogues.
Creating designs and layouts is the responsibility of art directors at advertising firms, public relations agencies, and publishing companies.
Chief Marketing Officer
You can make it to the Chief Marketing Officer position of a company if you work hard at it. It’s a high-level job, and you’ll not just be in charge of social media marketing but also have to look at how SEO, PPC, email marketing, content marketing, and overall web presence fit together. Although social media is still important, you’ll likely hand off some of the work and responsibilities to others on the team.
It is common for CMOs to have an expanded role that includes sales management, new business development, product development, and customer service management. To achieve sales goals, the CMO ensures that a consistent message is distributed across channels and to the targeted audience. Today, that means using mobile platforms, videos and social media to deliver messages.
Conclusion
With social media platforms building numbers in terms of users, traffic and a lot more, there will certainly be more social media career channels that will find their way into this market space.
In choosing a career path,m you must ensure your interests align not only with the position you seek but your skills must remain sharp enough to keep your performance at the highest standard.
These career paths are fun, interesting and full of learning for a young professional.
