People misunderstand social media marketing with social posting. When you or anyone posts something with some random hashtags at any time on social media sites is called social posting. This often helps in building followers if your posts are entertaining or informative, but not that effective in increasing sales. On the other hand, social media marketing is a strategic practice to establish a brand as a domain expert and a brand loved by its audiences. Thus, social media marketing (SMM) is a logical, strategic, and at the same time creative job.
You can use social media marketing services from a company or you can hire an in-house social media manager. Generally, social media agencies have experienced SMM (social media marketing) experts, so you do not need to worry about anything. On the other hand, if you are thinking to hire a social media manager that can work in your company, here are some of the skills you need to look for in the candidate:
- Standards and best practices of social media marketing on different platforms
It usually seems like post a single graphic on all four-five social networking platforms and you are done. Yes, it is somewhat like that, but not exactly. Each social media platform has its own set of Do’s and Don’ts and your social media expert needs to be familiar with it. For example, you can add more than ten hashtags in Instagram marketing, but in Facebook marketing, you cannot use that many hashtags, it will be considered as hashtag spamming. Your social media manager needs to know all the best practices for different social networking sites.
- Methods to engage people
Social media marketing is all about reaching audiences and generating engagement. Thus, without getting involved in any kind of black hat social media marketing activities, SMM expert needs to increase engagement. Thus, social media manager must have creative skills and of course, knowledge of platform-specific tricks to generate engagement. For example, Facebook has imposed some restrictions, thus, brand posts or the page posts do not show up on the feed of consumers. Thus, paid ads are necessary to increase engagement in Facebook marketing.
- Good command over the language and professionalism
Social media managers need to respond to customers, prospects, and general audiences on social media platforms. Thus, their command over the language in which they are running campaigns needs to be very strong. For example, if campaigns are in Spanish, your social media manager should have a strong command over the Spanish language.
- Knowledge of SMM tools
Similar to SEO marketing campaigns, in the social media marketing as well, there are many tools, which help with regular jobs as well as to monitor the performance, improve the results, and help with other parts of effective social media marketing. A social media manager that is going to run various social media marketing campaigns needs to know about these SMM tools and the ways of using them perfectly.
In a nutshell, social media marketing is a strategic and creative job. Thus, your social media manager needs to have a thorough knowledge of effective marketing practices of different social networking sites. Thus, if you hire an in-house manager for this job, make sure to examine if he holds all the above-mentioned skills or not.
