Managing your social media interactions is about more than just building brand recognition, driving traffic, and shaping the online reputation of your business. It’s also a powerful tool that directly connects you with your target market and gives you a huge advantage over your competition. This tool, however, can become a dangerous weapon when it’s wielded by someone inexperienced. That’s why the role of the social media manager is gaining importance and recognition.
Defining the social media manager’s role
It’s difficult to define the social media manager’s role because of the complexity of their mission. Some marketing gurus describe the social media manager as an “ambassador for your brand,” or “an evangelist that spreads the good news about your business.”
While there is some truth to these labels, in reality a social media manager is actually a full time marketing expert that understands the ins and outs of what it takes to use social media to connect you with your target audience and create a growing, vibrant community. In this community, conversations boost traffic, recognition and the reputation of your brand and lead to relationships as well as sales.
Duties of the social media manager
While posts, pins, likes and tweets are some of the more visible tasks performed by a social media manager, the job is much more complex. Before the very first post is ever made, your social media manager must first investigate what it is that separates your business from all of the hundreds or thousands of other similar businesses, and discover what it is that makes your target audience want to do business with you. As part of this investigation, your SMM will help you hone in on just who your target market is, and how your products and services can help them.
The SMM then uses this information to create a solid content development strategy which will guide what is posted on various social media channels. From there, a SMM then develops strategies for promotion, engagement and conversion as well as implements measures to analyse results so that these strategies can be continually refined as time goes on.
Once these strategies are in place and implemented, the SMM can then design, create, curate and manage all of your content as well as engage with and respond with your target market that has become members of your community.
As this infographic from Socialcast shows, the social media manager’s average work day can be both busy and overwhelming. Since managing social media requires a great deal of work and expertise in order to be effective, many small business owners simply skip it, or only haphazardly reply to posts that are made to them during their leisure time. In an increasingly competitive market and difficult economy, these small business owners are really short-changing themselves and handing over market share by neglecting to use or properly manage their social media efforts.
If you want to improve your brand recognition and reputation and boost sales, but don’t have time for social media, it may be time to turn these duties over to an expert social media manager. Talk to us about how we can support your social media efforts.