How to Become a Social Media Manager

To become a Social Media Manager, you must first become adept at using social media platforms and industry tools and tech. Although you will likely need formal education or training of some kind in social media management, you can start down this career path by building your social media following and growing your personal brand.

Many working in Social Media Specialist or Social Media Manager jobs today start with digital marketing courses or bootcamps, as these are the fastest ways to fast-track a career in social media. However, you can start on the path to a successful career in social media marketing by experimenting with your own passion projects, entrepreneurial endeavors, or by helping small businesses with their social media accounts. That’s a great way to build your resume while making connections that could pay dividends down the line.

How to become a Social Media Manager in seven steps:

1. Establish your social media presence
2. Learn social media marketing fundamentals
3. Measure social media campaigns with analytics
4. Get creative with your social media content
5. Stay flexible and be aware of social media trends
6. Build a social media portfolio
7. Apply to relevant social media jobs

Before you can begin your career as a social media professional, you should take a close look at all your social media channels and make sure they represent you in the best possible light.

When you don’t have a big portfolio to wow employers with, the very first thing they’ll do when you apply for a job is Google you. If they see profiles associated with you with little-to-no activity – or, even worse, anything inappropriate – you can bet they’ll be looking elsewhere for their next social media pro.

But don’t think of this stage just as a time to manage risks. Polishing your social media channels until they shine – and we recommend getting a profile on every widely used platform, both for greater visibility and to give you more practice with the apps and platforms you’ll likely need to master later – is the best first step you can take toward showing an employer or potential client that although you don’t have years of experience, you have a knack for interesting and on-trend content.

Put time and effort into growing your following and interacting with the online community in a constructive and positive way. Community management is a big part of any Social Media Specialist’s job and it can only help if employers see how well you conduct yourself.

Whether you decide to go to a traditional four-year college or fast-track your studies with a social media marketing course or digital marketing bootcamp, a Social Media Manager will likely require some kind of education, as well as at least a basic knowledge of many different forms of marketing, including paid advertising, SEO, SEM, influencer marketing, and email marketing.

Gaining a grasp on all forms of digital marketing will make Social Media Managers much more valuable to a company. Further, you’ll make valuable networking contacts with other social media professionals trying to break in.

BrainStation, as just one example, offers full-time diploma courses in Digital Marketing both online and in person, as well as part-time certification courses in Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Digital Marketing. Course curriculum focuses on building measurable, end-to-end social campaigns with a variety of platforms, including: Business Manager for Instagram and Facebook, and LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

In as little as 12 weeks, you will build a portfolio under the tutelage of industry experts and become deeply familiar with concepts like brand strategy, analytics, search marketing, and email marketing.

To be an effective Social Media Manager, you have to master how to use analytic tools to track the reach and engagement of your posts.

In fact, despite the huge and constantly growing number of businesses using social media for marketing and branding, there is still a lingering perception that the effectiveness of social media is difficult to measure. According to eMarketer, 61 percent of Marketers say measuring ROI is their top challenge.

Further, three other challenges in the survey’s top five are directly related to ROI measurement:

• Tying social to business goals (33 percent)
• Tracking results via a dashboard (27 percent)
• Understanding performance across social channels (25 percent)

In other words, you will need to be adept with analytics to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and social content, and ultimately, to prove your value to a company.

If you’re in the early phases of building your social media following, use this as an opportunity to experiment with what types of content truly connects with an audience. Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t and refine your approach accordingly.

This is also a time to develop your unique voice. Although you might eventually need to adapt to fit the voice of whatever brand or company you’re creating content for, it’s still important to be able to demonstrate to an employer that you can post social media content across multiple platforms with a consistent voice.

Consistency really is key. Brands need to have a consistent voice across all social media platforms, so showing that you understand how to do that is crucial to showing potential employers that they can trust you to handle their accounts.

Research is a crucial part of any digital marketing job, but especially in the realm of social media. You must be constantly aware of what your competitors are doing, what people are talking about, what people are saying about you, and which design or content trends seem to be resonating. And you must be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice based on the news of the day.

Social media never stops or slows down, so it can be overwhelming trying to stay on top of everything. Fortunately, there are plenty of social media management tools, apps, and platforms out there that help Social Media Specialists keep their fingers on the pulse of the Internet.

Google Trends helps you see what people are searching for on a macro level. Hootsuite will help you monitor trends across a number of different social media platforms, Geofeedia helps you see what’s trending in different regions, while Social Mention not only gives you the chance to see what people are talking about on different platforms, it can also tell you if the mentions of a certain keyword or phrase are associated with positive, negative or neutral sentiments.

You should also do research on which special awareness dates or other milestones tend to provoke a lot of reaction on social media and plan content ahead of time.

You should be ready now to get your hands dirty with a project. Whether you can land a freelance assignment at this stage or you’ve decided to work on a passion project, you must begin to build your portfolio to eventually land a social media management job.

Why not try launching a blog or website? Or try curating an eye-catching Instagram page or compelling YouTube channel. You could pen your own newsletter or start putting together an expert Pinterest board.

With Social Media Managers in scarce supply and many companies still in the fledgling phase of establishing a really solid social media presence, there’s plenty of opportunity to be assertive and land freelance work contributing to a company’s social media strategy.

Indeed alone shows more than 3,500 freelance social media projects available, some paying as much as $100 an hour if you can demonstrate you have some experience.

If you’ve built up a great portfolio – or just finished a social media course or bootcamp that allowed you to build up a great portfolio along the way – then you’re likely qualified to find a full-time position as a social media professional.

A common entry-level position is Social Media Coordinator. Social Media Coordinators draft and post content, including tweets and status messages. The Social Media Coordinator is usually also responsible for creating a social media calendar, setting up alerts to manage responses and monitoring what is being said about clients. They also work alongside management to determine social media strategies. Indeed shows more than 13,500 Social Media Coordinator positions open in the U.S., with hourly wages of up to $21.15.

The next rung up the ladder is the Social Media Specialist, who will have more input into overall strategy and a bigger role in steering content from a creative point of view. It’s one of the hottest positions in digital marketing right now – Indeed shows nearly 13,500 jobs available with that title.

Finally, the management-level roles in social media are Social Media Manager and Social Media Director. Management-level roles for social media professionals are often more focused on strategy and less about posting status messages or determining which Facebook pages to like or which Twitter profiles to follow.

Duties differ based on a client’s needs. For example, some may focus more on contests to promote products, and others involve knowing more about competitors. Of course, Social Media Directors have the highest salaries, making over $66,000 on average in the U.S., with senior workers at big companies making much more.

A Social Media Manager is responsible for planning, creating, and publishing content on all social media platforms to build an audience, boost brand awareness and ensure customer engagement.

Depending on the role, size of the company, and salary level, Social Media Mangers could also oversee higher-level social media marketing strategy, monitor site metrics and data, handle responding directly to customer feedback (otherwise known as community management), and personally craft creative content.

Given the quantity and variety of social media channels, a Social Media Manager must also understand how to create and plan content that caters to the specific audience of each social media app or platform – for instance, what works on Facebook will not necessarily be effective on Twitter or Instagram.

A Social Media Manager plans and carries out social media strategies, crafts and publishes social media content, handles community engagement and customer service, and sifts through analytic metrics to measure their success.

Across pretty much any job, the ultimate goal of a Social Media Manager is to create or plan content on all social media channels that will lead to high levels of engagement with target audiences, increases in various platform-specific metrics (for example, likes on Facebook or Instagram or followers on Twitter), boosts to company website traffic, and ultimately an increase in revenue for a business.

A Social Media Manager will also monitor broader cultural trends – specific to each social media platform – and identify opportunities for a brand to jump into larger conversations. Good Social Media Managers create content quickly based on those of-the-moment social media trends because they can be your best chance to go viral.

A Social Media Manager job description will typically include some or all of the following responsibilities:

• Create and implement social media strategies after conducting thorough research
• Create compelling, highly shareable new content
• Communicate directly with customers (community management)
• Create editorial calendars and syndication schedules
• Capture social media data and metrics and create reports for company stakeholders
• Build social media networks by targeting industry professionals and influencers

Yes, social media is a field growing as fast as almost any other – Forrester forecasts that digital marketing spend will reach $146 billion by 2023 and social media and other digital marketing roles grew 30 percent faster from 2011 to 2016 than overall marketing postings.

There are now more than 3.6 billion social media users in the world, with 56 percent of all adults using more than one social media dsplatform on a regular basis, and as much as 90 percent of all companies using social media for marketing. The number of users is expected to swell further – all the way to 4.4 billion people in 2025, according to numbers from Statista.

Facebook alone now has approximately 2.5 billion monthly active users. With Americans spending nearly two hours per day browsing social media, that’s a huge captive audience for companies to try to reach.

That explains why research from Burning Glass Technologies showed that four in 10 marketing job openings now call for digital marketing skills, and the number of postings calling for digital skills nearly doubled between 2011 and 2016. Further, digital marketing roles grew 30 percent faster over that period than overall marketing postings.

Social Media Managers earn more than $71,000 in base pay as an average salary, plus bonuses that exceed $6,000 on average. According to Glassdoor, meanwhile, the average salary for a Social Media Specialist is just over $48,000 and can rise up to $66,000.

The job outlook for Social Media Manager is very positive, as reports show that there’s high demand and low supply for skilled Social Media Managers and other social media professionals.

Even beyond Social Media Manager job descriptions, digital marketing jobs are beginning to outpace traditional marketing jobs, and all digital marketing jobs call for some level of social media skills.

In fact, communications jobs also now regularly call for social media skills, given how important a company’s social media presence is to its overall PR strategy.

Even if you have no experience, there are many paths to becoming a Social Media Manager, especially since there’s nothing stopping you from getting out there on your own, exploring the latest social media platforms and technology, learning how to create good content, and beginning to build your following.

That’s just the first step toward finding your niche as a Social Media Marketing Manager. You will likely want to consider attending a social media marketing course or digital marketing bootcamp. It’s not uncommon for agencies or companies to hire people right upon completing a bootcamp, especially with such a high demand currently for Digital Marketers.

It is also common for an aspiring Social Media Manager to start in generalist positions and decide to shift into social media as their specialty. Some even specialize in one specific platform, which can be an especially effective strategy when freelancing – a company may already have a Twitter or Facebook page but they might need someone particularly adept at TikTok, for example, to get their account off the ground.

If you don’t have experience and are starting from scratch, you’ll likely have to start at a more entry-level marketing role. Luckily, entry-level social media marketing positions are hardly scarce given the state of the industry, so if you have a knack for knowing how to communicate with an audience digitally, you’ll likely find yourself climbing the ladder in no time.

Since many are curious about exploring career paths in digital marketing, these are a few of the best reasons to become a Social Media Manager:

Chances are, you spend a lot of time on social media already the average person spends more than two hours every day scrolling social. Turning that hobby into a job could be a more natural transition than you think. Friends might be envious when they see that your day-to-day work duties involve monitoring the account of influencers or joining in on fun trending topics.

A successful Social Media Manager brings together strong storytelling instincts, a keen design eye, and a sense of humor to create shareable content that is relevant and resonates on an emotional level. Being able to have a creative job is something that many people find really rewarding.

Since being an effective social media expert means living and breathing trending topics, you’ll soon be that person at the party who is an expert on pretty much everything. And not only will you have your finger permanently on the pulse, but you’ll also be in a rare position to understand exactly what’s happening within your company. Since your job has you on the frontlines of potential PR disasters and customer service issues, your company will keep you in the loop while others might be left in the dark.

With all of the analytic tools and technology at your fingertips to evaluate the performance of the social media accounts you’re running, you won’t have to be left in the dark about whether you’re meeting your goals and objectives. Seeing real-time engagement through analytics tools can be a great motivator – not to mention provide a feeling of instant gratification.

Does the prospect of seeing social media content you created being shared and enjoyed by people all around the world excite you? Each day brings the potential for one of your social media posts to resonate with millions worldwide. With that comes great responsibility as well, of course, but if being able to reach a massive worldwide audience with something you made is exciting to you, you might be well-suited for a career in social media management.