Everything you need to know about working as a remote Social Media Manager
What is an Social Media Manager?
Social media managers maintain nurture and grow social media account like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok. Another platform to master is LinkedIn. Social media management comes with different responsibilities. For example, you can be more focused on the overall strategies that are focused on achieving your business goals. Other social media managers could be more focused on the implementation and this usually results in creating images/videos, writing social media captions, and community management. A lower-level task within social media management is scheduling content. As a social media manager, you can do all this work or specialize in a specific area of social media management.
Some social media managers niche down to one or multiple channels. This is because each channel has its own algorithm and type of content. An example is that your strategy on TikTok will be very different from your LinkedIn strategy.
Social media managers can work as contractors, self-employed but also be part of the internal team of an organization
Social Media Manager skills:
- No degree is really necessary but its always good to have a background in similar fields like Journalism, Communication, Business, Public Relations, or any related field.
- Communication skills: social media managers have to have the capacity to communicate well with the public, as the role is customer-facing, and they are responsible of portraying a good brand image online.
- Writing and editing skills are essential. Social media managers create and oversee content on all social media channels, so they must be comfortable with writing content.
- If you are creating content you need to know how to edit pictures or even videos to create content.
- Have an understanding of the most important social media platforms. Like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pintrest, TikTok and/or LinkedIn.
- Organizational skills: as a social media manager you are juggling many tasks at once, so it is essential to be organized in this role to be able to deliver.
- Research skills to stay up to date with the latest trends, algorithms and updates
Tools and resources for Social Media Managers
- Scheduling tools to manage multiple social content streams from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Common tools are HootSuite, Later.com, SproutSocial, Falcon, Loomly, Buffer, HubSpot
- Canva: is a social media tool focused on layout design and presentations. They also have video and animation features simplified and it’s compared to Adobe easy to learn. If you are creating content this is a must-have tool.
- Spreadsheets or Airtable to track performance. Although the majority of the tools offer social post performance reports in the tool. It’s recommended to define what metrics are important for your brand to measure and keep track of this weekly or monthly on a numbers sheet.
- Grammarly is a great tool for anything that includes words. Whether you are writing captions or designing layouts, you don’t want to catch any typos once your content is published.
- Project management tools are a great way to keep your work organized and collaborate remotely. Top project management tools are Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com or Basecamp.
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Challenges for Remote Social Media Managers
- Time management: it’s complicated to have enough time to create the content needed, post it at the precise time, research hashtags, get approval from clients, and so on.
- Getting stuck: not being able to come up with great ideas in time. The fact that social media moves at such a fast pace, you always need to come up with new fresh ideas.
- Leverage each platform for maximum engagement. Every social media serves a different purpose, and your audience utilizes them for a specific reason. Finding ways to your audience and being able to engage with them through the right media is a tricky path.
- Keeping up with the latest updates of each social media platform because each update would impact our social media process
- Getting to know your audience very well so your can build very strong social media channels with high engagement rates.
- Managing and growing organically your community.
Opportunities for Social Media Managers
- Large organizations, entrepreneurs, and small size businesses need to be on social media and these days a social media presence is required. This creates a lot of jobs and you can niche down to an industry you feel connected with. For example, if you are into outdoor activities you can become a social media manager for outdoor sports brands.
- As we mentioned above, you don’t need an expensive degree. If you have the willpower to become a social media manager you can take courses, read online and train yourself. You can start attracting clients while you are training yourself and find out what areas of social media management you want to master.
- You can start small as a freelancer with 1-3 clients and build an entire business around social media management. Many entrepreneurs who have built social media agencies started this way. When you can’t handle all your client work it’s time to hire and before you blink an eye you got a Social Media Agency.