Marketing has long been using social media as a new and dynamic platform for promoting products and services. The profession of an SMM manager appeared relatively recently, but has already established itself as one of the most sought after in the labor market.
There is a misconception that such specialists only publish content and maintain social networks . The profession of an SMM manager is much more extensive than simple posting and communication with the audience.
Who is an SMM manager
In short, an SMM manager is a social media specialist . His responsibilities include maintaining employer accounts , contacting the audience and setting up advertising. But like any other profession, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The task of the manager is to study the target audience and select the appropriate tools to promote the product. A specialist should be able to analyze in detail the response of the audience to their actions and select appropriate promotion strategies.
The duties of an SMM manager include a whole range of services:
- Development of the concept of company accounts from the name and address, to the development of corporate themes and the selection of hashtags .
- Creation of unique content. An SMM specialist needs to be able to write strong selling and engaging texts, engage in visual design of posts and the profile as a whole.
- Search and study of the target audience, identification of interests, expansion due to non-standard offers.
- Schedule posts and develop a content plan , taking into account the specifics of the product and the habits of its potential consumers.
- Analysis of direct and adjacent competitors. Studying their target audience.
- Keeping the audience active with the help of promotions and contests.
- Setting up targeted advertising. Analysis of reach and views. Choosing the best promotion strategy.
- Order direct and native advertising from bloggers and opinion leaders.
- Working with the information environment and tracking industry innovations.
- Maintaining customer feedback and gathering feedback.
- Tracking the negative in the direction of the company and the product. Analysis of the received information.
Despite all of the above, the duties of an SMM manager do not include direct sales. Communication with customers is limited solely to responding to comments and reviews. All side effects in social networks are discussed with customers separately. The main task of a specialist is to analyze the audience’s response to their actions and develop a promotion strategy.
Skills to help you get the job done
A competent specialist must have creative thinking, be able and know how to work with social networks .
Required skills to work as an SMM manager:
- Strategic thinking. The ability to build a long-term scenario for product promotion and calculate all the pitfalls.
- Knowledge of the psychology of the individual and the masses. It will help to find the right approach to the audience and create a strong trusting atmosphere.
- Organizational skills. Ability to manage your own and other people’s time with the greatest efficiency.
- Copywriting skills and the ability to choose the right seo keys.
- Stress resistance and the ability to communicate with trolls.
- Communication and responsiveness.
For a person who has chosen the path of SMM marketing, it is important to understand that such a profession requires knowledge and skills in addition to basic duties. A good specialist must have creative thinking. Typical algorithms for promotion in social networks are no longer as effective as before. If earlier mass actions were popular, then by 2020 this does not bring popularity, and most importantly, sales.
Based on the duties of an SMM manager, education in the field of marketing and PR is useful in the work. The basic techniques and skills of the market research and product promotion professions are perfect for online marketing.
A diploma in journalism will be a good help. Knowing the tactics and tools to attract the masses will help keep the attention of the audience. Journalists have the necessary experience in creating content and the ability to analyze news trends.
An SMM manager must understand the algorithms and mechanics of social networks . An analytical mindset will help you keep your finger on the pulse.
Where to learn the basics of the profession
The profession of an SMM manager is one of the most demanded and dynamically developing in the labor market. The demand for qualified professionals is growing every year.
There is a huge amount of information on the web. Free video tutorials and online courses will help you understand the basics and get a general idea of the profession. However, this way of learning is superficial and is fraught with the creation of an information dump in the head.
For a detailed study of the profession, there are many courses in the SMM field. A good course should include the most structured information on the profession, practical tasks and tools to achieve the goals.
After completing the training, the specialist must improve his skills by attending master classes and constantly searching for new information. The SMM market does not stand still. Audience preferences are rapidly changing, and social media algorithms are constantly evolving. Promotion methods that worked a year ago will not be relevant or ineffective in the present.
It is for this reason that you should not go to study a profession in universities. The SMM industry is changing so dynamically that long-term training programs become obsolete faster than they have time to fully mature.
The main tools of the profession
In addition to having skills in the SMM manager profession, knowledge of promotion and content creation tools will be required.
The main tools of an SMM specialist:
- Deferred Services posting and schedulers . A very necessary thing. It will give the opportunity to do “everything at once” and stretch in time. Many services show the account feed and help create a unified style, an especially important feature for Instagram profiles.
- Services for holding competitions . Various kinds of random number generators, selection of a random comment and creation of a separate list of participants with given conditions.
- Online design programs . The sms manager often needs to make an attractive picture or arrange a photo on the topic of the post. Knowledge of professional programs is welcome, but is not a direct responsibility of a specialist. Knowing the simplest online editors like Canva or Pixlr will help you create creative content, even from free templates.
- Services for Bulk Actions . Not the best method of promotion and practically useless in terms of the target audience. But sometimes it becomes necessary to gain a couple of hundred subscribers for the “solidity” of the page.
- Parsers for targeted advertising . Services help to select the most active target audience and find potential customers through direct and adjacent competitors.
- Link shorteners . The presence of long links makes the post look sloppy. A professional SMM specialist uses special services. Sites allow you to hide a huge link under one keyword and show statistics on the number of clicks.
- SMM analytics and statistics services . They help to find popular audience requests, select the most successful posts and collect activity statistics. The report consists of an analysis of the activity time of a given audience, the optimal text length and preferred content.
Also, to facilitate the work, you can use mutual like services , activity telegram chats and services for finding groups for mutual PR . There are a lot of options . Everything depends on the tasks.
Working with social networks
An SMM manager must be able to identify the initial target audience for each social network with which he works. This will help determine relevant material for publications.
Starting factors for determining the unique target audience of each social network :
- General information: gender, age, income, marital status. If the product has a wide application, the data may differ for each social network .
- How and where the target audience prefers to buy the product. For example, in Odnoklassniki, people tend to trust companies that have physical points of sale, but Instagram users calmly trust online businesses.
- inclined to the influence of fashion. Trends are not important for every consumer group, some prefer stability.
Each social network has its own algorithms and rules of work. Before promoting a product or service, it is worth determining the potential success with users.
How and where to find a job
SMM-specialists can choose the type of their employment. This profession does not apply to fully office work. You can find clients yourself and do business from literally anywhere in the world. However, when employed in large companies, specialists work in the SMM department. Employees in such organizations work according to a certain schedule and receive a fixed salary.
It is worth considering in more detail each of the options and determine the pros and cons.
1. Work in the office of the company
Work in the company will give a stable income, a normalized work schedule and the possibility of career growth. Large organizations, as a rule, are looking for a specialist in an already existing team. Most often, such vacancies appear on job search sites . The applicant is required to have a good portfolio and work experience. Large companies rely on full-time employment of their employees and long-term working relationships. Such organizations clearly understand the responsibilities of an SMM manager and do not overload employees with work. Small firms try to hire one or two people in the state and throw everything at them. You should be wary of vacancies without clear work tasks or when there are too many of them.
Approximate salary:
From $600 to $3000, depending on the company and position.
Pros of work:
- Opportunity for career growth and development of professional skills.
- Stable salary.
Cons of work:
- Work in the office strictly on time.
- Small companies can be overloaded with work.
2. Work in an SMM agency
A good start for newcomers to the profession. Work in specialized agencies is clearly distributed among employees. Any large order is carried out by a team, where each employee is responsible for a certain part of the task. The team consists of narrowly focused specialists, which excludes the possibility of communicating with customers for many technical-level employees.
Jobs should be searched both on agency websites and on public sites.
Approximate salary:
From $500 to $2000, rarely higher.
Pros of work:
- The agency is responsible for scheduling and distributing orders.
- Gives employees access to paid tools.
- The work schedule is negotiated separately with each specialist. There is a possibility of remote work.
Cons of work:
- The ceiling in the salary is not dependent on the value of the order.
- Large amount of work.
- You can not place individual orders in your portfolio . Typically, agencies allow you to specify the position and duration of work.
3. Freelance
Work on orders given. The specialist himself is looking for clients, agrees on the cost and terms of the order. A freelancer can fulfill both one-time orders and cooperate with clients on an ongoing basis.
You need to look for customers on freelance exchanges . These are the best places to find a job as an SMM manager. There are profile groups in social networks . There you can find suitable orders or publish advertisements.
Approximate salary:
From $300 to $3000. Depends on the availability of orders and the level of the specialist.
Pros of work:
- Free schedule and work from home.
- There is no salary cap.
- Possibility to choose customers.
Cons of work:
- You need good self-organization and the ability to plan your time.
- At first, you will have to work on a portfolio and take unprofitable orders.
Of course, these are not all options. If you have experience and start-up capital, you can open an agency yourself. Even large companies use the services of freelancers , and sometimes hire them to work remotely . There are a lot of job opportunities .
Qualification and work experience
Newcomers to the profession should work on the portfolio and improve their skills. Starting an expert blog is a good idea . Show your audience and potential customers your personal and professional growth. It is better to create a blog on free sites. For these purposes , WordPress is perfect . The platform offers a very simple and flexible management and analytics system. A portfolio on this site will show that the specialist knows how to work with CMS platforms.
A promoted blog on Instagram will show the expertise well . It can become the first project in the portfolio and at the same time the portfolio itself . Thanks to the Instagram blog, potential clients will have the opportunity to evaluate the professionalism and at the same time the personal qualities of a specialist.
When preparing a resume, it is worth specifying not only standard data. For the SMM manager, you must leave links to your projects. This is where having a blog comes in handy , in which a potential employer can study the qualifications of the applicant in more depth.
A qualified specialist should reflect the following skills in his resume or portfolio :
- Complete education, including all completed courses and trainings .
- Experience in creating and promoting content.
- Knowledge of social media . Expertise in promotion algorithms for different platforms.
- The ability to find creative solutions to problems and the ability to analyze the results.
- Good writing skills.
- Knowledge in the SEO field . Ability to use Google Analytics , Yandex Metrica and keywords.
- Receptiveness to new knowledge and technologies.
- Time management skills .
Pitfalls of the profession
SMM manager is a very broad concept. Often, customers and novice specialists want to cover everything at once, without understanding the specifics of the profession. By hiring a specialist, the customer can try to blame the employee not only for planning and analytics, but also for the direct generation of content completely. It must be remembered that all photo and video materials are provided by the customer by default. The SMM manager deals with content design, advertising settings and response analytics. Also, it is not uncommon for a specialist to be asked to do direct sales or accounting. In such cases, the boundaries of work should be clearly defined at the very beginning of cooperation.
Working with social networks involves communicating with people, whether they are clients of the promoted company or the customers themselves. It is important to learn how to properly conduct a dialogue with both. A polite attitude based on knowledge will help you avoid most troubles.
The main technical mistakes of novice SMM managers:
1. The pursuit of quantity, not quality.
Too fast entry into work and an active beginning often have a fatal effect. A common mistake for beginners is to actively post everything without a timely analysis of the audience’s response.
social media feed is turning into a big dump. Such actions lead to loss of money and zero result. The audience gets tired of the amount of information and starts to leave.
With a competent approach, any action of an SMM manager should be analyzed. What is the effect, is there a response from the audience, has the action attracted new subscribers, have the content been saved.
2. Lack of permanence of posts. Lack of planning.
The other extreme is the lack of regular posts.
The fear of doing something wrong makes the beginner analyze his every step. The promotion plan is subject to constant changes, which affects the regularity of actions. Subscribers get bored and leave.
To expand the audience and keep the existing one, you need to regularly remind yourself of yourself. Develop a content plan with a post release schedule. Over time, in the course of analyzing the response of the audience, there will be an understanding of what and how to publish for each specific order.
3. Too much trust in the automation of actions.
Do not use a large number of reposts from one social network to another. A novice SMM manager risks making his content non-unique.
If the same user is subscribed to the VK and Instagram public , then most likely he will unsubscribe from one of the pages. If the subscribers are different, then the material that is successful on Instagram will not necessarily be interesting on Facebook .
Each social network has its own unique audience. It is necessary to take into account both the age limits and the social status of users. Information needs to be presented to a specific target audience.
4. Frank cheating
Some people rate accounts by the number of likes , followers, and shares . Often the customer demands from the SMM manager exactly the quantity, not the quality.
The logic is simple – there are a lot of people, someone will buy something, and the page looks more solid this way. The task of the specialist is to explain that quantity is not equal to quality. Moreover, the wrapping is easily calculated. Most of these accounts are either commercial or bots.
The worst thing for any business or blog is to lose the trust of the audience. The reputation will be damaged, and it will not always be possible to restore it.
5. Content idealization
The vector for frankness and openness is still in trend. Do not idealize the promoted service, product or person too much.
There is a simple rule – not perfect, then your own.
If everything is clear with the promotion of personal accounts – photos without processing and honest stories, then with branded content is more difficult. You can’t show the flaws of a product or service, but you can tell honest stories about the workflow.
6. Ignoring the negative
Criticism can be constructive or not. Constructive criticism points out weaknesses and helps to improve. Thanks to this response, non-obvious flaws in products or content can be identified.
Destructive criticism most often does not carry a semantic load and is very offensive. But it’s good to work with her too. Responding to such comments can be a good way to increase engagement. The algorithms of social networks do not care what is written in the comments – the main thing is their number. Responding to malicious statements politely and to the point, you can raise the threshold of subscribers’ trust. This creates intimacy with the audience.
It is important to remember that experience is built on mistakes. A competent specialist takes into account the shortcomings of his work and turns them into advantages.
Conclusion
The SMM industry is growing at an incredibly fast pace. The specialist has to constantly monitor trends and new algorithms of social networks . An SMM manager is not a profession that can be learned in one day. Continuous professional development and self-education are an integral part of it.