What Does a Social Media Manager Do?

If you have a business, club, organisation or skill you need to promote – ignore social media at your peril!

While you may not particularly enjoy the use of social media yourself, it is an incredibly powerful forum for professional promotion to engage with followers, clients and potential members. Many businesses and individuals no longer rely solely on websites to have an online presence, as their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr accounts also help them reach out to the people interested in them.

While social media provides us with a greater opportunity to be connected than ever before – it is time consuming.  Hours and hours of your week can be spent creating posts and interacting with the people who like and comment. 

Many large companies will have a full-time person or team just to manage social media.  But if you have a small home business or a full professional life, you  may not have the personnel or the time to deal with this yourself.  This is where the services of a social media manager such as myself can be helpful.

So what does a social media manager do? We maintain any or all of your social media sites.  We take care of the day-to-day minutia of populating and responding to these, allowing you to focus on the core business that made you successful in the first place.

When I first begin working in this capacity, I sit down with the client to discuss the tone and voice of the brand.  How do you want to appear to the world?  Is it a serious brand, or fun-loving and friendly? As a professional writer, I can create all kinds of personas.  We then discuss the regularity and types of posts you are looking for. My industry knowledge helps me to make recommendations about the timing and frequency of posts, as well as the subject matter.  There are clear formulas for successful posts for each type of social media – and I can assist you to ensure you address these.

I assist you to interact with the people who are liking and commenting on your posts, presenting you with regular reports on the activities of your pages.  I monitor the types of posts that receive the most positive feedback and work to ensure future posts reflect this success.

Regular discussion with the client helps me to ensure my understanding of the brand and it’s current key concerns are up-to-date.  Although I do the day-to-day management of these sites, we remain a team, and the client makes the ultimate decisions about their online presence.  I simply facilitate this.

Exploring the opportunities for social media is an exciting journey – one I would be happy to assist you with.

This blog post first appeared on www.mypersonalblogger.com.au.