What does a social media manager do?

Growing up in Germany my teachers always talked to us different career paths. There were certain jobs that were considered especially great, for example becoming a doctor, lawyer or teacher. However nobody talked to me about the possibility of working for myself, as a digital nomad, let alone speak of a Social Media Manager.

As you can imagine that is mainly due to the big growth social networking had in just the last 5 years. My teachers did not grow up with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter. Because a career in the social media world is relatively new you might now know what kind of things an actual social media manager does. Therefore I have listed some of my daily, weekly and monthly tasks so you can get a better understanding of the job itself, but also of what I can do for your business.

Social Media Manager tasks

• Social media strategies

• Content Creation

• Market and Trend research

• Community Management

• Engagement

• Entrepreneurship

Social media strategies

Posting on Social Media without a strategy is like growing a plant with no water. A social media manager creates a strategy for every new client. This is the guideline for all continued work and helps reaching marketing goals. It’s important to mention that a strategy also needs updating and evolving according to new insights.

Content Creation

This part might be the biggest part, so lets break it down into: content planning, creation and scheduling.

Before content is created it needs to be planned. For the month ahead we plan what content will be created and when it will be posted. This includes keeping up with current social media trends and knowing what will work and what will not. It’s important to keep holidays and important events in mind to know when it’s a good or not good time to post.

Once we know what content our clients need we will create it. Because we are not always in the same location as our clients we don’t usually take photos or videos. These are provided by the client. But we can create graphics, memes, edit photos and videos. We always let our clients know what exact content we need. Another part of content creation is to write captions for all social media posts.

After writing the captions and having the visual content a social media manager uses certain tools and systems to schedule the content for the next month. This way a social media manager does not have to post every day, but can focus on community management. However, some content, such as photos can be scheduled, but some content, such as reels, can not.

Market and Trend research

It’s not secret that social media consistently changes. Platforms launch new features, algorithm’s change consistently, new viral trends pop up and its your social media managers job to stay up to date and adapt your social media strategy according to the new changes.

Community Management

On a daily basis a social media manager logs into your accounts and answers comments and messages. This is extremely important to build authentic relationships with your community.

Engagement

If you go one step further from community management and interact with new people it’s called engagement. Now the social media manager is actively reaching out to your target audience by commenting, sharing, texting, and liking their posts. Engagement is very time-consuming but very important to bring new people to your community. Genuine connections are more important than just trying to gain another follower!

Entrepreneurship

At younitesocial we don’t just work with our clients and our own social media accounts. But we are an active agency and have a lot of admin tasks on our to-do list that keep the company running.

What task surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments and take a look at our services to figure out what we can do for you.