4 Key Traits Your Social Media Manager Should Exemplify
Social media possess the great ability of turning doubting individuals to believers of an idea or product.
About 81% of up-and-coming businesses, particularly small and medium-sized ones, reap the benefits of catering their products and services to a wide array of diverse individuals, as per a research published by LinkedIn in 2014.
The research has yielded desirable results acquired from companies experiencing tremendous growth throughout the years past 2014, which are the following:
- 91% said social media aided their business in building awareness of their products and services.
- 82% agreed that social media helped them get new customers across the global platform.
Small businesses today utilize hiring social media managers to either help them lighten the workload or pass the entire job.
Thinking of hiring a social media manager to do the marketing job for you via social media?
The Top 4 Must-Have Traits of a Great Social Media Manager
Here are the five key attributes you should look for someone who wants to take care of your ‘online business kingdom’ for you.
Trait #1: Must be savvy with the visuals
This skill is a necessity and CANNOT BE COMPROMISED.
Largely owing to the fact that people, in general, have their distinctive ways of learning your products best, having potent customers read your lengthy, onerous, and plain product descriptions may not cut it at times.
Michelle Reynolds, renowned business writer and publisher of the newsletter “Working Parents Monthly,” stated that “visual merchandising taps into human emotion.”
Your social media manager must be able to bank on these emotions and unleash these to have a great chance of having your end product or idea being patronized.
A shoo-in skill would include the ability to produce consistent influx of high-quality, original images. The person in charge should also be creative enough in producing unorthodox, interactive pictures and graphics.
Here are some good visual content creation tools your trusted guy must be familiar with:
- PhotoGrid – Highly used in Instagram, this platform allows people to improve backgrounds, add texts, and import shaped photos other than the standard square to make creative collages that drive a particular set of actions, especially for small businesses.
- Canva – This tool has lots of standardized and innovative templates for professional or business use.
- Made with Over – Over allows visual content makers to discover their creative and artistic side with its flexible designs and features.
- Designspiration – The wide variety of designs available for each color palette is great, enabling designers to tailor-fit it with their business purpose.
- QuotesCover – For a small business thriving in selling a particular concept or idea, utilizing this tool helps emphasize the need to buy your concept through unique quotes and passages packaged in inventive designs.
Trait#2: They don’t just write content, but reaches out
The ability to empathize, by making your customers feel that their needs are also being encountered first-hand by your campaigner, is key in business.
While good writing skills are undeniably needed, he must also demonstrate characteristics of putting the customer first – inspiring content, sensitivity to cultural and gender taboos, sense of social responsibility, and etc.
Needless to say, queries of customers must be answered by your ‘chosen one’ not only by incorporating your product’s technicality, but also by considering human factor.
Here are 6 of the 100 ideas laid out by Forbes, internationally acclaimed business magazine, to have killer social media content:
- Quotes: Humorous, inspiring or motivational quotes always perform well.
- Fill-in-the-blank posts(e.g. “If I had $1 million I would _________”)
- Ask for input on your products:Your followers will love giving their thoughts on how to improve your products.
- Share a helpful resource:If you’re truly concerned about sharing the most useful info with your followers, don’t be afraid to direct them to other people’s valuable content (not just your own).
- Recommend a tool:Share a (preferably free) tool or resource you think your followers would find useful.
- A day in the life post:Give a recap of a typical day in the life of a graphic designer, author, CEO, etc.
To end this particular discussion about making your written content people-based instead of company-focused, I will leave you with an insightful thought crafted by Digital Transformation.
If it takes you years to create a bad-looking, company-centric, outdated application, while startups adapt to customer-centric market needs in a matter of weeks or months, you can guess who will win this race.”
Trait: 3 Hustles, and runs the ‘extra mile’
A digital strategies consulting company, Duval Union Consulting, left a very insightful yet realistic kind of thinking.
How do you make the best kind of impression? A large part of it is about putting in the extra effort.
Your aspiring social media manager or entity must be willing to engage in activities that most campaigners today will refrain from doing, because they thought they did enough.
These hustle tasks could range from a number of examples: replying to conversational posts, ensuring thrown links are not spams but genuine ones, making timely posts, taking advantage of events and seasons, and etc.
Small increments mentioned above are some of the ways customers will perceive your business as special in terms of making valuable customer experience online.
Whether it’s rendering overtime to meet strict deadlines or staying awake just to make sure that international customers from different time zones are well-informed about your commercial promos are bonus attributes of ‘gem among the stones’ type of online ambassadors.
Trait #4: Puts SEO and content marketing at heart
Making inviting visuals, unique written content, and hustling will only go to waste without a solid foundation of SEO and content marketing strategies.
The person in-charge should know the utmost importance of creating relevant blogs and content in improving search rankings, producing content amenable to readers across the diverse online world, and currently accepted ethical guidelines with SEO (white and black hat SEO).
Importance of understanding the correlation between exposure online and increased search rankings is non-discountable because of the humongous amount of increasing users of search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etc.
The Pew Research Center’s article about demographic trends in search engines revealed the following:
Since the table shows “% of each group who ever use search engines”, this includes other incidental people that may also patronize your product for an added profit – students, college undergraduates, government bodies, pastoral officers, and other people whom you least expect to make a purchase.
The Catch with Hiring a Social Media Manager
The person you entrusted with your blogging, online advertising and writing chores for your small or medium-sized business must exemplify the aforementioned traits.
These traits could be acquired and honed by different methodologies in learning – training certifications, related work experience, or just from how he values sustainable excellence for the nature of his job.
Social media is being bombarded everyday by tons of products and services that could be your direct or indirect competitors; hence, the need to be unique, customer-focused, and efficient.
Let me leave you a quote from the late, great Steve Jobs in his interview with BusinessWeek on May 25, 1998:
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
