While the role of a Social Media Manager may appear glamorous, there’s a wealth of misconceptions about the job. Before delving into a career in Social Media Management or Marketing, it’s crucial to understand the daily tasks and skills required for success.

The weekly routine of a Social Media Manager

Monitor trends and updates

As a Social Media Manager, safeguarding the digital reputation of your company is paramount. Staying creative and attuned to trends ensures your content resonates with the real world.

You will dedicate time weekly to monitor social media trends and industry news. Here are some effective tactics:

  • Subscribe to expert newsletters within your industry.
  • Utilize social media management tools to monitor hashtags, competitors, and partners’ content.
  • Regularly engage on social media platforms.

Set up an editorial content calendar

To streamline content creation and plan your weekly content, you may find it useful to establish a theme for each day of the week. While flexibility is necessary, setting weekly themes guides your content creation process. Begin the week by planning, allowing for necessary improvisation.

Prepare your content

Once you’ve selected the kind of content you want to publish, you need to dedicate some time to preparing it. You’ll need to adapt visuals, copy, and formatting to suit each social media platform. Tailoring content ensures optimal engagement.

Partnerships with influencers

Depending on the industry or the product or service you’re promoting you will find it useful to identify and collaborate with influencers to enhance your brand’s visibility and credibility.

Meet the internal teams

You will spend time engaging in regular meetings with various teams—such as clients, legal, customer success, product, and sales—for briefings and validation. Effective communication is key to success.

Analytics

Contrary to the misconception that Social Media Management is solely about creativity, regular analysis of content performance is essential. Monthly or quarterly, you will delve into analytics to understand what worked and what didn’t. Hootsuite and other Social Media Management tools offer comprehensive reports. Familiarize yourself with platform-specific metrics for a holistic understanding.

The must-have skills to develop to become a professional Social Media Manager

Let’s now have a look at a few key skills you should have to be good at Social media management

  • Quick and organized: social media is about establishing a regular presence online so that your audience is always in touch with your content. Social media posts are published almost daily. This means that you need to produce several pieces of digital content and make sure to publish it on the relevant day and time of the week. 
  • Adaptability: last-minute changes on the content calendar communications happen quite often. If the situation requires it you’ll need to be able to be ready to produce social media assets for last-minute communication. It may be about a PR that is finally been approved, a major decision regarding the company made by the CEO that must be covered on social media, a long piece the content team has been working on for a long time and that is finally ready, or a crisis communication.
  • Proficient writing skills: you need to be able to write appealing and catching copies for your social media posts. Of course, it will be different from writing a blog article. There are some techniques you can apply to your social copy to make sure your audience is clicking on them. 
  • An eye for design: A good sense of design is beneficial, although you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer. Depending on the company, collaboration with a graphic designer may be possible. However, possessing an aesthetic sense aids in making informed decisions and managing graphic designers effectively.