Written by Rachael Samuels | Published on March 26, 2021 | Reading time 13 minutes
A social media manager can be a marketer, a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, an analyst and a customer service rep—sometimes all in one day. As someone who loves a challenge, that variety is one of the things that first drew me to working in social.
Managing all of these diverse responsibilities requires social media managers to develop a number of crucial marketing and marketing-adjacent social media skills. An effective social media pro brings both hard skills and soft skills to the table, both types which take time and effort to develop. Hard skills like data analysis and copywriting can be more easily studied and trained, whereas soft skills like being organized and making connections may be more difficult to learn, but are just as important.
One of the most rewarding and challenging things about working in social is that you’re never done learning. You have to constantly refine and develop all nine of the social media skills below to continue advancing in your career. The more you focus on cultivating these skills, the more you’ll be able to drive results, realize true business impact and level up your own abilities as a social pro.
1. Communication
At its core, social media is a communication platform—so as a social media professional, it’s important to have strong communication skills that can flex to fit any platform, media, character count or audience.
In a given day, I’m often switching between communicating with customers in the Sprout Inbox, meeting with our product team to share feedback, writing a brief to kick off a creative project or compiling a social listening analysis to share with leadership. I have to be able to communicate ideas to a wide range of stakeholders in both my own voice and in Sprout’s.
Communicating on social
As the voice of your brand for customers on social, you have to be able to drop what you’re doing at a moment’s notice to hop on a trending topic or handle a disgruntled customer complaint. And you aren’t only communicating in writing; you’re also using emojis, video, GIFs, pictures, stickers and anything else at your disposal to get your message across in a clear and engaging way.
Communicating with your boss & team
Internally, you also have to be able to effectively communicate with your boss, peers and collaborators across teams. It’s particularly important that you can speak to any internal stakeholder about your social media strategy, content distribution plan and impact of your work. The ability to explain how your work on social moves the business forward is one of the most important skills any social media professional can develop.
Last but not least, strong communication skills are key to developing internal education and training. While your social media team might lead the charge for your company’s social media marketing efforts, you can also work to train people from departments like customer support, sales and creative to support—and use—social in their own roles.
2. Writing
While there are many skills that can help get your message across on social, the core of communication always comes back to the written word.
The best social media managers are excellent copywriters and sparkling digital conversationalists who not only embody, but enhance, their brand’s voice on social. From attention-grabbing ad copy to witty social banter, you should know how to write concise copy that elicits emotion from your audience. Makeup brand Il Makiage does a fantastic job of this, pairing cheeky captions with their colorful, highly saturated images to tell a story and connect with their pop culture-savvy audience.
Effective writers also know how to tailor their writing for different audiences and platforms. For example, while you can use up to 2,200 characters in your Instagram captions, data has shown that the most engaging length for Instagram captions is between 138–150 characters.
While writing is an important social media skill for creating engaging content and conversations, it’s also important for your career. If you’re asked to contribute to your company’s blog, provide executives with insight into your strategy or make the case for increasing your social media budget, there will likely be writing involved. The ability to articulate yourself in clear, well-reasoned emails, strategies and presentations will help your ideas make an impression.
3. Creativity
Differentiation is one of the biggest challenges for brands in the saturated social media space. Every social media manager wants to create content that’s exciting, valuable and buzz-worthy, but it takes creativity to come up with ideas that stand out.
When it comes to social media skills, creativity is particularly versatile. Creativity helps social media managers:
Develop innovative, risk-taking social campaigns
Create visually appealing, multimedia content
Consider every aesthetic detail of a social post, from images to links to formatting of copy
Lead productive brainstorms that bring out their teammates’ best ideas
Hone and expand their brand’s voice and persona
On par with being creative is having a sense of humor and ability to improvise in any given situation. One of my favorite creative moments was when our video team spotted a punny holiday Tweet from our partners at Zendesk…and knowing we had a skeleton of our own, we jumped into action to reply in kind:
Our partners, audience and internal team had a lot of fun with this exchange of witty bone mots (get it?!), and it also helped our video and social teams pioneer a process for quickly executing on timely, creative social content ideas in the future.
4. Efficiency & top-notch organization
You can’t manage a social media strategy without managing your time wisely, making efficiency and organization two necessary social media skills.
As a social media manager, not only do you have to conceptualize campaigns and distribution rhythms, but you have to lead and execute these plans from start to finish. To do this at scale, a skilled social pro will implement tools, policies and processes for their social presence to keep all of the moving pieces straight. Using a social media calendar is one of the best ways to keep content organized and plan ahead.
5. Traditional & digital marketing
If you see your role as one focused on accomplishing social goals, I want to challenge you to think bigger. Social sits at the intersection of marketing, customer experience and sales and is the source of so much valuable business intelligence.
Yet despite the multidisciplinary nature of social, 47% of social marketers say developing social strategies that support overall business goals is their number one challenge. Your ability to connect your social strategy to larger marketing and business goals is what will take your career to the next level.
To create a social strategy with business impact, it’s important to build an understanding of other traditional and digital marketing approaches: email, events, lead generation, PR and more. This knowledge will help you position social within the larger context of how your brand connects with its customers, drives sales and ultimately generates revenue.
6. Customer care
Customer care is a social media skill that combines customer service, people skills and an eye for uncovering opportunities. Developing a social customer care strategy is an integral part of being a social media manager.
According to the latest Sprout Social Index™, 33% of consumers prefer to reach out to brands on social media with a customer service issue or question. Not only do you have to listen to and understand the concerns, demands and even praise of current customers, but you also have to be proactive about what future customers might say. It’s equally important to be able to read a DM and identify the “why” behind what a customer is upset about, as it is to be able to find a clever way to surprise and delight a long-time fan.
For instance, women’s clothing and accessories brand ban.do constantly celebrates their customers. When one of their repeat customers shared a product suggestion on Twitter, ban.do quickly replied to let their customer know their feedback had been heard and shared with the team.
As a social media manager, you are your brand’s biggest champion. Understanding customer care enables you to make a positive impact in the hearts and minds of your community. Personalizing your interactions by referencing conversation history can help take an everyday interaction and turn it into an extra special moment.
7. Making connections
One of the core tenets of social media is being inherently social. This means that establishing and building digital relationships is still a core aspect of any social media manager’s approach.
Our research has found that 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them on social. When they feel connected to a brand, 57% of people will increase their spending with that brand and 76% will choose that brand over a competitor. There are always new connections to be made on social, and the best social pros are proactive and creative when it comes to building them.
That said, everyone has a different comfort and skill level when it comes to connection and engagement. As a social media manager, get comfortable experimenting, honing your brand voice and understanding the landscape of how playful or risk-taking you can be. What worked for Wendy’s in their now-legendary #NuggsForCarter exchange isn’t going to work for every brand, and that’s ok.
As valuable as 1:1 connections are, these everyday interactions also provide the answer to one of social marketers’ greatest challenges. Our 2019 Sprout Social Index found that social practitioners’ top challenge is identifying and understanding their target audience.
As a social media manager, your quantitative audience insights as well as anecdotal experiences of connecting with your followers give you an invaluable understanding of what your audience wants and needs.
8. Agility
As we all know, the social landscape moves fast and even the best laid plans can quickly become irrelevant.
The ability to quickly pivot and react to a new trend, opportunity or crisis is an indispensable social media skill. In the everyday, being agile and flexible can help you decisively respond to a frustrated customer (or an appreciative superfan) in equally empathetic and personalized ways.
It’s also important to be agile when it comes to your long-term strategy. Social strategies have to be as dynamic and flexible as the platforms they rely on. As a social media manager, it’s important to experiment with different tactics, or even shake up your strategy entirely, to adapt to new trends, to incorporate business changes or to bounce back from subpar results.
Learning from your data, listening to feedback (customer and internal) and keeping a pulse on social trends can all make you a more agile social media manager.
9. Data analysis
We’re all familiar with end-of-month reporting, but skillful social media managers are looking at data and turning it into action more regularly than once a month.
Understanding both quantitative & qualitative data
Those of us who have been working in social for awhile might be wary of qualitative data—back in the wild west days of social, it was so crucial to be able to present accurate, quantitative data to provide the value of your efforts that qualitative data was often pushed to the side.
Today, with the growing importance of social listening, it’s important to develop both quantitative and qualitative data analysis skills in order to understand the full picture and performance of social.
Communicating your insights to stakeholders
Reporting on social performance is a good first step, but analysis means looking at your data and being able to identify trends, develop recommendations and communicate a plan of action. Analysis gives you something solid and valuable to bring to your boss, your collaborators and even other departments.
For example, one of our goals this year was to increase the amount of social impressions and engagements driven by our content. We saw what content resonated with our audience, but we wanted to explore different media types and channels to see what was most successful for each of these metrics.
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