I recently made a video about my career
in social media marketing, and one of the comments on
it was from Little Miss Eden 100. And she was asking how to decide between a career in SMM or PPC. What a question. I know what PPC stands for. It stands for pay per click, and that's something that we would use
when we're describing the auction on Google Search, where those ads thoughts
are on the search results page, otherwise known as the SERP search
engine results page. And there are various
ad slots that your ad can register in depending
on your positioning in the auction.
Because you're paying for the click,
you are buying clicks. However, there is another acronym
in this question, which is as simple as SMS can mean basically
one of two different fields. The first is social media marketing, and then the other one
is going to be social media management. You could also have a different
s in there, perhaps like instead of social saying,
search like search, marketing, management,
but you don't really see that. And usually what you would see is if it was referring
to your social media marketing, it would be SMS
or CRM would be the dichotomy presented because one is based off
of the search platforms in the other, one is based off
of these social platforms.
I'm going to be talking a little bit about the landscape,
the types of skills associated with both. And then I'm going to provide
a little bit context of my career. And then I'm going to make
some recommendations. The difference between social media
marketing and social media management. This is the difference
between a technical skill and a soft
skill in social media management. You're coming up with content calendar,
you're doing research on the marketplace, you're seeing what your competitors are doing on their social media,
you're evaluating trends and you may be directing somebody
who is a creative to create content or you yourself may be taking the photos, writing the captions,
doing the hashtag research. It's more about a longform strategy and planning of a social media account. Is social media manager at a company
will likely handle all of their social media
so that the company's Facebook, the company's Instagram, their Pinterest,
their LinkedIn, all of that will fall underneath their purview.
And it's possible that underneath
this person would be a social media marketer and social media
marketer is going to be somebody who is doing technical skill
of creating the ad campaigns, optimizing the ad campaigns, deploying them,
analyzing and then reporting on them. So much like the social media manager, the social media marketer
could either be embedded in a company or it can be an agency who is assigned
to a portfolio of companies. Somebody who is a social media marketer would have certifications
in the different platforms, right? They would have Facebook blueprint,
they would have done Twitter Flight School, they would have LinkedIn
courses under their belt. They would know how to activate
on a variety of platforms and know the technical skills
in order to optimize and analyze the performance on those accounts.
They also may know some of the more
technical aspects regarding first party tracking, developing audiences and then managing pixels and partner permissions and tracking. A social media marketer is mainly working
in the domain of paid media. They are putting money behind campaigns. They are using the business tools
and Facebook manager through the business manager
to promote posts. Meanwhile,
a social media manager is mostly conscious about the organic process, and if this person is in charge
in managing the social media marketer, then they are aware of both organic
and paid realms. But if they are not the same person
and if they're not fully connected in that way and instead
they are parallel to one another, then the social media manager
would be in charge of organic while the social media marketer
would be in charge of paid. We call it organic because it's not incentivizing the algorithm
to provide the content. We are only presenting the content
organically. We are not promoting it or not
boosting it. We're not adding any fuel to the fire. We're just seeing how the post behaves
without added money. Meanwhile, PPC is something that usually
runs in parallel to social media campaigns because it is a little bit more technical
the process it tends to fall under the responsibility
of whoever is running the website.
It's not unusual to see a search engine. Optimization and search engine marketing
being managed by the same person. Theoretically,
they fill a very similar position to social media marketing,
so theoretically they should both be underneath the marketing umbrella
in an organization. It's not unusual to see it in
more of a website technology capacity
than a marketing capacity. I would argue that a search engine
marketer should be on the marketing team and should work in parallel lockstep
with the social media team, something that wasn't asked that
I'm just going to throw in for the flavor. You know, the variety of coverage. Is that a PPC purchaser? Somebody who's working in
these search platforms may also fall into the discipline of display
and programmatic buying.
So those are tactics in digital marketing
you'd think of like banner advertisements or like little videos
that play on news articles. Those types of elements can be purchased through the same platforms and techniques that are very closely
related to search engine marketing. Search engine marketing and social media
marketing are very similar. I say this as a person
who has had extensive experience in both fields,
which I don't know if it's typical or not. I was kind of thrust into it in a place where I didn't see
people around me doing the same thing. I had an opportunity where I had been
working in search engine marketing for two years and I was activating across
all of the search platforms. So that was those Google that was being. That was Yahoo, Yahoo. Gemini being ads. Google Ads. And then I'd also dabbled in Amazon. At that point, selling some gift cards
through their product listings plays product listing ads. So I had experience doing that
and then the entire social media marketing department at my company left. They all left over the span of two months
and there were vacancies and I raised my hand.
I said I would really like
to learn social media marketing. So I learned the technical side of social media marketing,
and I found that my skills from search engine
marketing were directly transferable. You know, I was up and running
within a day in Facebook ads. I had also used
Facebook ads a little bit on the side for just like clubs
and whatever in college, but it was pretty easy
to learn social media marketing from first learning
search engine marketing. Part of my job that I did not develop
until later was more of these social media management
aspect. Because it is wildly different,
then social media marketing. It is absolutely more of a planning skill, and I find myself more in the position where I'm managing people who are doing both the marketing
and then the planning.
I'm a firm believer that once you learn
search engine marketing, it's a lot easier to then
pick up social media marketing and that search engine
marketing is just a lot quirkier. There's a lot more nuance going on, too. It's very technical. It's a lot of spreadsheets,
not a lot of pretty pictures. And the Google Ads interface is not as pretty as the Facebook
business manager interface. It is. It's very data driven, and the majority
of your volume of the data that you're crunching is going to come
from a minority of your assets. So there's really a lot of curiosity and interest that goes into search
engine marketing. I definitely recommend it to anyone
who wants to get into digital marketing because it is in such demand
and it will always be in demand. I'm still pretty firm behind saying that search engine
marketing is not going away anytime soon. And then there's the added layer that
through Google ads and search platforms, you could also manage display
and then you have the tie in of Google Analytics that you can dabble in
if you're interested.
And then you also have the opportunity
to learn programmatic programmatic is the most lucrative
of these search engine tactics, and I personally have not dabbled in it,
and I am incredibly, incredibly skeptical of it lucrative
because it is a bubble and it's a bubble that's been growing for,
like the last decade, and I'm very curious about it . I have some books to recommend, and this is going to be my first book
recommendation of the day. Which of these sub-prime
attention crisis by Tim? And I really enjoyed this book. This is kind of my guiding light in now
evaluating programmatic campaigns because I'm
in a position where I'm dictating or providing feedback on allocation
between different types of advertising
and whenever programmatic comes up. I'm just very skeptical. It is lucrative if you are entering
the digital marketing industry, and I recommend checking it out,
getting familiar.
When we say pay per click,
it does exclude programmatic and display because those are bought on an impression
basis. An impression
is whenever an ad loads on a page, and that impression is sold
on a per thousand basis. So the acronym is CPM cost per mile. And so when we're talking about Hulu ads
or we're talking about banner ads, we're going to be talking about CPMs
and it's ironically what YouTube is sold on. I struggled to wrap my head around
exactly how the algorithm works because YouTube and Google
take the majority of the money and the way that they report the CPM
back to the creators is just a bizarre scenario, and I'm always
struggling to understand it.
With my experience
and search engine marketing, I've never found myself in a position
where I couldn't find work. I've turned down job offers. I feel very secure with my. Also, because of that foundation
and search engine marketing, then we add on or go to social media
marketing, social media marketing is an in-demand skill,
and if you want to make it as an entrepreneur, then
having the background of search and social or just social media marketing under
your belt is very useful.
You'll always find small business owners
or even large businesses in your neighborhood
that are interested in working with you. There's no shortage of people
looking for social media marketers the ability to make ads run in Facebook, business manager
or Pinterest or LinkedIn or Twitter. Very attractive skill set in general. I think that it's incredibly useful if you have a more diverse skill skillset like the ability
to also copyright or photography, or if you have a deep understanding
of Google Analytics or website design. I think that social media marketing
in general requires more understanding of the landscape
in order for it to work on its own. I think search engine marketing is something that could stand on its own
just fine and that you won't have any trouble
finding work.
But I think that with social media
marketing, you have to have other feathers in your cap like like an in-depth
understanding of different platforms. If you only know
Facebook business manager, it's not going to be
a very marketable skill. But the more platforms
you have familiarity with and the more skills you have. I think the easier it will be to get hired and then social media management. This is definitely more of a soft skill,
and it really depends on what type of businesses
exist in your area. There are people who only do social media management,
but they tend to be at larger companies and it's a position
where you'll have to manage other people if you cannot do social media marketing.
I think that you're much more likely
to get picked up as a social media manager
coming up with plans and content strategy. If you do have the technical skills behind
social media marketing and it's much easier to get hired
as a social media manager if you can do social media marketing
and you have experience in the field. I recently made a career move
where I stepped out of the platforms.
So as part of my day to day
responsibilities at work, I'm no longer activating campaigns either
search or social. I have now moved to a position where I am a liaison from the company
I work for, and those people and I make sure that the strategy is sound
and I dictate the strategy or I give recommendations on directions and then they activate on my behalf.
And part of that position is that
I also work with social media managers who come up with a plan and strategy,
and I give feedback on like, Hey, I think that's a good idea or
are you paying attention to this or not? And ultimately give a final yes or final
no about strategy in both the marketing and the management? I did that
because I'm pretty skeptical of Facebook. I'm not crazy about Mark Zuckerberg
or Sheryl Sandberg and the direction
that that organization is going, and I didn't want to be beholden to that
for the rest of my career, which is why
I'm getting a MBA in marketing so I can kind of broad in my field
a little bit so that I'm not beholden to the decisions of one lizard man. I have a couple of book recommendations. If you're curious about the landscape
or just basically getting your feet wet in the terminology,
a little bit more. The first is Sub Prime
Attention Crisis by Tim Wong. And it talks about the programmatic bubble, programmatic advertising bubble.
And it's really
it has informed my strategy and the way
that I think of digital marketing. This came out this year, 2021,
and it is just a wonderful book. I could not stop reading it. I bought a copy
that tells you anything about it. When we talk
about social media management, this book right here is ancient. It is social nomics, and this is much more of
like a social strategy book. It's more about coming up
with planning and concepts and defining how you interact
with your audience, how you decide to interact
with that, audiences entire network, and emboldening your audience
to being advocates for your brand. This is ancient. I got it in college. I love this book. It's by Eric Quammen,
and it's just I love it. I mean, you probably see fingerprints
of it all over my YouTube channel because. It really dictated so much of my early
relationship with social media. And then this next one
is called paid attention, and it is by Faris, Yakub and Faris
and his wife Rosie run a Slack Group, a mastermind group called School of Stolen Genius. And I really love
basically their concepts.
Their approach
to digital media and digital marketing. And that it would be more
about the planning side of things, but then also strategic planning. A huge, huge advocate
of the scores of stolen genius. Now I'm going to stop burying the lead and
I'm going to tell you what I want to do, so I am incredibly biased towards search
engine marketing because it has a lot of technical skills
that once you wrap your mind around, make learning social media
marketing much easier. In an ideal world, you would learn both
and you will learn them hand in hand. And I don't understand
why colleges don't do this.
Maybe they do.
Maybe they're getting into it now. But I do believe that a good way to get
started is to get those Google search
ad certifications under your belt and then sit down
and watch a couple of hours of Facebook blueprint videos
and then try running some campaigns . You know, throw $100 into each. Let it run for two months. And congratulations, you should know a lot
back then because that's a lot of money. But also,
I think that they make a great foundation. That's just for people who really like
spreadsheets and algorithms. You don't have to be good at math. You just have to like numbers,
which is me. Not not great at math. Didn't take a single math class
in college, but I love numbers. I love data. I love algorithms. I love logic thinking. So for me, it was a huge fit. I could spend all day in spreadsheets
instead of meetings with people, and I would be happy if you are the reverse,
if you say numbers intimidate me. I want people show me people. If you would rather work with people instead of numbers
in social media, management is for you.
And that's coming up the planning
that's doing the strategy, the research that is your bag
because you're going to have to be working with people in order to make it work. That one, you know, is going to rely
a lot more on your soft skills. That's my recommendation there. If one of those speaks to you
more than follow that, you are able to make a career that hits
all of them.
That's what I did,
and I'm pretty happy with that career. But if you're starting out,
I would say focus on the PPC skills. The cost per skills. The activation skills. Do you guys want to see something kick? Oh..