What Does a Social Media Manager ACTUALLY Do? Social Media Management for Beginners

Hey there, Latasha here. I started my freelance social media
management business sometime around 2014. It all stemmed from a job posted
actually ended up being on Upwork. It was a blog grading gig, and over
time it turned into a freelance social media copywriting position. Couple years go by a couple of day
jobs get acquired and that little hustle is a full fledged side hustle. So I left, I took the leap
and started my own business. Since leaving my day job, I've
been able to double revenue in that business year, over year consistently. And I get to do a lot of really cool
things now, like speaking and educating and focusing more on some of the fun
things like creative video and strategy. So I wanted to start this series for
those of you who are looking to get started as a social media manager and
have big dreams for your online business.

Over this next week, I'll be
uploading a new video, both on Wednesday and on Friday. And I'll be adding to this
series over time as well. So be sure to turn the
notifications on, to tune into this free course content today. We're going to answer the question, what
a social media manager actually even does. Thanks. So I've gotta be honest. This job title has changed. So much over the years, these
social media management role can vary from company to company. So my best advice is to write down a
list of dream clients or dream jobs that you're looking to get and stalk
them a little bit on LinkedIn, look at their job postings and see what they
define as a social media manager and what some of the tools, technologies,
and skills you may need to have.

For those, that dream roles. But for this video, I want to
give an overview of the work that I've done in my career. And that really starts with strategy
is social media manager needs to be able to help develop a social
media strategy for a business. And this is true, whether you're working
as an entrepreneur, as a freelance. Or as an in-house social media manager. Yes. You're responsible for publishing the
content across different social platforms. But in order to do that, you
need to know which platforms you need to be on in the first place. For example, a tech company may
be a little bit more focused on a platform like LinkedIn and Twitter,
as opposed to a cosmetics company, which may do a little bit better
connecting with their audience on a platform like Instagram, or even today. That's one of the questions that a
social media strategy should answer is which platforms should we be on.

But you also need to know who you're
talking to, which is incredibly important. This is something that you can ask
your client for, or your job before. Do they have an ideal customer
avatar or a buyer persona drawn up? Meaning do they know the ideal
person that they're looking to reach with their products or service? If not, I'll leave a couple of
resources for you down below. I invited a persona and customer
avatars, a social media strategy should also tell you the types of
content that you're going to post. You should have some type of a map. If we say that we're
going to post on LinkedIn. Well, there are a ton of different content
types that I could publish on there. I could write LinkedIn articles.

I could post photos, I could post
live videos or regular videos. I could post text posts. I could engage with people via. There are so many options
just on one platform. So mapping out the types of content
that you will engage in and which topics will be included in that content. I like to use what I call content pillars
in general, a brand shouldn't have any more than two to three key content. And I'll give you an example of this. Let's say that I'm
working with a taco stand. They want to be known for their
premium organic ingredients. They're not like your average taco stand. They offer vegan options and farm to
table vegetables and things like that. So for that taco company, I'm probably
going to establish one of their pillars or main themes that they use as organic food. I might talk about why organic food. Arguably better for you and
why their customers should care that their food is organic. Now I may also focus on
the physical location. Let's say that they are in Dallas, Texas.

So I'm going to share
happenings around Dallas. I'm going to support other
local business owners. And engage with local
influencers and the community. And lastly, maybe the owner has
a passion project, if you will. And they have a charity element
to their business, they give a few cents off of every taco that sold
to an environmental awareness fund. So I'm also going to talk about. The mission of the company and
saving the environment and how eating clean and organic and vegan
can help minimize our impact. So that's just one example, and
it's not to say that we couldn't ever post about anything else. We might occasionally post employee
snapshots and share our employees and our team working in a little
bit about them, but it's not going to be one of those main pillars.

The main message that
we want to get through. On our social profiles. Now your social media strategy
should also include some goals. And some KPIs, KPIs stands for
key performance indicators and it refers to metrics or analytics that
you'll pull every month usually. And they will help indicate the
success of your social profiles. So for that taco company, if their main
goal was away, Meaning, they just wanted people to know more about their business,
about their mission, about their values. Then I would choose an awareness
focused metric to center that around. Maybe that would be reach meaning total
number of accounts that I was able to reach through Instagram or whichever
platforms we choose to be on, or maybe its total number of followers,
which does give us some indication of how well our messaging is resonating
with those new audience member.

Now after you develop that strategy,
it's also important to be able to help optimize existing social media
platforms and websites or set them up. If they don't have anything for
brand new businesses, you're going to be on the setup side. You're going to need to know
how to set up a brand new page. Give proper access to the owner or
whoever your key point of contact is you probably don't ever want to
be the only person in charge of a social profile, just in case something
happens to yours or to you personally.

And someone else needs to get in. If you are optimizing existing
profiles, you should be able to. I know how to do a quick audit, meaning
that you're checking out their profile, picture their banner images, their
bio's, and about section any of that key profile information and comparing it
against their website or their brand kit. If they've been able to provide
you with one and you want to make sure that everything's. On brand it's sized appropriately. You don't have any cover or
banner photos that are stretched.

Oddly. You want to be sure again, for this
taco stand or any type of brick and mortar, that if they have a
Facebook page, you have the hours of operation listed on that page. You have the contact and online
ordering information set up. If you're working with an
e-commerce company, you'll want to make sure that you have. Instagram shopping set up or any
type of tracking pixels that you may need, like the Facebook pixel or the
LinkedIn insight tag, for example. And at minimum, I would recommend
asking your client or your job if they have Google analytics set up
and if they can add you to their. Now I know all of these pixels and
analytics might sound like I'm speaking a completely different language.

I certainly did not know what
these things were when I first got started, but basically what they
do is enable you to track activity that happens beyond social media. That actually happens on
the client's websites. And this can be really effective. For reporting purposes
and advertising purposes. So it's better to just have
them on there, even if you don't quite know how to use them yet. Or you're not always pulling that data. It's better to be safe than sorry. And get it on there if you can. Now the next thing and probably the most. Well known thing that social media
managers do is actually published content and create content calendars for
their clients or for their companies. They go through and map out what content
will be posted on which days, and they will schedule it out or post it manual. Now I get this question all the time. What is my favorite scheduling tool? And to be honest, they
are very, very personal. I personally really like a tool
called CoSchedule and I also just use Facebook's native scheduler to
schedule Facebook and Instagram posts. And I also do a lot of organic manual
posting just because it is a good reminder for me to engage with the content
and check inboxes while I'm in there.

So it really is a personal thing. Social media management systems give
you at least a 15 or 30 day free trial. So I'd recommend trying out a
few and seeing which one you like best, but hold on, let's back up. What content are we even posting
for the sake of this video? I will be talking about three key
content types, original content, repurposed content, and curated con. Original content is exactly
what it sounds like. These are going to be images,
videos, photos, designs that either you create or somebody on the team,
your client's team, your jobs team.

pexels photo 4050319

If you're working with a larger
company, a lot of times they'll have creative departments, either
photographers, videographers designers, who can provide you that content. But I would be lying if I said
that there weren't times when I was actually creating the stuff myself,
particularly if you're working with smaller companies, mom, and pop. Solo preneurs, anybody who might be
on a bit of a tight budget or just have a very small boot shop team.

So in my opinion, it is important
to have a bit of those skills, just basic photo editing, video clipping,
and cutting, designing in a tool like Canva and really customizing. You can also choose as a social media
manager that you're not very talented in the design and creative department. And therefore you'll only work
with clients who have original content for you to pull from. That's totally. Okay. Repurpose content is content that I
might find on the client's website.

So maybe they have a podcast or they
have a YouTube channel, or they have webinars, or they have blog posts. All of those things are things that I
can pull and create new content with. I can trim down a webinar, whole, a bunch
of one minute snippets for Instagram. Or I can caption some of the
videos and post them on LinkedIn. I can take some of their blog posts
and turn them into captions for image content, or video content. So these are all things that I
recommend scrubbing through and just kind of creating a document where you
can pull potential content ideas that you may want to use on social media. And then kind of going ahead
and repurposing some of that. Some of my favorite tools for repurposing.

Our tool called headliner, which
enables you to create little wave forms and audio snippets. I also love Canva. It's really easy to take a screenshot
and really jazz it up with texts. And you can also edit videos on canvas. So I definitely recommend learning how to. That tool now, like I said, you
don't have to create the content. You don't have to work with clients who
require you to be an original content creator if that's not your sweet spot,
but I still do think it's important for a social media manager to have some
type of insight and directive over what types of content are being produced. A CEO may not know how to
create an Instagram reel. So it's your job as a social media
manager to provide them training. Or to provide them documentation
or to just help them out to learn the best practices of
creating these new content types. That might be a little bit foreign to
them for some of my clients that are very far away where I can't go onsite
to take images or videos for them.

I'll just create a show. Or wishlist, I'll say,
Hey, I would love it. If you took a picture of
the taco stand, I'd love it. If you took a picture of the CEO, can
you also take a picture of Dallas, the skyline and things like that
and get those images over to me so that I have something to work with
for the next month content calendar.

One of the last pieces here is engagement. There are certain amounts of just ongoing
work that you have to continue to do. Unfortunately, this is
not the kind of job. The schedule things out and leave
it be, you really do have to engage. And what does that mean? Well, there's two types of engagement. There's inbound and there's outbound
inbound engagement would refer to any comments or direct messages that come
through that you didn't really try for. They just sort of happened
upon you through either the hashtags that you're using, the
location tags that you're using. Maybe you were tagged in
something by somebody. Maybe they just found you from
somewhere else on the web, they searched you up on Instagram or
LinkedIn or Tik talk and you're getting these comments and engagements. Well, it's really important
to respond to them. So making sure that you're going
in every single day, if you can, and responding to things, hurting
comments, stimulating conversation, as best as you can, engagement really
helps with the algorithm, which the algorithm is just a fancy way of
saying it's the system that dictates.

How often, and which pieces of content
are being shown to your followers and to the greater social media community
in short, you want to be active. You want to be consistent. These are all things that make the
algorithm really like you and make it a lot more likely for your content to show
up for the people who need to see it. So inbound engagement, responding
to that stuff is really important, but there's also outbounding. And this is going to tie back
to that ideal client, that buyer persona that customer avatar. Again, I'm going to go ahead
and use this taco example. Let's say that this taco example,
they really want to reach health conscious vegans in Dallas. A lot of people just think of them as your
average taco shop, and they don't really know that this taco company has a vegan. Sustainable organic options. So what I would do is I would look
at hashtags like Dallas vegans, or eat organic or Dallas healthy
food or something like that. And go after these different
hashtags, look through the hashtags and start leaving meaningful. Start following influencers or
thought leaders in that space.

I may also look through location
tags of similar restaurants. Maybe there is a healthy vegan
restaurant that is in the area. So I'll click on their location tag
and start doing something similar, all start liking and commenting on
people who have checked in there. And that strategy. Same across social platforms. By the way, I know I'm using an Instagram
example here, but you could totally do something similar on LinkedIn. Maybe you don't have location
tags on LinkedIn, but you do have hashtags on LinkedIn.

You also can look up companies. So if I wanted to reach employees of a
particular restaurant or a particular industry, then I could search for them
using LinkedIn search and connect with them, send them a message and say, Hey. You're a restaurant down the street. We should totally create a
collaboration, a collaborative taco, if you will, and so on, and you
should also be reviewing or success. This is really how you continue
to see success happen is you look at your analytics. Pretty much all of the
social platforms have some. In app analytics that you can look
through, look through your top performing posts and start to look for trends. Maybe all of your top performing
posts were of the food themselves. Meaning you need to take more food
photography, or maybe even encourage your client to hire a professional food
photographer, or maybe they were all real. So you need to go all in
and create a bunch of.

Maybe you get the most website clicks
when you post a quote or some type of text-based posts about being
vegan and organic and things like. So look for trends so that it can help
you inform your future content calendar, and continue to improve from there. It's always a great idea to
include your client or your manager on these reports as well. Putting together reports
enables you to really show your client what you've been doing. And what kind of success you're seeing? I always say social media is
one of those things that can be very out of sight out of mind. And for people who are not trained
in this and have not spent the time that you're spending on courses and
learning, it's not something that is necessarily easy to understand. And I can't blame them. I don't know anything about
making organic vegan tacos really. So you are the expert. You should be providing
that information to. In a monthly report. And of course, if you're a freelancer
you're on your own business, you're going to need to do other admin things
like generating leads, providing customer service meeting with your
clients, invoicing, maybe hiring help.

And if you work in house, there
are probably some other duties that may get sprinkled in there as well. But overall, those are some of the key
social media management responsibilities and what we actually do all. Believe it or not, it's not just play on
Instagram or talk to people on Facebook. I'll go ahead and drop a free
social media strategy template down in the description box. If you want to snag that, and don't
forget to tune in for episode two of this series on Wednesday, you
can subscribe and turn on the bell notification, so you don't miss it. And I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, drop them
down below and I will see you next time. Bye..

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