Shaquibe Raihan

Working as an SEO based service freelancer I specialize in being an articulate wordsmith and SEO specialist. Over the years I've worked with a wide range of clientele starting from affiliate marketers, e-commerce websites, B2B services, B2C services, and more.

We are probably a match made in heaven if:
- You struggle to give your brand the personality it deserves
- Writing copy that's not too sales-y feels like a nightmare
- You could use another set of hands but can’t afford a full-time in-house person

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5 Essentials of Social Media Marketing

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Social media marketing is a good start at freelancing for most people from all walks of life. Unlike many other freelancing and work-from-home skills that require specialization on that particular skill, social media management doesn’t require extensive knowledge on anything except understanding people. In almost all modern businesses that have an online identity, a social media manager is a must to interact and understand their customer base. Even though its popularity has diminished slightly over the years, social media managers are still considered the vital consolidators of marketing and advertising campaigns of different brands whether they’re small or large in size.

Steps to Success

While understanding and communicating with people to manage the social media presence of a brand is the critical skill a social media manager needs, it is not a social media manager’s only responsibility. A social media manager has multiple job responsibilities that have to be performed with equal responsibility, including analyzing audience responses and visits through different analysis tools, monitoring any significant changes in the market based on that analysis, and utilize those results to help a company formulate marketing and advertising campaigns. A social media manager also has to keep up with the latest trends in his/her brand niche and also be able to analyze and assess competitor offerings. On top of all these responsibilities, a social media manager is also responsible for copywriting of social media advertisements, offers, and press releases as well.

While it might seem like a lot to chew on at first, the tasks are easy enough to pick up once you notice that you have been doing all these on social media subconsciously without focusing on the numbers or the analysis tools. The main struggle you will face is managing the brand presence effectively in different social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc but as long as you know how to schedule your posts ahead of time it shouldn’t take you too long to master.

KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) of social media management are as follows:

  • - Traffic: How much traffic is driven to the brand website and how much time potential buyers/visitors are spending there is considered as the primary KPI.
  • - Growth: How steadily is the number of followers following a brand’s social media page growing. Growth is usually measured by the number of likes and followers on different social media platforms.
  • - Engagement: Engagement is measured by how many people are interacting with a social media post by viewing, commenting, and reacting to it. In the last few years, engagement has become the primary KPI of how successfully a social media page is running.
  • - Reach/Impressions: Reach and impressions are basically the engagement a brand is getting from its social media page from non-followers. As a social media manager, one of your main goals will be to expand the reach/impression ratio to gain more growth for the brand.
  • - Conversions: Conversions are the successful number of sales achieved from the overall branding efforts of the social media manager.

The Five Essentials of SMM

Now that you know what are the key tasks and responsibilities of a social media manager, let’s focus on the key skills that you need to have to successfully freelance as a social media manager.

  • a) Understanding of the social media community guidelines

One of the primary responsibilities of a social media manager is responding to the different community queries on the social media pages of different brands. While it may sound easy enough on paper, each popular social media platforms has their own community guidelines for business pages which need to be followed when responding. You need to internalize the different community guidelines effectively so that responding to multiple queries across different platforms doesn’t become a messy or convoluted affair.

  • b) Analytical skills

If you don’t like charts, graphs, and numbers then you won’t make much headway as a social media manager. The instinctive element is definitely the deciding factor behind a social media manager’s actions, but those actions have to be backed by numbers obtained from Google Analytics, the most trusted and common analysis tool which is free as well. Different social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, Keyholes, Reputology, Socialbakers, and more are also available for more specialized applications. These tools can easily measure the growth rate of a social media page, the number of views and interactions with a page’s content, and insights into structuring and generating better content or products based on the actionable data obtained.

  • c) Writing skills

As a social media manager, clients will be expecting you to write sales and advertisement copies along with your account management services. To this end, you need to sharpen your writing skills as well. Writing social media content and advertisement copies are not the same as making memes; you will need to have a strong vocabulary and the ability to convey a message across to the audience with the minimum of words. You should start using grammar apps like Grammarly to keep your content as error-free as possible.

  • d) Organizational skills

Your organizational skills have to be top-notch so that you can effectively communicate your strategies to the different teams of a company whose social media management is being done by you at the moment. The data acquired by the social media manager for a brand is used to improve the product or service offered by the brand.

  • e) Social Skills

Of course, all these skills won’t matter if you aren’t a people’s person. Understanding audience emotions and interacting with them properly is the key to success in social media marketing. You need to gauge audience emotions through the way they engage with your posts and adapt accordingly.

Do’s and Dont’s

Here are the do’s and don’ts of freelancing as a social media manager-

Do’s

  • - Make sure you have a good quality website and blog. If your self-promotion is good then you will find clients knocking at your door instead of the other way around.
  • - Make a schedule and stick to it. It might seem like a stretch at first when you have a few clients to handle only with one or two social media accounts, but as your career will expand you will find more clients with multiple social media accounts to manage and unless you have a proper schedule, you won’t be able to manage your responsibilities properly.
  • - Making a calendar and sticking to your deadlines is also another must.
  • - Learning how to use widgets and extensions with social media platforms to streamline data collection in the most efficient way.
  • - Project the right attitude for the right audience. If you’re running a corporate social media page, make sure the posts and the language and visuals of the posts are professional and clean. On the other hand, if you are running a social media page for a café or bistro, you can inject humor and color in the social media posts for that particular page.
  • - Use the right networks on social media platforms for executing successful B2B and B2C campaigns.
  • - And most importantly, craft stories. Nothing hooks the audience better than effective storytelling.

Don’t

  • - Don’t be a spammer. Spamming is the quickest way of destroying a brand’s value in social media platforms. Identify your audience and reach out to them.
  • - Don’t flood your managed pages with content at all times of the day. Know when your audience is most active and share your content accordingly.
  • - On Twitter and Instagram, the quickest way to lose followers is the unnecessarily frequent use of hashtags to try to make a particular post-viral or trending. Use hashtags appropriately and sparingly and it will have more impact.
  • - Don’t regurgitate old content.
  • - Don’t ride on numbers alone. Growth is reflected through numbers but if those numbers don’t reflect in the audience engagement of the page content then. If a page you’re managing has 50,000 likes but each post published is garnering 15-20 likes and a couple of comments, then it’s actually a bad sign.
  • - Don’t devote all your time to social media. Many novice social media managers make the mistake of keeping their eyes glued on their monitors, constantly flipping through social media platforms for hours at an end. This habit should be nipped at the bud; as a social media manager you have a lot more tasks than simply communicating with the community- you have other tasks at hand as well, don’t forget to focus on them as well.

To Sum It Up

Once you understand the basics, social media marketing isn’t all that hard. It’s easier to build certain types of businesses on social media more easily than other mediums, so study the niche you will be working to promote before starting any project. The rest depends on your efforts and a bit of luck.