So… a lot of people ask us “What does a social media manager actually DO?”
Short story, we help our clients. We help them maintain their brand standards. We help our clients to grow their social presence. We help our clients to engage with their audience in a relevant, informational, and fun manner. Lastly, we help our clients to make smart marketing decisions regarding social media. To which we get the inevitable next question, “Well, that sounds great… but what does that look like?”
Good questions. For social media managers, there are daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities that we conduct for our clients. Here are some basics.
Daily Tasks
As far as daily, social media managers should be checking all content. Is it going out when it should? Is it going out the right time? Is it applicable still? Is it going out in a manner that engages with the target audience?
Speaking of engaging with the audience, a social media manager should engage daily with their client’s audience. Also, a social media manager monitors all platforms, daily, for any mentions for all their client’s brands. This involves checking all the client’s handles and checking branded and unofficial hashtags. A social media manager always ensures that their clients are aware of and are addressing any mentions. It is imperative for a business or organization to ensure that they are tracking all comments, good or bad. If it is good, a social media manager helps their client leverage that for social proof. If it is bad, a social media manager will enact an approved SOP (Standard Operating Protocol) to address the issue immediately.
Also, a social media manager needs to monitor the mood of the audience continuously. Sometimes things happen or affect the audience that are outside of the business’ or organization’s realm of control. While these issues are outside of their realm of control, they are within the realm of concern, and sometimes content needs to be amended or shifted in a hurry.
Weekly Tasks
A task that social media managers conduct weekly is to ensure that all content is scheduled and formatted accurately. Moreover, social media managers need to monitor the audience’s timeline and schedules. For example, if your audience isn’t online at 7:00 a.m., why should a post be scheduled for then? All that will result in is less-than-optimal engagement and post-performance. Social media managers also monitor their client’s statistics and metrics on a weekly basis. It is imperative to know and understand many people are engaging, how they’re engaging, and the type of content that they’re engaging with. Are they engaging more with video or more with images or more text? Each audience is different, and when an organization or business know their audience, they will be able to ensure that the message is most accurately received.
Monthly Tasks
Monthly, social media managers create a comprehensive content calendar. What this looks like varies for each business and organization. Some people want to do an entire month’s worth of content ahead of time. For our clients, we prefer to create content on a monthly basis and add additional content as needed (this ensures the clients don’t have to take the time to review on a weekly basis and is more respectful of their time). However, each business and organization are different, and we’ve worked with somewhere the content has to be created on a weekly (and sometimes daily basis). Once the social media manager has you the monthly content calendar, it is time to review performance and set new monthly goals. This is the roadmap, because if you don’t know where you are and where you are going, how do you know if you got there?
Quarterly Tasks
On a quarterly basis, social media managers take time to review the audience avatar with their clients. This is a critical component of success. Have things shifted? Has the customer base changed? If the customer base is shifting, the messaging needs to shift. This involves checking the insights of each platform. Find out the audiences ages, their demographics, their languages. Find out kind of some of the other things that they like (affinity interests and affinity brands). When an organization or business knows that, they and the social media manager can ensure that the content is going to be relevant and engaging to the audience because again, at the end of the day, social media is supposed to be social.
Another task that social media managers should do on a quarterly basis is to perform a platform audit. For our agency, that means we evaluate all the platforms a client is currently on and ones that we think might be a good fit in the future. So many of our customers come to us saying “We need to be on ALL the platforms”. To which, we almost always respond that, no, they do not need to be on all the platforms, they need to be WHERE their audience is. Moreover, since we understand that organizations and businesses have limited time and resources, we highly recommend focusing on and mastering one platform at a time. Once that platform and audience are stable, strategically select the next platform to bring into the plan. And move forward in this manner. It will ensure that a brand’s audience is not confused about where to find the brand AND that when they reach out on whatever platform they are seeing relevant and engaging content.
Tired yet? When done correctly, the job of a social media manager has many moving pieces and parts.