The social media manager is the online marketing professional who is responsible for creating and designing the strategic plan of Social Media that will be carried out in the social networks of our brand and whose work will be in charge of the Community Manager of our company.
Social manager Vs Community Manager
It is important to understand the differences between the social media manager and the community manager of our company to know what job each of them will perform, because although they are closely related positions, each will develop different functions.
The social media manager is a position that has been formed with the constant growth and rise of social networks and the importance of developing a large part of our social media plan in each of them in order to give greater impetus to our brand.
Within the organisation of the company, the social media manager will develop a fundamental role that will ensure that our social media strategy, related to our Inbound Marketing plan, will have a greater reach. In addition, it will make us position ourselves in social networks, which will be very important for our brand today because users consume them at all times on a regular basis.
To better understand the position of the social media manager, let's summarise the main functions that he/she will perform:
- Define the SMART objectives that the brand aims to achieve as precisely as possible through the Social Media Plan.
- Establish the social media plan of the company or brand and set out in it the objectives that have been previously established based on what it is intended to achieve once the plan has been implemented.
- Analyse the evolution and presence on social networks of the possible competition for our brand, and thus know what aspects we have to work on so that users end up choosing us in the end.
- Knowing the market situation, what trends exist and how it will be easier for us to win over users through social networks so that they become our customers.
- Maintain a fluid relationship with the Community Manager, supporting him/her in the tasks that he/she has to carry out and guiding him/her on the planning that he/she has to follow and that the Social Media Manager has previously developed.
- Analyse the audience data, statistics and visualisations that arrive through the social networks in order to know how to interpret them and assess what things we need to improve in order to go further.
- Develop a crisis plan. This is a fundamental aspect because, although we would like it to never happen, sometimes it can happen. Sometimes, our brand's reputation is affected due to comments, reviews or publications on social networks that can cause us to lose many potential customers if we do not have a crisis plan prepared to solve it immediately.
Once we know what are the main tasks that the Social Media Manager will develop it will be easier to find the differences with the Community Manager. To understand it in general terms, the social media is responsible for planning the strategy and planning the Social Media while the Community Manager will be responsible for carrying out this plan.
The community manager of our brand will be the person who manages the social networks of our brand, publishes the posts and is in direct contact with users, to respond to comments, messages, reviews... In short, he/she will be in charge of "showing the face" of our brand and positioning us on social networks.
Achieving SMART objectives through social networks
As we have already mentioned throughout the post, social networks are one of the main engines on which we must focus our strategic plan of Social Media. They will be a fundamental ally to help us enhance our brand, gain greater visibility and, therefore, get more traffic guided to our website that will lead to final sales and new customers.
Once we have established our SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) objectives, a large part of them will be used by our brand's social media manager to outline the strategic social media plan. Therefore, they will design a large part of the social media campaign, thus helping to achieve objectives.
For example, if one of our brand's SMART objectives is to "increase traffic to our website", we can do this through social media. But how?
The social media manager should, at this point, be in charge of developing advertising and marketing campaigns that the community manager will publish on the social networks of our brand and that will help to draw attention to our brand and guide traffic to our website. In this way, we will achieve an increase in views, as defined by our brand in the SMART objective.
Another example of a SMART objective could be "increase sales of our services or products in the spring/summer campaign". Well, in this case social media could also help us to achieve this.
In this case, the social media manager will establish an advertising campaign that will focus on using social networks to publish offers, offer discount codes and give greater visibility to our products or services. Therefore, the community manager will use the loudspeaker of the networks to develop the campaign that the social media manager has previously established and that will make us achieve the objective of increasing sales of our services or products in the spring/summer campaign.
In this way, we will not only be using social networks to make ourselves known or to get more audience, but we can use them as another tool to achieve the SMART objectives of our brand and they will be very useful to develop our social media plan.
The five key skills of the social media manager
The social media manager is, as we have already discovered throughout the post, a fundamental figure in our brand, as social media is an Inbound Marketing strategy that will help our business a lot.
That is why, the social media manager will be a person who will have many skills that will help him/her to carry out his/her work in the most dynamic way possible. Here are five of them:
- Strategy: Our social media manager will be a strategic person who will know how to use social networks to achieve the SMART objectives of our brand.
- Organisation: Social media people have to take care of many tasks, so it is important that they know how to organise them and know which strategies will be most useful to achieve each one of them.
- Research: They must be able to research the main trends, analyse the audience and know how they can best win over users and convert them into customers.
- Insight: Although social networks are dynamic and move very fast, social media people must know what things would not be good for our brand if they were published.
- Creativity: They are creative people, who know how to use all the resources at their disposal to make the social media strategy an original and attractive plan that manages to generate customers.
Now that we know everything about the social media manager and the role they play in our brand, we can assess the importance of this figure in our brand and how essential they will be for our business when developing our social media strategy.
