There is a huge difference between posting photos of the hotel breakfast you enjoyed while on holiday and uploading engaging content as a social media specialist or manager.
Social media are constantly changing. You need to keep up if you want your posts to drive your business or your clients’ companies. Creativity, attention, and engagement are just a few of the skills you need to be a successful social media authority.
Do you want to hone your social media talents? As a media agency, we use social media to give our clients the best marketing. Here is how our agency evaluates the necessary skills for social media experts.
Know How to Write
To survive in the highly competitive world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), businesses need to publish evergreen content—which means that someone needs to produce it. You should hone your writing skills to write engaging and interesting texts, posts, and social media content.
Copywriters writing for a brand must have done their research to understand the brand’s voice, philosophy, and tone. Some brands support humor and funny, tongue-in-cheek copy. Other brands prefer a factual, formal tone. Your posts should align with the brand to create a consistent voice throughout all marketing channels.
Be Creative About Your Posts
There is so much more to content than text: photos, videos, quizzes, competitions, questions, infographics, how-tos, behind-the-scenes, interviews, and even memes that can enrich your posts.
Be creative and imaginative and design original posts brimming with inspiration. People connect with interactive content that gives them cause to pause, think, and engage.
Analyze Your Successes and Failures
You want to know what works and what doesn’t. To see which posts get recognition and resonate with your audience, check your social media analytics and see the reactions and responses your posts get.
Each social media platform has its own tools for analytics, so you need to become familiar and fluent in all of these. Check them on a regular basis to focus your social media strategy on posts and content that appeal to your audience.
Listen to Your Audience
You want to keep up with your audience. Develop your observation skills and learn to listen to your readers, visitors, and followers.
Notice what makes them react to posts and how they engage with the brand. That is the only way to build a deeper relationship with your potential customers.
Develop your communication skills and learn how to talk, engage, and respond to people’s questions and comments on posts and other social media interactions. Show interest and genuine understanding of the brand and the business itself.
If something went wrong, learn to apologize and offer incentives for the customer to remain loyal to the brand. If many clients complain about the same thing—for example, your after-sales service or staff issues—don’t be quick to dismiss them. There are plenty of black-hat marketers who resort to badmouthing the competition online, but there are also unhappy customers that have genuine grievances. Learning to tell the difference between the two is key to your success.
Follow Your Industry
Whether you are posting for your business or you are social media expert managing other accounts, you must follow the industry of the brand. This will show you developments happening around you and could be great starting points for online conversations.
Also, when you discuss your industry, you show you have a broader view of the world that goes beyond the business itself. This makes people think of you as an expert in your field.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Follow your competitors and see where they hang out, what platforms they choose, and how they interact with their audience. Get ideas from them and see how your company can outdo them. If they are doing something right, do the same thing—only better. If they are doing something wrong, make sure you don’t repeat their mistakes. Let your own competition show you how to outshine them!
Manage Ads and Budgets
If you are running social media ads for your business or your clients, you must keep an eye on the budget spent and how the ads performed. You will want to discontinue ads that eat up too much of your budget without delivering results and direct more money to highly performing ads.
Hone your mathematics skills to analyze the statistics of the landing pages and understand how much your ads are costing you, starting with your cost-per-click (CPC) and the average cost of sale (ACoS). The point of your social media ads is to sell. Create several ads and see which ones are delivering and which ones are just costing you money. Run rolling A/B tests to continuously improve your ads’ performance.
Build Relationships with Influencers and Industry Leaders
You need social skills for social media. Talk with influencers, industry leaders, bloggers, and other people who are successfully engaged in social media. Study their success and see what you can learn from them. Share with them content, discuss trends, and make notes of what other people are thinking and posting.
Your relationship with influencers can also lead to endorsements, as well as product and service promotion and placements.
Learn to Be Selective
See where your audience is and engage with their preferred social media platforms. Each platform has its own lingo and unwritten rules. Learn the platform etiquette and follow the norms that will make your engagement within this community as smooth as possible.
If you have several social media accounts you are managing, you will need to acquire the skills for each platform and match each medium’s idiosyncrasies.
We Have the Social Media Skills for Your Account
If all of the above sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is! Instead of trying to become a social media guru, why not focus on what you do best—run your business—and let us do what we do best—promote your brand and get you new customers and clients? Here at InSync Media, we have a dedicated SEO team, social media specialists, and an expert content writing team. In short, we have all the skills you need to make your business shine.
