Top 15 Social Media Skills to Succeed on the Job
If you work in the social media industry, you will need to possess certain skills to be on top of your game.
This post share with you major skills and qualities you will need to develop to succeed in your career as a social media professional.
But first:
What is Social Media?
Social media act as go-between technologies you can use to easily create and share information, ideas, interests, career, and other kinds of online communications through popular communities and networks.
Some prominent examples of social media include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Wikipedia, Reddit, and LinkedIn.
And now:
15 Social Media Skills you need to give Best Performances on the Job
1. Analytics Skills
Having the skills to effectively use analytics tools on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms will help you measure well the impact of your campaigns and marketing initiatives.
With a tool like Hootsuite Impact, you can accurately measure the return on investment of social media across owned, earned, and paid social channels.
Hootsuite Impact links to existing analytics systems so you can combine social data with the rest of your business metrics.
It also makes it easy to produce executive reports and delivers plain-language recommendations to optimize your social media strategies.
Analytics tools will provide a variety of measures of the performance of your posts and tweets.
You can use these data to find out from the public which topics, formats, and even times of day that work best for your message, and visible information like likes, shares, plays and the number of comments, as well as private information that only you can observe.
2. Communication Skills
Strong writing abilities are required in social media marketing to be good on the job. You need to express your information in the most effective way while working with character limits and platform best practices.
You can use many writing training tools out there to improve your skills so that you can efficiently know how to communicate on social media.
In order to create the best presence for your business, you need to integrate platform skills with writing.
In addition to communicating effectively in writing, you need to have the passion for audio and video social platforms such as podcasts and Youtube.
You should also consider verbal communication because not all platform activity is in written form.
3. Community Management
The knowledge of community management will help you to create, observe, and respond to conversations within your brand community.
Having effective community management skills will also enable you to monitor tweets, engage with brand advocates, and respond to Facebook posts excellently.
Community management functions when communities or their representatives control the systems.
More than 21,000 professionals list community management as one of their skills, with sixty-four percent of them being between the ages of 25 and 34.
4. Copywriting Skills
You must not write full-length articles or blog posts before you can become a good copywriter.
You may be writing short copies with attention-grabbing headlines and engaging introduction and still be distinguished from the crowd.
Make your copies to be better, engaging, and effective in order to attract attention and draw people in, encouraging them to enjoy your content and click through to your landing page or website.
5. Graphics Design Skills
You need a good understanding of graphics design to help you run a more effective and engaging campaign. This has to do with the ability to create visual content that stands out and looks beautiful.
Images have an impact on the chances of your audience retaining the content you share, giving your blog posts and articles more shares than when your posts have no image.
Everybody in the social media world knows that posts with images are gaining more views. Therefore, you should create impressive images for your social media blog posts.
You don’t need to have advanced graphics design knowledge, but a good eye for design and the ability to edit images are needed.
Hootsuite Enhance is a free tool you can use to automatically crop and store images for all your social media accounts. Try it out and you will like the flexibility and capacity of the software.
6. Public Speaking
Public speaking can be an essential quality to have as a social media professional, as you can use live video to engage your audience. If you must star in your video, you need to build your self-confidence and present yourself as a professional.
Public speaking is also needed in a conference room with a short presentation that draws attention. You should have the courage to speak to your viewers and those interested in your speech.
7. Time Management Skills
Social media can be overwhelming and time-consuming, so you need the ability to manage your time effectively by being in control of your activities.
As a social media marketer, you should know what to automate, when, and how. The best way to go with this is to apply time management strategies. The result will be overwhelming.
8. Organization
You need to get yourself organized while on the social media. Learn how to create, follow, and maintain a calendar for your activities; it will help you to run a successful social media marketing campaign.
You need to know how to follow a well-designed workflow using your organizational skills.
You need a well-organized plan so that your marketing campaigns will not miss the track and fall; a plan such as knowing when to publish content, what to plan ahead for, and how to keep track of all the various social media conversations going on.
9. Customer Service
Your social media customer service skills are required especially when working for a business. This is to authenticate J D Power’s study that states that sixty-seven percent of consumers use social media to ask specific questions or find help resolving issues.
Social media allows you to engage in dialogue, receive feedback, and address customers’ concerns.
You must be open-minded, diligent, and genuinely interested in what your visitors and customers have to say to you through the social media.
10. Video Creation
According to Cisco’s research into global IP video traffic, more than 500 million people are watching videos on Facebook every day. Therefore, video creation is undeniably an essential way to reach your audience.
You need amazing video creation skills to help you make compelling content for platforms such as Facebook Live broadcasts, Snapchat stories, and Instagram stories.
You also need to know how to optimize videos for all of your various social media channels using available options.
You can find great video creation and editing tools to help you create compelling video content even if you are a beginner.
Leveraging the power of video to create unique content is helpful, especially now that video content brings approximately 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic.
11. Search Engine Optimization
Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will enable you to optimize content in a way that search engines will rank them high for your keywords and phrases.
Having good SEO and content marketing skills will be helpful to you in writing a great copy that will rank well.
SEO has great impact on your social media approach. According to Hootsuite. You should always have SEO in mind when optimizing content on social networks.
You will be able to attract a larger audience when you stick tight to SEO as part of your social media strategy.
Content with a high social reach and that gets lots of comments, likes, and shares, is likely to get engagement metrics that will positively impact your rankings.
If you think you don’t have need of SEO skills, you are making a big mistake and limiting your success on the social media.
12. Creativity
In order for you to keep your followers engaged and hooked, you will need to constantly come up with new and interesting ideas, creative programs and campaigns.
Your creativity skills become a way you can stand apart from millions of others on the social media.
You don’t know how much innovative you are until you begin to exhibit your creative skills.
Creativity, from the perspective of trying things others couldn’t imagine on a normal circumstance, can be an effective way to market your business on social media platforms.
You must not be the best creative dude, but a creative strategy to social media can help you create content that stand out from the crowd. The impact will unquestionably be positive on your results.
13. Content Creation
Social media require the skills to create content on a daily basis so that you will keep your audience updated. You need to learn writing for you to create original and interesting content regularly.
Always give your audience a reason for clicking on your content by thinking out first how they could benefit from what you are posting.
“Why should people even click on this content or even share it”, is a question you must ask yourself if you want to draw the attention of your audience.
Write killer headlines that will prompt your audience to desire to share, like, or/and comment on your post.
Make sure to write unique content for your every social message, and avoid repetition.
14. Leadership
If you are on a tight budget with a fast growing campaign, you can delegate some of your tasks to other people.
You need to first understand systemization and know how to create processes for other people to follow.
Leadership skills become so essential and valuable that you can begin to see your social media campaigns develop.
If you can use your leadership skills to grow your social media efforts, you will begin to see them produce a positive Return on Investment.
Learn to keep the team motivated, and the customer satisfied. You need to be a leader that motivates, improves, and coaches people to become top performers.
You also need to put an extra effort or support to the ideas of your audience, to inspire them to achieve better results and gain higher emotional intelligence.
15. Punctuality
Just as everybody knows how important it is to be to work on time, in the social media world it is also important to be on time with your audience to create more value for your campaign. It is your duty to be punctual in all aspects of your social media engagements.
Try as much as you can to respond to your audience quickly if you receive their message, comment, tweet, or any other form of communication.
Make sure to interact and connect with your audience frequently.
Answer urgently as many questions as your followers have and resolve any issues they may have quickly.
Also, send quick messages when you want to simply thank your followers for sharing your content.
Social Media Skills for Resume
If you are writing a resume for a social media job, you can create a compelling core competence section for it by applying the social media skills and qualities provided above.
Conclusion
The social media skills and qualities we have shared in this article will help a lot in your marketing campaigns and put you among the best in your industry.
You need to keep these qualities fresh by staying abreast with the latest trends and tools in the industry.
If you want to become successful and effective being on the social media and create values for your company, you need to develop the above skills and apply them regularly in your work.