Social media managers are vital to the success of brands today, as they’re skilled at striking the right balance between community-building and marketing to an online audience. If you’re interested in social media manager jobs, you’re in luck; this is a highly sought-after position brands today are looking to fill. 

A great social media manager defines a clear brand identity and voice online through the content they share. The best part? With the right tools and mindset, anyone can learn to become a social media manager with or without marketing experience.

Social media managers take control of a company’s social media marketing strategy. Their work could be as part of a wider marketing team, as a solo in-house social media manager, or as a freelancer. 

As the majority of marketing efforts today take place online, the demand for social media managers continues to grow. Let’s dive into why social media managers are critical to community-driven brands, plus how you can find, lock down, and excel in a social media manager job.

Table of Contents

• The Rise of the Social Media Manager Job
• 10 Social Media Manager Interview Questions
• 4 Responsibilities to Expect in a Social Media Manager Role
• Where to Find Social Media Manager Jobs
• Skills Every Social Media Manager Needs
• What Platforms Do Social Media Managers Use?

The Rise of the Social Media Manager Job

Social media management is crucial for building a strong relationship with customers while attracting new customers to your brand. They are more likely to engage with a brand that engages back with them, be that through comments, likes, or shares.

A robust social media management strategy can also include influencer marketing and working with brand ambassadors to generate social content and showcase new campaigns and products. 

Social media marketing helps you reach a wider audience, and you can also use their images on your website. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a product page that includes pictures from social media, specifically user-generated content (UGC). UGC refers to photos and videos from real customers, often originally posted on social media and reshared by brands on their own profiles and other marketing channels like website displays.

10 Social Media Manager Job Interview Questions

Knowing how to speak intelligently about social media marketing and conveying your experience or familiarity with the role automatically makes you a better candidate. 

Here are some of the most common questions you’ll face in a social media manager interview:

1. What online communities or brand social media accounts have you managed in the past?
2. What was your most successful social media campaign? Describe it and why it worked.
3. How would you determine what key performance indicators (KPIs) our company should measure on social media?
4. What social media platform do you think is most effective to focus on for our company?
5. How would you deal with an unhappy customer commenting on a post?
6. How would you increase impressions and engagement on our social media profiles?
7. How would you use social media to drive traffic to our website?
8. What factors would you use to define and reach our target audience on social media?
9. How would your content strategy differ between social platforms, ex. TikTok vs Instagram?
10. What is our company currently doing well on social media and what would you change?

If you’re unsure how to respond to some of these questions, reading up on the role and how social media managers for other companies succeed can help. It’s also crucial you’re aware of the responsibilities that come with a social media manager role.

4 Responsibilities to Expect in a Social Media Manager Role

Knowing what you’ll be in charge of and how to manage social media effectively makes you a great social media manager candidate.

Check out these four social media manager tasks and responsibilities:

1. Monitoring Social Analytics

A social media manager needs to extract and analyze data to ensure the company budget is being used effectively. Many posts will benefit from organic reach, but a social manager may also control paid adverts.  

For example, a social media manager could use Instagram analytics to learn about followers’ demographics and engagement trends. Most social media managers are very familiar with the analytics dashboards on channels like Instagram and TikTok. Some may even use other softwares like Pixlee TurnTo to measure performance and connect social success to website activity and conversion.

You’ll need to research competitors and see whether your content aligns with theirs and how you can make yours stand out even more. Once you better understand your target audience, you can learn which content engages them the most. Using analytics software, you’ll be able to see reach, likes, comments, examples of customer touchpoints, and more.

2. Creating and Managing Social Media Content

Aesthetically pleasing social media is all about coordinated graphics and artwork. Social media managers may have to work closely with a brand's design team to create content or learn how to make it themselves through tools like Canva. Check out some of our social media content ideas for brands to learn more.

For most brands, not all social media content is created in-house. This means that the social media manager may be tasked with sourcing, curating, scheduling, and publishing influencer content or customer photos and videos. They may use software like Pixlee TurnTo to automatically collect this content and push it to social, instead of doing so manually.

Delta features UGC from a customer with a search bar design over the image to share the brand’s new nonstop flight available to Tahiti through an Instagram post.

3. Reporting to Stakeholders

The wider marketing team and your company’s stakeholders need to be kept in the loop when it comes to the success of your social channels. Stakeholders will want to know how many followers you have, how you’re growing the following, your planned creative campaigns, and your projected spending. 

For example, if your job is to scope out Vonage competitors like Dialpad and create an effective campaign that will rival your competitors, stakeholders would want to be updated on its progress.

4. Interacting with Followers in Real Time

Perhaps one of the most important tasks for a social media manager is to interact with and engage followers on all social platforms. This may include responding to comments from followers (both negative and positive), answering questions in the comments section or via DMs, and liking or sharing content from customers that relates to your brand. 

Users are more likely to follow, feel connected to, and eventually buy from a brand that shows its dedication to its customers and building a brand community. Social listening, monitoring what users are saying about your brand online, and resharing UGC are both incredibly important to this element of social media management.

The social media manager at Xtreme lashes responds to customer comments and questions in Instagram comments sections, and reshares photos from real customers regularly.

Where to Find Social Media Manager Jobs

While LinkedIn is a valid place to look for social media manager jobs, you’ll likely want to cast a wider net when searching online to increase your chances of finding the right fit. Here are a few more places you can look for social media job opportunities:

1. Twitter - Many marketers and executives at ecommerce brands use Twitter to share business advice and open roles. These users as a group are sometimes referred to as “Marketing Twitter,” and Twitter’s advanced search tools can help you sort through new Tweets from brand leaders looking for social media managers.

2. Indeed - Indeed is a slightly less saturated job listing website than LinkedIn, and often features opportunities that may not be discoverable anywhere else.

3. Upwork - Upwork is a freelancing platform that caters to both job seekers and companies hiring individuals for individual projects or longer-term partnerships.

4. Hirect - A relatively new app for job searching, Hirect uses virtual chat and AI to expose companies to candidates likely to meet their needs.

5. Lensa - is a job search engine. It uses machine-learning algorithms to point out specific skills a candidate needs to be a success at a certain job.

Our best advice here is to start building an online presence and networking with other marketers on social media — specifically Twitter and LinkedIn — to create your own personal brand. The more connected you are with people who already work in the industry, the more privy you’ll be to brands with open social roles.‍

Skills Every Social Media Manager Needs

There are a few skills that make a social media manager successful. Social media management is at its core community-oriented, and caters to the needs of social users. General marketing skills as well as confidence in your creative abilities sets the stage for social media managers to create engaging, eye-catching posts that drive followers closer to a brand’s product.

Most of these skills can be learned and harnessed over time.

Creativity

Arguably the most critical skill, a social media manager needs a creative flair. This is because social posts need to look amazing and uniquely sell the product. You shouldn’t be afraid to take risks and try new things creatively to see if the customers interact positively. 

Leadership

As a social media manager, you may oversee a team of graphic designers or other social interns. You’ll need to supervise and guide those team members, ensuring they are equipped with everything they need to help build the brand’s social presence. You may also need to be prepared to manage multiple products at once. 

Flexibility

As a social media manager, you have to learn to be flexible. New trends are entering the social sphere quite literally all the time. You need to be able to keep up. New hashtags, changes in the algorithm, and new trending sounds; are all things you need to keep an eye out for and adapt your content accordingly. 

Some individuals in social media manager roles see this part of the job as unrealistic or too demanding. However, with the right tools to build a social calendar, schedule posts ahead of time, and manage your time effectively, you can ensure consistent activity on brand social accounts without being online at all hours of the day.

Customer Service

This role requires a level of customer service skills as you are dealing directly with customers day-to-day. You need to respond appropriately to any feedback in comments, take conversations offline or delegate them to another team when needed, and keep the brand’s tone of voice consistent across all platforms. 

Check out how Article’s social media team replies to a negative comment and takes the conversation to the DMs.

Strong Copywriting Skills 

A huge part of the role of a social media manager is crafting posts and the text that accompanies them; think CTAs, conveying a sense of urgency, generating buzz around company news and products, and more. A good social media manager will possess excellent copywriting skills to help them with this aspect of the job.

Even if you’re not creating the visuals of a social media post, you’ll almost always be tasked with writing the copy that goes with it. Any kind of writing experience will help with this aspect of the job.   

What Platforms Do Social Media Managers Use?

Facebook

Facebook has long been used by businesses to advertise their products to their target audiences. It offers businesses several demographics to choose from, meaning you can tailor your content to the right people. 

Social media managers can create and launch advertisements by boosting organic posts or directing content towards a specific target audience. Social Media Managers are also tasked with creating an informative and engaging company profile.

Instagram

Instagram revolves around images and videos, so is a popular choice for brands in the beauty or fashion industry to show off their products. Instagram features a lot of shopping features that allow users to discover products and make purchases without leaving the app. Given that it’s an incredibly popular app, there are users of many ages from many demographics using the app daily.

For social media managers, advertising on Instagram works much like Facebook, you can boost your posts and run your own ads. If you’re looking to work in social media or already are, you should be familiar with all of Instagram’s tools — including Instagram shops, stories, highlights, DMs, IGTV, Reels, and Instagram analytics.

TikTok

One of the newer social media apps, TikTok, is now a popular place for businesses to show off their products and services. Social media managers need to create, edit, and post snappy videos to capture the audience's attention. You can also run paid ads on this platform. 

It helps to spend time on TikTok simply consuming content related to your product or industry on the brand account, as the algorithm will eventually alter what you’re seeing on the For You page to be more relevant. Check out the details of TikTok marketing in our guide for brands and social media teams.

Twitter

Depending on your industry, Twitter may be an important part of your social media management strategy. Cosmetics, B2B, and food brands are just a few of the accounts you’ll see on Twitter, typically combining witty copy with informing, entertaining, and product-oriented media.   

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual social media site, with users creating ‘boards’ of certain images and products. Social media managers can use this to their advantage by uploading high-quality photos and encouraging users to share the image to their boards on the site.

Social media management can be an amazing career for those who love the idea of combining marketing and social media. Try out our tips above and start your journey in social media marketing.

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Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform that takes every kind of conversation to the next level—turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns. Jessica has also written for domains such as Springworks and TDAN. Here is her LinkedIn.