Social Media Manager - A Career to Pursue this 2022

Home-based freelancing is a positive career change that everyone is pursuing. Nothing beats working at the comfort of your own home and earn the same as your previous 9 - 5 job, and sometimes the salary is even better! If you’ve done your research, you’ll see that one of the most common job positions overseas clients are looking for is a social media manager. For starters, you can charge $3.00 - $4.00 an hour and if you’re capable, you can take multiple clients. Which in return, can raise your monthly salary to a six-digit figure. Yes, you read that right.

Now what is a social media manager and why do companies are looking for them now? A social media manager is the individual in an organization trusted with monitoring, contributing to, filtering, measuring and otherwise guiding the social media presence of a brand, product, individual or corporation. In simple terms, you spearhead the social media presence of a business through marketing campaigns and the end goal is to attract more customers and increase sales.

Next question is, why do companies need social media managers? Is social media really that a big thing to increase sales. The answer is yes, see data below:

• There are over 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook.
• LinkedIn has over 500 million users.
• There are 250 million active users on Pinterest.
• More than 500 million people use Instagram every day. 
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Not to mention Twitter, Quora, Snapchat, Youtube as well. CEOs and start-ups want to capitalize on those figures. They need someone that is well versed on the marketing side of using social media and at the same time they want to save on production cost by hiring someone offshore. That’s where you come in! 

Probably you are thinking that it is not for you because you are not a business/marketing management graduate or a comm arts graduate, or any related course. Honestly, being a graduate of the said course is a big plus but there are a lot of home-based social media managers out there that are a graduate of non-related courses or do not have any idea about marketing and stuff. What they have is the eagerness to learn and be really great at slaying social media marketing. 

What do you need to have to become a social media manager?

1. Customer Service - because 59% of Americans believe that customer service through social media has made it easier to get their questions answered and issues resolved. So if you’re from the BPO industry, you already have an edge because you’re well versed in handling customers’ concerns and inquiries.
2. Writing - captions, slogans, headlines are some of the few things that you need to write about. This is not just writing, you need to be really creative about it to attract customers. If writing is not your niche, try learning a thing or two about it. You may also want to explore SEO writing.
3. Time Management - you need to be able to multi-task effectively and efficiently because you will be handling different social media platforms and accounts. Especially if you are catering to multiple clients.
4. Social Media Savy - I think this is self-explanatory, you need to know your way around each platform. However, you should also be mindful of your accounts/profiles or pages. Ask yourself, if your potential client sees your profiles or pages, will he be impressed or repulsed?
5. Eagerness to learn - There are a lot of social media tools that you need to master. Also, consumer behavior is constantly changing so you need to learn to adopt new market strategies. 

Those are just the basics! If you still find yourself lacking the skills to do so, my final piece of advice is that you open yourself to the digital marketing world. Check out companies and ads that are viral. Study and learn what makes them viral, what made them click. For example, Instagram stories are just 15 seconds but it generates sales. There are a lot of training articles and videos and how to become one, never stop learning! Just like my previous article, I would also suggest a paid course to totally immerse your self in the world of social media marketing. You can do it!