Hiring A Social Media Manager: A Guide

What is a Social Media Manager?

A Social Media Manager is in control of managing, monitoring, executing, assessing, and filtering a brand’s or an individual’s social media accounts, and at the same time promoting and expanding their social media presence as well. Arguably, social media managers serve as the “voice” of your company on social media networking platforms.

Apart from the more common roles of social media managers, which are to maintain, manage, and create brand promotions, they are also keen on understanding social media best practices and indicators of trends. Furthermore, they are also skilled in utilizing different marketing tools in order to be more effective when crafting marketing strategies as well as to be able to develop novel content regularly. 

In addition, responding and engaging to comments and inquiries accordingly while continuing to be innovative in their ideas are also among the roles of a social media manager. Lastly, social media managers not only work alone but are also capable of collaborating with other creative departments —  developing campaigns to generate more traffic and coming up with lead generation strategies.

Reasons to Hire a Social Media Manager and Their Roles

1. Keeps you relevant to your target audiences.

When you hire a social media manager, they help you keep track of the latest trends across all platforms and, at the same time, align your marketing strategies if ever there are algorithm changes. In connection, hire social media managers who are open-minded when it comes to analyzing trends, can easily adapt, and apply those in your social media pages.

Whichever social media platform is on the rise and in a boom, your social media manager should be able to create a presence there. TikTok, for instance, is still massively received from 2020 till the present, so if you deem your target audience to be avid users of the platform, then you should cement your presence there as well.

The moment you hire social media managers, they will keep you abreast with all the developments, trends, and forecasts within your industry. They can be very helpful especially when there comes a need to tweak some social media campaigns.

2. Develops you an effective social media strategy.

If you wish your posts to have a wider reach, then hire social media managers. They can see to it that will have a social media strategy in place, varying across different platforms. They will also ensure that your posts be of high quality and value-adding to your followers so that they will have reasons to continue to be updated by your page.

3. Spearheads on the engagement and attracting of customers.

Attracting engagements from your followers, converting them to leads, and eventually gaining sales from them are among the prime reasons why you should hire social media managers.

It is important that there is consistent engagement from you to your followers, whether it be in a group or page. Since social media is essentially an interactive space and platform, there have to be interactions from you so your customers know that you value them and care about them. Responding to your follower’s input, whether favorable or not, is critical and another approach to demonstrate that your company is keen on taking their feedback seriously.

Hire social media specialists for your small business because they can monitor your company’s social media accounts to gather insights that could benefit you. A competent social media manager will understand all the factors of providing excellent content on the correct platform in order to engage more, connect, and acquire the loyalty of potential consumers.

4. Saves you a lot of time.

When running a business, especially if you’re still in the phase of starting out, or even if you’ve already managed to scale up, you are expected to work on many tasks. And as much as maintaining a social media presence is equally important, there have to be other more urgent matters that need to be attended to. Thus, hire social media managers. A greatly put together social media campaign did not just happen overnight, or even in a short period of time — it demands regular posting of quality materials, consistent customer engagement, and constant updates — so, we cannot possibly expect you to do those things altogether along with all your other tasks, right? Hire social media managers as they will save you so much time since they are focused on creating content for you that is tailored to your page’s needs, more so, they can even schedule when to put it out ahead of time.

5. Tracks your marketing efforts and analyze its data.

A social media manager is proficient with social media analytics and understands what they signify. They can assess the effect of your postings, whether it has increased its reach, had a lot of engagements, and all the best possible time to post. Without analyzing data from previous postings, there would be no way of knowing whether your social media marketing strategy or your campaigns are effective or not. Being able to hire social media managers to be in control of your efforts might help you better your current campaign.

How to Hire a Social Media Manager?

Step 1: Figure out your business needs

Before anything else, when you hire social media managers for small businesses, you need to understand that they can’t possibly adhere to all your requests. The precise demands of your company will ultimately dictate who you should hire as social media managers and what responsibilities they’ll be accountable for.

Ask yourself whether you will be needing a social media manager for the long run or not. If yes, then it would be better to hire a full-time employee or a freelancer with a fixed period for you. But if it is only for a specific campaign, then it’s wiser to just hire a part-timer. 

More importantly, when you hire social media managers, be specific about the things that you want them to accomplish. You should be aware of the needs of your social media channels in order to hire the appropriate social media manager.

However, if you need someone to manage numerous channels other than the typical social media management tasks, such as email marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, and the likes, then it would be best to hire a virtual assistant agency like SmartVAs.

Step 2: Identify the qualifications that you want for a Social Media Manager

Utilizing social media as a marketing platform has always been competitive since it is free to the public, so a lot of big and small business owners have leveraged it. Thus, it is expected that a good social media manager would have invested in taking courses and obtaining certifications to further their knowledge on social media management. You may ask them for their additional credentials. Moreover, upon the interview, ask them you may ask them about real-world scenarios with regard to social media management, probe their experiences and the contents of their portfolio.

Step 3: Find your suited Social Media Manager

You may now begin your search for a social media manager once you have identified the qualifications, skills, and experience you require. There are two approaches to locating the ideal applicant. 

The first approach is to publicize the position and invite interested people to apply. You’ll need to create a thorough job description that describes all the responsibilities and scope of the social media managing job. Publish the job opening on your website or your different social media platforms such as your LinkedIn page.

You may also opt to post your job opening on third-party job boards where social media managers are on the lookout for job opportunities. These platforms offer a straightforward method to look through listings, making them a useful and supplementary choice for hiring a social media manager. 

How much do you need to pay to hire a Social Media Manager?

You have the option of working with a social media management agency or a virtual assistance agency that will require you to compensate monthly. On the other hand, you can also hire social media managers who are freelancers and be charged per hour. 

SmartVas will provide you with a team of seasoned and competent virtual assistants at the price of one. Your virtual assistant team from SmartVAs can be composed of social media managers, content creators, SEO specialists, email marketers, and essentially all your digital needs. By delegating some of your workloads to them, you will be able to focus on more important things in order to scale up your business.