Social Media Manager: Start an In-Demand Career

Do you have what it takes to excel in social media management? A social media manager is a must-have for brands, many of which are willing to pay good money for an experienced professional who can maximize their engagement and follower counts. And if you’ve got an interest in social media marketing and a knack for posting killer content, it’s worth looking into as a career—especially now, when demand is higher than ever.

Whether you want to join a brand’s payroll, go solo as a freelancer, or start your own social media management agency, here’s what you need to know to get your career off the ground, including a quick look at social media manager rates.

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What Is a Social Media Manager?
Social Media Manager Job Description
How to Become a Social Media Manager
Average Social Media Manager Salary
Tips for Landing Social Media Manager Jobs
Develop Your Social Media Manager Skills

What Is a Social Media Manager?

A social media manager is a marketing professional who plans, executes, and oversees a brand’s presence on social channels. Depending on the size of the company, a social media manager may be tasked with coordinating content across a team of copywriters, editors, and graphic designers, or they may be singularly responsible for both creating content and optimizing its performance.

In either case, it’s the social media manager’s responsibility to ensure that brands are firing on all cylinders when it comes to their social media strategy, and there’s a lot of work involved in making that happen.

Social Media Manager Job Description

Long gone are the days when brands relied on unpaid interns to run their social media pages. Today, there is an entire field of marketing pros making sure that every post, tweet, video, and comment is on point. There’s a lot to gain if they get it right, plus a lot to lose if they don’t.

The first thing to know about how to be a social media manager is that you’ll be expected to wear a lot of hats. Most brands are engaged on multiple social media platforms at once, and even then, posting content is only a small portion of what the job entails.

So, what does a social media manager do? Here are some of the core tasks associated with the role:

Content strategy: You’ll need to be able to think high-level—and well in advance—if you want to be a social media manager. It’s common to plan out week’s, month’s, or even a year’s worth of content at once, much of which must be aligned with a brand’s broader digital marketing campaigns and strategy.
Team coordination: As with most manager jobs, there’s a good chance you’ll be overseeing not just your own work but the world of one or more additional team members. This usually includes a writer and graphic designer who will create the copy and image for each post.
Data and analytics: Social media management is a heavily data-driven field. You’ll need to be comfortable using software tools and data dashboards to figure out what’s working and what’s not. You’ll also need to be able to pull actionable insights out of that information and use it to guide your next steps.
Social listening and trend forecasting: Social media managers must have their ears to the ground and their eyes to the screen to get ahead of big trends and conversations. This means staying aware of all brand mentions and joining the discussion when necessary. It also means following social media trends and knowing when and how to jump in.

From TikTok to Twitter, being a social media manager means staying both up-to-date and a step ahead of a brand’s social presence. And when there’s a social media emergency (yes, they do happen), it’s the managers who need to be on-call and ready to put a solution into place.

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How to Become a Social Media Manager

What qualifications do you need? The answer is none, though having a marketing degree and/or a proven history of social media marketing success will go a long way toward getting you a high-paying gig.

There are a lot of people interested in how to be a social media manager, and a lot of companies looking for smart and savvy experts to join their teams. And while the most valuable thing you can bring to the table is your skills, a degree or experience will help you stand out from the competition. It could also be a requirement of the specific job you’re applying for.

Get a Communications or Marketing Degree

A bachelor’s degree can’t hurt, especially when it comes to snagging an entry-level role that you can work your way up from. Most helpful here is a degree in marketing or communications; however, a writing degree, business degree, or journalism degree could also be a good way to go.

Pursuing a formal education offers a number of benefits for people who want to be a social media manager. Most notably, perhaps, it opens up the doors to internships and other opportunities that could help you establish a network and get where you’re trying to go faster.

If you’d rather learn on the job, seek out junior roles in social media marketing and start building your skill set from there. Relevant positions like social media content creator, social media analyst, or social media marketing assistant will all work to prepare you for a future as an on-staff or freelance social media manager. And just like going to school for a marketing or writing degree, they’ll likely lead you to people and opportunities you wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.

Average Social Media Manager Salary

Social media manager rates vary by company, but the average salary for the role is $65,112 per year, according to Glassdoor, with social media managers on the high end taking home closer to $194,000 per year.

Of course, freelance rates will look a bit different, since many freelancers manage pages for more than one brand client at a time. Other factors to consider include location, experience level, and specialties. Pay structures may play into overall salary as well, with some social media managers making more or less depending on the performance of their accounts.

If you’re trying to set your freelance rates, look at industry averages to get an idea of what you should charge. Hootsuite notes that, in 2021, average rates for freelancers in social media management ranged anywhere from $20 to $30 per hour to $100 to $250 per hour, depending on experience.

Tips for Landing Social Media Manager Jobs

In social media or otherwise, most people don’t start out in a managerial position. You’ll almost certainly need to work your way up to the role over time, but there are a few things that you can (and should) do as you go to increase your chances of eventually scoring that top job.

Learn as Much as You Can

Social media is an ever-changing field of marketing, and it’s important that you’re well-versed in the latest and greatest trends, tools, and techniques. Dig into platform-specific practices like the best time to post on TikTok or Instagram, familiarize yourself with social media workflow applications like Trello and Falcon, follow along with social media marketing news and algorithmic updates, and generally engage with anything that you might need to know to call yourself a social media expert. The need for learning will never stop, but the more you know from the get-go, the better.

Try your hand at freelancing and start establishing yourself in the industry. There are many smaller brands with limited budgets that are in need of someone who can manage their social media accounts on a freelance basis, and while you might not make as much as you would working for a big name, you will gain experience you can leverage into more lucrative gigs.

To diversify your freelance income and pick up even more experience, consider offering other social media and digital marketing services to clients. All of it can be valuable, and you never know what future hiring teams will be looking for.

You’ll need a deep understanding of social media platforms in order to succeed in this career. And the best way to get that understanding is to actually engage with them. Put effort into managing your own accounts, and try to approach your personal brand just as you would a client’s brand. You’ll get to try things out without the pressure of needing to hit certain performance goals, and you’ll get to play around with various features that could come in handy for you later on.

Develop Your Social Media Manager Skills

A great social media manager is a jack-of-all-trades who not only knows what to do but understands why it needs to be done. There are a lot of skills involved in that, and you’ll want to develop all of them as you set your sights on a career in social media management.

Skills that you’ll want to work on include:

Writing and editing marketing and social media copy
Search engine optimization
Digital media research
Data analytics
Social media software tools

Follow the advice above to figure out exactly where to start, and aim to continually put your skills to the test as you forge ahead toward a career as a social media manager.

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