hey there latasha here i started my
freelance social media management
business sometime around 2014. it all
stemmed from a job post it actually
ended up being on upwork it was a blog
writing gig and over time it turned into
a freelance social media copywriting
position a couple years go by a couple
of day jobs get acquired and that little
hustle is a full-fledged side hustle so
i left i took the leap and started my
own business since leaving my day job
i've been able to double revenue in that
business year over year consistently and
i get to do a lot of really cool things
now like speaking and educating and
focusing more on some of the fun things
like creative video and strategy so i
wanted to start this series for those of
you who are looking to get started as a
social media manager and have big dreams
for your online business over this next
week i'll be uploading a new video both
on wednesday and on friday and i'll be
adding to this series over time as well
so be sure to turn the notifications on
to tune in to this free course content
today we're gonna answer the question
what a social media manager actually
even does
so i've got to be honest this job title
has changed and evolved so much over the
years the social media management role
can vary from company to company so my
best advice is to write down a list of
dream clients or dream jobs that you're
looking to get and stalk them a little
bit on linkedin look at their job
postings and see what they define as a
social media manager and what some of
the tools technologies and skills you
may need to have for those dream roles
but for this video i want to give an
overview of the work that i've done in
my career and that really starts with
strategy a social media manager needs to
be able to help develop a social media
strategy for a business and this is true
whether you're working as an
entrepreneur as a freelancer or as an
in-house social media manager yes you're
responsible for publishing the content
across different social platforms but in
order to do that you need to know which
platforms you need to be on in the first
place for example a tech company may be
a little bit more focused on a platform
like linkedin and twitter as opposed to
a cosmetics company which may do a
little bit better connecting with their
audience on a platform like instagram or
even tick tock that's one of the
questions that a social media strategy
should answer is which platforms should
we be on but you also need to know who
you're talking to which is incredibly
important this is something that you can
ask your client for or your job for do
they have an ideal customer avatar or a
buyer persona drawn up meaning do they
know the ideal person that they're
looking to reach with their products or
services if not i'll leave a couple of
resources for you down below on buyer
persona and customer avatars a social
media strategy should also tell you the
types of content that you're going to
post you should have some type of a map
if we say that we're going to post on
linkedin well there were a ton of
different
content types that i could publish on
there i could write linkedin articles i
could post photos i could post live
videos or regular videos i could post
text posts i could engage with people
via dms there are so many options just
on one platform so mapping out the types
of content that you'll engage in and
which topics will be included in that
content i like to use what i call
content pillars in general a brand
shouldn't have any more than two to
three key content pillars and i'll give
you an example of this let's say that
i'm working with a taco stand they want
to be known for their premium organic
ingredients they're not like your
average taco stand they offer vegan
options and farm to table vegetables and
things like that so for that taco
company i'm probably going to establish
one of their pillars or main themes that
they use as organic food i might talk
about why organic food is
arguably better for you and why their
customers should care that their food is
organic
now i may also focus on the physical
location let's say that they are in
dallas texas so i'm going to share
happenings around dallas i'm going to
support other local business owners in
dallas and engage with local influencers
and the community
and lastly maybe the owner has a passion
project if you will and they have a
charity element to their business they
give a few cents off of every taco
that's sold to an environmental
awareness fund so i'm also going to talk
about the mission of the company and
saving the environment and how eating
clean and organic and vegan can help
minimize our impact so that's just one
example and it's not to say that we
couldn't ever post about anything else
we might occasionally post employee
snapshots and share our employees and
our team working in a little bit about
them but it's not going to be one of
those main pillars the main message that
we want to get across on our social
profiles now your social media strategy
should also include some goals and some
kpis kpis stands for key performance
indicators and it refers to metrics or
analytics that you'll pull every month
usually
and they will help indicate the success
of your social profiles so for that taco
company if their main goal was awareness
meaning they just wanted people to know
more about their business about their
mission about their values then i would
choose an awareness-focused metric to
center that around maybe that would be
reach meaning total number of accounts
that i was able to reach through
instagram or whichever platforms we
choose to be on or maybe its total
number of followers which does give us
some indication of how well our
messaging is resonating with those new
audience members now after you develop
that strategy it's also important to be
able to help optimize existing social
media platforms and websites or set them
up if they don't have anything for brand
new businesses you're going to be on the
setup side you're going to need to know
how to
set up a brand new page
give proper access to the owner or
whoever your key point of a contact is
you probably don't ever want to be the
only person in charge of a social
profile just in case something happens
to yours or to you personally and
someone else needs to get in if you are
optimizing existing profiles you should
be able to know how to do a quick audit
meaning that you're checking out their
profile picture their banner images
their bios and about section any of that
key profile information and comparing it
against their website or their brand kit
if they've been able to provide you with
one and you want to make sure that
everything is on brand it's sized
appropriately you don't have any cover
or banner photos that are stretched
oddly you want to be sure again for this
taco stand or any type of brick and
mortar that if they have a facebook page
you have the hours of operation listed
on that page you have the contact and
online ordering information set up if
you're working with an e-commerce
company you'll want to make sure that
you have instagram shopping set up or
any type of tracking pixels that you may
need like the facebook pixel or the
linkedin insight tag for example and at
minimum i would recommend asking your
client or your job if they have google
analytics set up and if they can add you
to their account now i know all of these
pixels and analytics might sound like
i'm speaking a completely different
language i certainly did not know what
these things were when i first got
started but basically what they do is
enable you to track activity that
happens beyond social media that
actually happens on the clients websites
and this can be really important for
reporting purposes and advertising
purposes so it's better to just have
them on there even if you don't quite
know how to use them yet or you're not
always pulling that data it's better to
be safe than sorry and get it on there
if you can now the next thing and
probably the most
well-known thing that social media
managers do is actually publish content
and create content calendars for their
clients or for their companies they go
through and map out what content will be
posted on which days and they will
schedule it out or post it manually now
i get this question all the time what is
my favorite scheduling tool and to be
honest they are very very personal i
personally really like a tool called
co-schedule and i also just use
facebook's native scheduler to schedule
facebook and instagram posts and i also
do a lot of organic manual posting just
because it is a good reminder for me to
engage with the content and check
inboxes while i'm in there so it really
is a personal thing most social media
management systems give you at least a
15 or 30 day free trial so i'd recommend
trying out a few and seeing which one
you like best but hold on let's back up
what content are we even posting for the
sake of this video i will be talking
about three key content types original
content
repurposed content and curated content
original content is exactly what it
sounds like these are going to be images
videos photos designs that either you
create or somebody on the team your
clients team your jobs team actually
creates if you're working with a larger
company a lot of times they'll have
creative departments either
photographers videographers designers
who can provide you that content but i
would be lying if i said that there
weren't times when i was actually
creating the stuff myself particularly
if you're working with smaller companies
mom and pop shops solopreneurs anybody
who might be on a bit of a tight budget
or just have a very small boot shop team
so in my opinion it is important to have
a bit of those skills just basic photo
editing video clipping and cutting
designing in a tool like canva and
really customizing you can also choose
as a social media manager that you're
not very talented in the design and
creative department and therefore you'll
only work with clients who have original
content for you to pull from that's
totally okay repurpose content is
content that i might find on the
client's website so maybe they have a
podcast or they have a youtube channel
or they have webinars or they have blog
posts all of those things are things
that i can pull and create new content
with i can trim down a webinar pull a
bunch of one-minute snippets for
instagram or i can caption some of the
videos and post them on linkedin i can
take some of their blog posts and turn
them into captions for image content or
video content so these are all things
that i recommend scrubbing through and
just kind of creating a document where
you can pull potential content ideas
that you may want to use on social media
and then kind of going ahead and
repurposing some of that some of my
favorite tools for repurposing are a
tool called headliner which enables you
to create little waveforms and audio
snippets i also love canva it's really
easy to take a screenshot and really
jazz it up with text and you can also
edit videos on canva so i definitely
recommend learning how to use that tool
now like i said you don't have to create
the content you don't have to work with
clients who require you to be an
original content creator if that's not
your sweet spot but i still do think
it's important for a social media
manager to have some type of insight and
directive over what types of content are
being produced a ceo
may not know how to create an instagram
reel so it's your job as a social media
manager to provide them training or to
provide them documentation or to just
help them out to learn the best
practices of creating these new content
types that might be a little bit foreign
to them for some of my clients that are
very far away where i can't go on site
to take images or videos for them i'll
just create a shot list or a wish list
i'll say hey i would love it if you took
a picture of the taco stand i'd love it
if you took a picture of the ceo can you
also take a picture of dallas the
skyline and things like that and get
those images over to me so that i have
something to work with for the next
month's content calendar one of the last
pieces here is engagement there are
certain amounts of just ongoing work
that you have to continue to do
unfortunately this is not the kind of
job where you just schedule things out
and leave it be you really do have to
engage what does that mean well there's
two types of engagement there's inbound
and there's outbound
inbound engagement would refer to any
comments or direct messages that come
through that you didn't really try for
they just sort of happened upon you
through either the hashtags that you're
using the location tags that you're
using maybe you were tagged in something
by somebody else
maybe they just found you from somewhere
else on the web they searched you up on
instagram or linkedin or tick tock and
you're getting these comments and
engagements well it's really important
to respond to them so
making sure that you're going in every
single day if you can and responding to
things hurting comments stimulating
conversation as best as you can
engagement really helps with the
algorithm which the algorithm is just a
fancy way of saying it's the system that
dictates how often and which pieces of
content are being shown to your
followers and to the greater social
media community
in short you want to be active you want
to be consistent these are all things
that make the algorithm really like you
and make it a lot more likely for your
content to show up for the people who
need to see it so inbound engagement
responding to that stuff is really
important but there's also outbound
engagement and this is gonna tie back to
that ideal client that buyer persona
that customer avatar again i'm going to
go ahead and use this taco example
let's say that this taco example they
really want to reach health conscious
vegans in dallas a lot of people just
think of them as your average taco shop
and they don't really know
that this taco company has vegan
sustainable organic options so what i
would do is i would look at hashtags
like dallas vegans or eat organic or
dallas healthy food or something like
that and go after these different
hashtags look through the hashtags and
start leaving meaningful comments start
following influencers or thought leaders
in that space i may also look through
location tags of similar restaurants
maybe there is a healthy vegan
restaurant that is in the area so i'll
click on their location tag and start
doing something similar i'll start
liking and commenting on people who have
checked in there and that strategy is
the same across social platforms by the
way i know i'm using an instagram
example here but you could totally do
something similar on linkedin maybe you
don't have location tags on linkedin but
you do have hashtags on linkedin you
also can look up companies so if i
wanted to reach employees of a
particular restaurant or a particular
industry then i could search for them
using linkedin search and connect with
them send them a message and say hey
you're a restaurant down the street we
should totally create a collaboration a
collaborative taco if you will and so on
and you should also be reviewing your
success this is really how you continue
to see success happen is you look at
your analytics pretty much all of the
social platforms have some type of
in-app analytics that you can look
through look through your top performing
posts and start to look for trends maybe
all of your top performing posts were of
the food themselves meaning you need to
take more food photography or maybe even
encourage your client to hire a
professional food photographer or maybe
they were all real so you need to go all
in and create a bunch of reals
maybe you get the most website clicks
when you post a quote or some type of
text based post about being vegan and
organic and things like that
so look for trends so that can help you
inform your future content calendar and
continue to improve from there it's
always a great idea to include your
client or your manager on these reports
as well putting together reports enables
you to really show your client what
you've been doing and what kind of
success you're seeing i always say
social media is one of those things that
can be very out of sight out of mind and
for people who are not trained in this
and not spent the time that you're
spending on courses and learning
it's not something that is necessarily
easy to understand and i can't blame
them i don't know anything about making
organic vegan tacos really so you are
the expert you should be providing that
information to them in a monthly report
and of course if you're a freelancer
you're on your own business you're going
to need to do other admin things like
generating leads providing customer
service meeting with your clients
invoicing maybe hiring help and if you
work in-house there are probably some
other duties that may get sprinkled in
there as well but overall those are some
of the key social media management
responsibilities and what we actually do
all day believe it or not it's not just
play on instagram or talk to people on
facebook i'll go ahead and drop a free
social media strategy template down in
the description box if you want to snag
that and don't forget to tune in for
episode 2 of this series on wednesday
you can subscribe and turn on the bell
notifications so you don't miss it and i
hope this was helpful if you have any
questions drop them down below and i
will see you next time bye
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