SMM manager: who is it, and what are his responsibilities

SMM (Social Media Marketing) is an effective marketing tool for business promotion and attracting a loyal target audience. On the public pages of the brand, experts publish news about the company, thematic longreads about its activities or products, advice to readers, and more. Creative, high-quality, and helpful content attracts interested users and sells a service or product. In addition, it works for the future and for creating a positive image of the company. However, just posting on social networks is not enough. SMM is a complex profession that requires some marketing knowledge and many practical skills.

Who is an SMM specialist: the profession of SMM manager

SMM specialist is a new profession that is not taught at the university yet. Usually, it is chosen by people with marketing or PR education because this is the basis required to work in this field. However, there are also many successful self-taught people with innate marketing flair.

Main responsibilities of the SMM manager

SMM manager (Social Media Manager) is a person who promotes a brand, company, or product on social networks. His responsibilities include:

• developing a promotion strategy;
• regular content filling of client groups and pages;
• constant tracking and moderation of pages;
• organization and implementation of advertising campaigns in social networks.

A social media manager attracts subscribers, encourages people to communicate, organizes and conducts competitions, knows how to respond competently to criticism, and works with targeted advertising.

This profession is at the intersection of marketing and IT, so an SMM manager must have high computer literacy, know marketing communication strategies, be able to work in graphic editors and various online applications, and quickly learn new tools. In SMM, everything changes at the speed of light, so a social media manager must have an open and flexible mind and advanced analytics skills. Later in the article, we will talk about this in more detail.

What does an SMM manager do

In short, the SMM specialist creates and designs communities and public pages for business on social networks, fills them with content — posts with text, photos, and videos, links to the site — moderates, and advertises on social networks.

Regardless of the direction of the business or project, the work of the social media manager consists of several stages:

• analysis of the niche and competitors;
• tracking the company’s image on social networks, strategy development;
• creating a content plan;
• writing texts for posts according to the content plan;
• preparation of creative materials (photos, videos, graphics) for posts;
• filling the page with content according to plan;
• page moderation, work with comments, reviews, and criticism.

When creating a business page, an SMM manager prepares a description and cover (avatar) and menu, designs the necessary sections and elements and puts external links to the company’s website or other brand pages. The fob of an SMM manager is to publish news about the company and niche, build a dialogue with the user and involve him in the sales funnel. SMM is useful for businesses with a long sales cycle, where it takes a long time to prepare and warm up a potential customer for a long time to buy or place an order. Before working directly with the client’s page, the manager studies the project, market, competitors, and their positioning on social networks in detail. Then, based on the analysis, the manager creates a strategy for promoting your project.

When compiling a promotion strategy, the specialist considers the social networks relevant to your project, the integration of SMM into the overall marketing strategy, the positioning of the company, and the style of communication with subscribers. For this, the manager determines the portrait of the target audience, which employees will be involved in the work, and which tools will be used. In addition, the specialist must consider the budget that the client can allocate for advertising. The specialist must coordinate all key issues with the client and, if necessary, adjust them in the process.

The content plan for a specified period should contain information about the headings, topics of publications, their content, frequency, and time of publication. To perform it, the SMM manager himself writes or processes the relevant texts and either prepares visual creatives himself or connects a full-time designer, if it is an agency. In addition to educational, useful, and entertaining content, the plan includes publications about corporate and industry events dedicated to significant dates, holidays, and more.

It is also worth noting that the responsibilities of such an employee include tracking news about the client’s business niche, constant monitoring and analysis of competitors’ activities, and tracking and rapid response to global trends. The social media manager must be ready to urgently prepare and publish sudden posts in addition to the content plan. For example, you should inform subscribers about sudden changes in the company’s work schedule. You cannot miss such information.

In addition to filling the pages with content, the social media specialist also works on attracting subscribers. The specialist creates «viral» publications: unusual, unique, and often humorous material, which the subscriber is willing to share and thus attracts new users to the page. The second way to attract subscribers is to collaborate with other pages on the same or similar topics. It’s usually a mutually beneficial free promotion, but in some large communities, advertising is only paid. And another very effective way to promote the page and attract the audience is paid posts in the feed or targeted advertising on social networks.

Let’s talk about the development of advertising campaigns and the work with targeted advertising separately. Sometimes other employees work on this, but often these two activities are the responsibility of the SMM manager. Despite the external simplicity, setting up targeted advertising, constantly monitoring its effectiveness, and, if necessary, making changes require a lot of time, attention, and analytical mind.

One of the functions of the SMM manager is community management — choosing topics for a conversation with subscribers, supporting discussions, and reputation management. SMM managers collect feedback, work with opinion leaders, post positive feedback from customers, work with negativity and prevent conflict situations.

The SMM manager also organizes and conducts contests as part of community promotion. He creates posts, engages users through all available channels, and works with those who wind likes or voices and bots. At the end of the activity, the specialist analyzes it.

At the end of each period, the SMM manager reports on the results of promotion and the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns. The specialist also regularly submits content plans for the upcoming period for approval. The SMM manager uses various internal and external analytics tools to report and adjust the work.

SMM specialist skills: what a social media specialist should know and be able to do

Such an employee must know the capabilities of different social networks — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, and others, understand their differences and know the specifics of each. It is necessary to choose the right platform for promotion.

An SMM manager needs to be able to work with advertising exchanges on social networks and know the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. It will help you avoid wasting advertising budgets. An SMM manager also needs to be able to work with cross-posting and postponed posting services. An SMM manager needs to be a copywriter a little, as he will have to write texts for publications in different styles, depending on the brand’s positioning. And to write these texts easily and quickly.

The SMM specialist is responsible for skills in the photo, video, and graphic editors. He does not have to be a cool pro, but he must at least be able to process the materials to reduce them to a single style chosen for the project page. And designers work on complex visuals. In addition, some businesses require the organization of photo and video shooting for social networks. The SMM specialist must have experience working with stock photo services and be able to quickly find the necessary and quality content, understand the licensing conditions, and buy it if necessary.

To organize the work of all project participants, the SMM manager must have management skills, business correspondence and communication skills. However, a manager can gain these skills with experience. It is also important to know and understand people, namely psychology and neuromarketing (the science of how and why people make purchasing decisions).

A good SMM specialist is a passionate person who is always in touch,  monitors the project, is always ready to respond to comments, keeps up the conversation, and solves emergencies.

Why do you need an SMM specialist

As you have already seen, the SMM specialist has many responsibilities and tasks. Everything that an SMM manager does comes down to creating a brand image and a loyal audience, attracting customers, and increasing sales. And, of course, saving the owner’s time. It takes a lot of time to perform the tasks of an SMM manager on your own: generate ideas for publications, design visuals, hold contests, and respond to comments. And with all this work on the product and development of the company. It is not just difficult but impossible if the basis of your business is the sale of physical goods and services. The SMM manager professionally performs all this work. The specialist will provide you with representation in social networks and business promotion even with a minimal budget, the growth of a loyal audience, and, as a result, sales growth.

Order an individual consultation at the Lanet CLICK agency to find out if your business needs promotion on social networks and get information about prices for SMM!