So you need someone to handle your social media accounts and they have to be able to monitor the activity as well as reply to queries and comments on these too. You believe that this post is a piece of cake and is going to be easy to handle, right? How difficult is it anyway to take care of accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, right?
As it turns out, being a social media manager is not as easy as it may sound. Yes, you have to monitor and handle accounts on various social media sites, and yes, these can be linked together with the use of tools that make it somewhat easier to handle the many accounts that you need to monitor. What may not be obvious is that even when there are tools to make things a little easier and these social networks are being used by many quite easily, what you are doing is something that is not for fun. What you are doing is actually advertising, marketing, personal relations, and reputation management rolled into one.
This is why a social media manager has to have some qualities that make them ideal for the job. Here are some of the skills, traits and attributes that are needed:
Solid writing skills – a social media manager has to post updates, comments, blurbs, and many more on these social media sites. They should be adept at stringing together words that people will want to read, and skilled at creating responses that people will appreciate. They also need to be able to get an idea across effectively even when the number of characters they can use to do so is limited.
Can take the punches – if a person in this position is not thick skinned and can take whatever comes their way with aplomb, then they are not right for the job. A social media manager can and should be able to take the heat when it happens. They also need to be able to deflect any blows that the company takes when negative comments and complaints come in by way of these social media platforms.
Innovative and quick thinking – things happen fast on social media, so a person handling such a position needs to be quick on their feet and has to have an inventive brain as well. Problems can escalate fast on these platforms, particularly when people misunderstand or are misinformed, and they take this out on your company via these accounts that you have. Quick thinking as well as being innovative can help prevent extensive damage being made to your company’s reputation, and can help keep the sharks at bay, so to speak.
People person – since a social media manager will need to deal with a lot of people, and to deal with them in a nice way, they need to be someone who enjoys having to interact with people day in and day out. This is essentially a post that requires you to handle people from different walks of life, different demographics, and different dispositions. This means you need to be able to handle almost everyone who happens to post a comment, question, or accusation on your pages, and with diplomacy at that.
Apart from these, the perfect social media manager should be able to learn how to use various social media platforms with ease, can multi-task when required, and knows how to manage everything while trying to live a normal life. Managing social media accounts is not your typical 9-to-5 job, since you do need to be able to answer queries in a timely manner, so the person who gets into such a post should be able to get to any of these platforms with a suitable reply in 8 hours or less.
