How I’d break out the role of a Social Media Manager

What’s up y’all 👋🏽

Today I’ll be breaking out the role of the Social Media Manager.

It’s a highly debated topic but I’m just sharing from personal experiences (both as a Social Media Lead and hiring/managing Social Media Managers).

A few more editions you might enjoy too:

Ok, enough shilling.

Let’s dive into this week’s edition.

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This guide is intended for startups but can be modified for hiring a Social Media Manager at almost any stage.

Conversely, if you are a Social Media Manager, you can use this to guide some of workflow (or pushback on leadership if they are stretching you too thin across different priorities).

How I’d break out the role of a Social Media Manager:

1/ Content Creation (30%)

• Creating content for 2 or 3 social platforms at most

• 30% of time might sound like a lot but when you consider that this includes multiple platforms & formats, then it makes more sense

• For example, this can include writing 500 word long form posts, 10 tweet long threads, witty short form posts, funny memes, simple videos, and optimizing each piece of content for each individual platform (vs just copy and pasting, which I see a lot of brands do)

• Anything more than 3 social platforms is usually too much for one person to manage (unless support will be provided in terms of video creation, social design, or platform management)

• Remember, great content drives growth across every aspect (impressions, engagement, following, brand sentiment, clicks, conversions, signups, etc.) so this should be a top priority

2/ Community Management (30%)

• Replying to all mentions across each social platform

• Reviewing and replying to DMs if open to the public

• Doing outbound community management by joining the conversation with others in the feed (also includes simply browsing and liking content from others in your niche)

• Building relationships with key influencers, brand advocates, and customers by engaging with their content

• Surfacing trends and general sentiment to the leadership team

• Remember, great community management is just as important as your content itself (but is still deprioritized at most companies because it happens behind the scenes and not as easy to measure as content performance)

3/ Admin Work & Corporate Bureaucracy (20%)

• The role of the Social Media Manager is one of the few roles that seems to get included in every major aspect of the company

• This includes product launches, growth, customer service, comms, compliance, brand, legal, events, content, and more

• ^ Because of this, it requires a great deal of project management (and time management in general) to avoid being drowned in the countless emails, meetings, and instant messages

• I’ve personally had stretches of time when I’d wake up to a dozen slack messages from different internal partners, a hundred emails (being cc’d on a ton), and 6 hours of back to back meetings on the calendar — which can make it tough to get the actual work done

• Part of the role is being able to push back, learn which meetings are crucial to attend, and be able to switch from admin mode to creative workflow mode quickly (but more on this in the 5th bucket below)

4/ Strategy & Campaign Management (15%)

• Building & executing the overarching social strategy

• Creating individual platform strategies (X, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)

• Building & executing social campaigns for product launches and other one-off launches (events, conferences, etc.)

• Social reporting after big launches

• Recurring mini reports on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis

• Quick updates on how content is performing (or not) and hypothesis on why this is the outcome (plus suggestions on how to experiment moving forward)

• In depth annual reports

5/ Context Switching & Getting into a Creative Flow (5%)

• The Social Media Manager role is highly creative and can be tough to do great creative work when you are in hours of meetings or have tons of email to go through on daily basis

• I’ve found there to be a bit of a lag when getting into creative flow due to the constant context switching

• If it were completely up to me, I’d block off hours to do this type of work but when working with many cross-functional partners, it’s inevitable that there will be meetings and inbound communications that break this creative flow

• It might sound odd to allocate 5% of time to this but I’m just speaking from experience doing social at multiple companies at different stages

As you can see, the role of a Social Media Manager is both simple and highly complex at the same time.

I think the more you can simplify, remove unnecessary bureaucracy/approvals, and admin work, the better the output (in terms of content, performance, growth, and brand sentiment).

If I were running social for a startup, I’d choose just 2-3 social platforms where my audience was most active, try to get creative support (video/design), and spend most of my time growing our brand while driving traffic to our top business priority (downloads, signups, sales, etc.)

Best of luck and shoot me a tweet if you have any questions - @ishverduzco

If you’re finding value in this newsletter, I’d really appreciate a share on social!

Thank you for your support!

Ish

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What I loved this week:

Starter Story: I made 30M with my side project (Epic Gardening)