Have you ever heard that social media is all about what you post? We’re on social media a lot and we can tell you with certainty that creating posts for each social media channel is just one of the many things we do to grow an organic social media presence. We dedicate this post to all of the people that think social media managers just spend their time creatively brainstorming about what to post. This stereotyped profession, in reality, contains countless duties, so much so that many brands eventually end up hiring social media teams that include specialized positions for all of these duties.

Don’t get us wrong -- crafting high-quality social media content does take time and we’d LOVE to see more brands devote even more time to create unique, channel-specific experiences. However, creating content is just one of the countless duties a typical social media manager does to grow their social media audience organically.

Posting on social media channels is truly just the tip of the iceberg. A regularly updated strategy should be behind every post, and the performance of all posts should be analyzed to inform the strategy. On the engagement side, posts (both your own and posts from your community) should be engaged with, monitored, and used as a chance to build community. Social media is never something you should set and forget. Remember, it should always be social. Below, we’ve outlined the many roles of a typical social media manager.

Note: Because social media platforms change every day, so do the daily duties of a social media team. To that end, this is not a comprehensive list in any way. It’s merely to demonstrate that social media is much, much more than just creating and scheduling posts on social media channels.

This Post is Now an Infographic!

Strategy

Defining channel-specific posting strategies (defining programming by post type and topics) and updating at least on a quarterly basis with insights from data and audience feedback.
Ensuring that each channel provides a unique value to your audience that leverages the social media channel’s unique strength and features.
Setting up recurring processes to get feedback from your audience through surveys, interviews, and focus groups to ensure whatever you program on your social media channels is as valuable and relevant as possible to your audience.
Establishing and documenting a cohesive and consistent brand voice and tone. Continually updating the voice as trends and situations emerge.
Crafting a hashtag strategy using various hashtag tools for each social media channel, along with processes to update them at least quarterly.
Creating a diverse set of content regularly, defined by a content marketing strategy (if your business does not have a content creation department).
Defining a channel-specific engagement strategy with corresponding goals that includes customer service, crisis communications and scenario planning, updating FAQs and more. Ensuring moderation policies and channel-specific settings are up to date. Update with insights from data and audience feedback to ensure engagement is as effective and impactful as possible.
Collaborating with senior leadership to embed social media goals into the overall operations and strategic plans. Forecasting scenarios of social media investment and estimated results of brand recognition, referral traffic, and conversions (purchases, sign ups, etc).
Integrating social media backchannels and complimentary services within live events, product launches, specific campaigns, and more.
Optimizing handoff processes for customer service and sales teams.

Programming

Creating a content calendar that incorporates relevant events and audience needs.
Using a social media scheduling tool to draft and approve batched posts in bulk quantities.
- Specifically, research, prep, and craft any video, image, or gif series directed by the programming strategy.
Brainstorming real-time timely and trending content and complementary channel-specific social media posts.
Curating high-quality content from other sources that engage, uplift, and help your audience.
Following and anticipating trends and incorporating these trends into content and posts.
Collaborating with content teams (if applicable) to ensure the content they create is channel-specific and timely.

Engagement / Community Building

Responding daily to direct messages in each social media channel’s inboxes.
Banning people and deleting comments that violate your guidelines.
Deleting spam and notifying the channel of the spammer.
Updating moderation filters within channels so they proactively hide/delete comments that contain certain words.
Collaborating with the social media team to provide the best responses to complex interactions and questions.
Maintaining FAQ with typical responses and situations that occur to ensure its as up-to-date as possible.
Liking, commenting, following, and direct messaging with partners, customers, and influencers to establish supportive relationships with them.
Regularly following your target audience on all appropriate channels (we recommend you follow at least 50 people each week in the field of education, where brands are expected to listen, learn, and uplift educators).
Celebrate and acknowledge followers and active users daily.
Connecting your audience with other audience and community members, specific staff members, or experts.
Uplifting and celebrating employee posts that represent your product or brand in a humanizing way.
Using advanced listening tools to proactively respond to potential customer queries and research. Using image recognition software to engage with posts mentioning your brand (without directly mentioning your brand).
Listening and contributing to the dialogue in brand-aligned topics in social media.

Data Analysis

Consistently downloading and analyzing channel-specific native insights, programming and engagement tool insights, and Google Analytics (or comparable website analytics provider).
Collaborating regularly with the social media team to derive insights that will inform/update future programming and engagement strategies.
Establishing UTM encoding procedures. Update as needs arise.
Thoroughly understanding each social media user’s journey on your website. Collaborate with the development team to optimize channel-specific experiences that convert (conversion rate optimization).
Working alongside social media team to identify A/B programming tests to increase reach, engagement, and referral traffic.
Updating/creating goals in Google Analytics specifically for each social media channel.
Using analytics to begin to establish a specific customer lifetime value (CLV) of each social media channel.
Analyzing trends to inform future scenario planning, content planning, and engagement staffing/capacity.
Collaborating with the social media team to craft channel-specific programming and engagement goals monthly, quarterly, and annually.
Forecasting results with various scenarios based on previous trend analysis of native-specific channel data and Google analytics.
Monitoring and analyzing overall sentiment within each social media channel and sentiment analysis within each campaign, product line, topics, content type, or various tags.
Establish tagging criteria to monitor performance for each tag.
- Tags can help you segment data by topic, content type, campaign, and more.
Analyzing competitor programming, engagement, and overall performance.

Employee and Executive Training

Crafting social media guidelines with staff. Collaborate with lawyers, HR, and senior leadership to embed into the employee handbook.
Training teams/staff on appropriate social media usage. Ensuring they understand the social media guidelines of their organization.
Coaching individually with appropriate staff members learn how to use social media to listen, collaborate, and share.
Teaching all staff about the importance of social media to the organization and its current and anticipated benefits.
Representing social media needs and customer and potential customer voice in appropriate meetings.
Provide feedback to content development to entire content-specific needs are being met.
Coaching executive staff to leverage social media to become a thought leader.

We hope this list has started to paint a picture of just how complex a social media manager role can be and the various duties and tasks it encompasses. If you are a social media manager within a team of one, please use this post as an affirmation of EVERYTHING you do on a daily basis to grow your brand’s social media presence. What you do is nothing short of a miracle and it’s ok if you cannot get everything done as fast or as comprehensive as you’d like. Just keep going and keep learning. Lastly, if you see a category of tasks or any specific tasks we missed, please let us know on Twitter and we’re happy to update this post.