The social media industry is at its nascent stage and it is only exploring and shaping itself up as we go. In a scenario like this there are no well-defined job profiles. However , some job profiles stand out and are of requirement to a social media agency or a brand. These are some of the most crucial job profiles in the social media industry and no social media team is complete without these.
I am listing them down here, so on the basis of your skills and interests you can look them up.
Copywriters
Social media is a communication platform for brands to reach out to their consumers. The brand needs to communicate in the most effective way in order to win the loyalty and trust of its consumers.
So to keep the communication interesting and engaging, a copywriter is a must have in the team. As a copywriter, your role will be to create textual content that not only resonates with the brand's public image but would also be interesting to read for the consumer.
You will be creating Facebook updates, tweets and possibly some blog posts too. A brand usually requires 2–3 Facebook updates and 5–6 tweets every day. You need to be especially adept with brevity when it comes to Twitter because every tweet has a 140-character limit. So you must make sure that your tweets are concise and also interesting.
Designers
Images are also an effective form of communication on social media platforms. A well-designed, creative image grabs the attention of the reader and manages to hook him/her with the brand's message.
A lot of updates on Facebook are primarily image-based (supported by text, of course) because it has been proven to work very effectively for the brands. And there are cover photos and contests which require a lot of creative work as well.
As a part of a design team, you will be required to be at your creative best and churn out graphics on a regular basis.
Social Media Executives
The responsibility of a social media executive would be to execute a brand’s social media strategy. It would involve creation of content, broadcasting content on the brand’s social channels, encouraging interactions, responding to user comments and mentions, monitoring these brand mentions, running campaigns and contests on the brand’s social profiles. If you are working with an agency you would be required to handle at least 2–4 brands simultaneously. You need to be well aware of the brand’s overall marketing and communication strategy, their objective of being on social media, the dos and don’ts regarding the brand, as you would be the one who would be the voice of the brand. Being well aware of the above would help avoid any brand PR crisis.
You will also need to be comfortable with all social media platforms likes Facebook pages, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Blogs, etc. as 90 per cent of your work will revolve around these platforms.
Data scientists/analysts
More than one-seventh of the world's entire population is on social media now. To a business, the data generated by this huge population is massive and highly valuable. But the huge pile of data generated is random and unstructured.
They need smart brains that are good at Mathematics and have superb analytical skills to derive business insights from numbers.
This is one of the most crucial aspect of a business’ social media activities and the lack of an analyst can result in all the efforts going down the drain.
As an analyst, you will go through the data generated by enterprise grade social media tools (tools that measure the performance of social media activities), evaluate the performance of the brand's efforts, derive insights, generate reports and offer suggestions in case there is scope for improvement.
Strategists
As a social media strategist, you will be at the managerial role handling the overall social media activities of several brands at a time. Your job is to ideate the best social media action path for brands in order to achieve their desired business objectives. You will be conceptualizing their brand voice, personality, communication channels, integration with other verticals within the business, apart from promotional campaigns and contests.
This involves a lot of brainstorming with your executives and meetings with the client.
To be a social media strategist, you need to be well experienced as a social media executive. A good experience in the execution team prepares you well for handling strategic duties.
Ankita Gaba is the founder of socialsamosa.com
