Everywhere you turn, social media is the hot topic of discussion. Companies are investing in social media and people with the skills to harness these new platforms are in high demand. Initially, companies handed their social media accounts over to interns or went out and found millennials to run this piece of the marketing strategy.
As the importance of social media has grown through the years, we've seen departments grow and the trend of hiring Gen Xers with more marketing experience to manage millennials with increasingly specific and specialized positions like social media coordinator, social media planner, content specialist, SEO specialist, etc.
The demand for content isn't going anywhere so while the number of social media tools on the market continues to increase, the need for bloggers or social media copywriters will continue.
Here are some tools that will complement the rise of social media jobs:
Social Media Monitoring Software
These are tools that help let you know what is being said about you and about your competitors in the social media universe. Solutions like Lithium, Meltwater Buzz, or Social Mention all help to cull the massive quantities of data that exist and extract and filter information relevant to your brand or your competitors. Find out what words are being associated with your brand. These software tools allow you to listen to the discourse and get a birds-eye view of what's going on.
Social Media Engagement Software
These tools help you manage the conversation surrounding your brand by enabling you to respond to questions posted to your company in a timely manner. You can even assign posts that need responses to different people within your company. Tools like Argyle Social or Spredfast remove the need for an employee to scour all posts and filter out questions.
Social Marketing Software
There are now a number of great options in the marketplace for tools that help launch and administer promotions, create custom Facebook apps and manage the creative content you've produced across platforms. Tools like Involver, Wildfire or Agorapulse and many others will help with this and many of them include workflow management so that multiple team members can collaborate or assign and approve tasks.
Social Analytics Software
These tools are all about figuring out how effective your efforts are. Tracking who is participating in the conversation around your brand and what they are disproportionately interested in is a huge help, and there are tools that will help you identify top influencers and topics generating a lot of buzz within your industry or geographic space. Klout, Google Analytics and Simply Measured are all good examples of the options that exist in the marketplace.
The Rise of Social Media Jobs
As the importance of social media has grown through the years, the demand for content and accordingly, the need for bloggers or social media copywriters has also continued to rise.
Here is also an outline of some critical social media positions that companies will be investing in this year.
Social Media Copywriter/Blogger
An effective social media strategy is always going to require content. Marketing and PR managers need writers who can develop engaging content for their audience. These positions require not only strong writing skills, but also the creativity to generate unique perspectives on the hot-button topics of the space a company is operating in.
Companies need more content than ever, and this trend is only going to continue.
Social Media Marketing Managers/Coordinators
This role previously fell to somebody else within the marketing department, or was a dual-role with social media copywriting in the past - but not any longer. Companies require talented people who understand how to leverage all of the relevant platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. as well as the tools that exist to make the best use of them.
Solutions like Everypost have changed the way social media marketing managers can organize and execute social media strategies. The people who have built the skills to take advantage of these tools across platforms are in high demand and will continue to be.
Online Community Manager
This position is responsible for maintaining the online brand image of the company and they are specifically tasked with actively engaging the online community that surrounds their brand. This person must have their finger on the pulse of the discourse in their online communities and handle the day-to-day conversations taking place.
Responding to questions or complaints, as well as proactively identifying where opportunities for content generation lie are all critical functions of this role within the broader social media strategy. As online communities grow, it becomes paramount that a company have somebody constantly monitoring and participating in those communities on a daily basis.
SEO Specialist
SEO is continuing to evolve away from keyword-stuffing to a greater focus on value-added content. However, the flood of new websites that hit the web every day and the increased social media and SEO investments of competitors necessitates the role of SEO specialists.
Ultimately, this person is focused on increasing the search rankings for relevant search terms or phrases and improving the quantity and quality of traffic to the company's website. In order to do this, the person needs to have both strong web skills and a strong understanding of marketing concepts, as they may wear various hats from basic programming to blogging depending on the allocation of responsibilities within the department.