Many years ago, when I was contemplating which subjects to take for my GCSEs, social media wasn’t even a thing.

I had zero aspirations to become a Social Media Manager (SMM). How could I when they didn’t even exist?

Social media as we know it today, didn’t start to emerge until the early naughties. This was around the time when LinkedIn and MySpace first appeared.

Do you need a formal qualification to become successful?

It wasn’t until 2020 that I started to think about working in Social Media myself. I have no formal qualifications in marketing or social media management. And this made me question if I could really make a go of it.

The short answer is yes! You can become a successful Social Media Manager without a formal qualification. I’m over 4 years into freelance life, and my business has grown every year.

But one thing has become apparent.

It’s not always my social media skills people are hiring me for.

My clients often want to work with me because of other skills I have. Knowing a thing or two about social media is almost seen as a bonus.

Here are five skills, in no particular order, that I believe get me hired regularly as a Social Media Manager:

Communication Skills

Social media is all about connections, making communication a must-have skill. However, being able to communicate clearly to clients is equally, if not more, important than making those connections. Explaining what I do, the processes involved, what I need from them, and what they can expect from my end. These are just some of the essentials to creating a smooth working relationship.

I have a flexible approach to communicating with my clients once they have been through the onboarding process. We agree on how regularly we need to meet, whether it’s online, face to face or over WhatsApp, Slack or email. Some clients, just leave me to get on with things and only get in touch when they have something specific they would like me to focus on. I talk about being adaptable below, but it’s worth mentioning here too, because if you’re too rigid in your approach to communication, it can cause agro neither you nor your clients need. If you nail your communication from the get-go, this will only strengthen the relationship you have with your clients.

A Love For Learning And Adaptability

I’ve banded a love of learning and adaptability together because I believe they are closely interlinked. Social Media changes ALOT, so it’s important to be able to adapt to new platforms, trends, and algorithms. I’m a complete nerd for learning. I have a constant stream of newsletters in my inbox from other professionals within the world of social media and marketing, helping me stay on top of industry news. As an SMM you don’t need to implement every change that comes in, but it’s useful to keep your knowledge up-to-date so you can have a discussion with your client about anything new that may help their business.

Learning goes beyond staying on top of trends. At the moment, I’m taking part in a LinkedIn challenge run by Jodi Goldman called Get Your A$$ Out There to improve my visibility on LinkedIn. I’m also diving deeper into the broader subject of marketing. It’s giving me so much more knowledge about how to grow my own business and I hope to pick up some titbits that will benefit my clients too. Ultimately by throwing myself into learning new skills and adapting to new trends, I can increase the visibility of my client’s brands as well as my own.

Attention To Detail

Ok, we all make mistakes. But you do need to make sure you don’t make too many as a Social Media Manager. I was forever making silly typos when I first started out, but thankfully, these are few and far between these days. Nowadays, I give myself plenty of time to carry out a task. Because it’s when I rush that those mistakes creep in. The smallest mistakes can make a big difference to how a message is received on social media. When you’re writing captions and creating the imagery for clients, it’s not just your reputation on the line – it’s your client’s reputation too.

I also want to talk a little bit about authenticity here. When I talk about attention to detail, it’s not about being grammatically perfect. I want my client’s tone of voice to come through in their captions. If the caption doesn’t sound like them, the audience may not be able to relate to the content so much, especially if they know the client personally. We’re very much living in an AI world, so getting a client’s tone of voice right, ensures the audience has more faith that the content is human-generated rather than AI generated.

Funny/not funny story – when I worked in football, back in the days of writing letters to people, I once wrote to a footballer asking him for his shit number rather than his shirt number! Oops 🙈

Creativity

I love my clients, but sometimes they leave me with no choice other than to create something out of nothing! In fact, it was when clients kept sending me naff photographs to use on their social media platforms that I first volunteered to go and take some snaps of my own! I’m not suggesting that every Social Media Manager needs to also be a photographer, but work with your clients to make sure they have assets you can work with, that will make them stand out from the crowd. Social Media is an incredibly crowded space, and being able to stand out is key. You need to be able to tell a story, not just through writing captions, but in the imagery and graphics you use too.

Resilience

Ahh, my good friend, resilience. I’ll save my tales of the love/hate relationship I have with resilience for another time, but it’s important to have bucketloads of it as a SMM. But even more so as a freelancer. Social media can be unpredictable. Not every post will do as well as you or your client hoped. You need to be able to deal with negative comments, algorithm shifts, and big world events impacting your campaigns. It can be easy to become disheartened when posts flop, but you have to persevere.

There are lots of ‘lurkers’ out there who scroll on social media, see posts, but don’t engage with them. I have genuinely lost track of the amount of people who say ‘I loved your post the other day’ but they didn’t like it or comment on it! As a freelance SMM, you also need to be resilient in other ways. Being able to deal with the highs of gaining a new client and the lows of saying goodbye to others. It’s a rollercoaster. But if you work hard, it can be a rewarding one!

Let’s Wrap Things Up

I hope that’s given you some food for thought.

Existing Social Media Managers – would you add any other skills to the list? Did you head into your Social Media career with any specific qualifications related to your job?

Whether you’re thinking of going into Social Media Management or you’re already in that space, I would love to hear from you.

Also, if you’re looking for a Social Media Manager who brings creativity, adaptability, and bags of resilience, let’s chat! Check out my services here.