Top 12 Social Media Marketing Skills for 2023

In recent years, social media platforms have grown remarkably. It has tripled its users from 970 million in 2010 to around 5 billion in 2022. 

This ground-breaking growth in the usage of social media has made it an excellent marketing platform for brand awareness, and for driving more traffic and sales. 

Since social media management requires precision at many phases, the role of a social media manager is as varied as it is essential. You might work as a marketer, analyst, copywriter, strategist, designer, or in customer service. And occasionally all of that occurs in one day! 

Social media marketing can be a fantastic fit for you if you enjoy a challenge. So today we're going to talk about the 12 social media marketing skills that we've discovered are the most frequently requested skills for social media marketers, so that you're prepared for success. 

Let’s dig in!

Communication

Without the ability to speak clearly, one cannot be a social media marketer. It’s like you are afraid of heights and want to be a pilot.

You require communication more than any other social skill. Social media marketing is not your profession if you don't enjoy communicating with others, especially strangers, and you're not eager to learn. The truth is that.

If you want to represent and promote a company or brand on social media, you need to be well-versed in communication.

How to develop communication skills?

• A fantastic method to enhance your communication abilities is to practice active listening. Follow up with questions to demonstrate that you are listening to what they are saying rather than just sort of nodding along while you think of what to say next.
• Practice social listening is an extension of active listening to social media. Take the time to carefully consider what the person is saying while you're reading communications from your brand.
• Next, purposefully determine whether you have sufficient knowledge to react. Ask a question if you don't know.

All this might take a little longer, but your audience will be far more invested in your company.

Creativity & innovation

One of the most important characteristics of social media marketing abilities is creativity. Users are likely to unfollow a brand that shares uninteresting or repetitive content on social media. 

To keep people interested and hooked on social media, marketers must constantly come up with new and interesting ideas, creative projects, and campaigns.

You will need to come up with creative ideas to differentiate yourself from the millions of other users on social media, including interactive material, contests, and viral videos.

How to improve your creativity skills :

• Practice: Although it may seem obvious, creativity requires practice. Whether a beginner or not, to develop these abilities, you need practice and patience. You are better prepared for success in future creative efforts the more you engage in creative practice.
• Quantity over quality: Perfection is not the goal of creativity. Therefore, you need not stress over coming up with wonderful ideas for everyone. Before settling on the "correct" idea that sparks additional inspiration, explore a myriad of ideas. Frequently, it takes a large number of ideas before one finds the ones of sufficient quality to deserve further investigation.
• Collaborate: When it comes to creativity, collaboration has significant ramifications. There are several ways to work together with creatives and artists who can inspire you. Your mental blockages can be removed by brainstorming with others and working together to come up with original ideas.

• Try creative ways to market your content: Creatively marketing your content will help you get an edge over your competitor. For example, nowadays, marketers started using a social media QR code to share their content offline at an event or in an offline marketing campaign.

• Self-assurance: Having self-assurance in your profession can foster creativity. It is challenging to be creative if you are unwilling to experiment or try new things in your art.
• Brain Break: Taking a step back from your project might sometimes be the best approach to get fresh ideas. 

Copywriting

More than any of the mentioned talents, this is one of the most crucial yet overlooked skills. Why? Because this is what would portray your brand to your audience, give it a voice.

Social media experts work hard to create original copy that is immediately recognizable as the brand's fundamental voice. These experts achieve this by improving their copywriting skills.

To connect with various target audience subgroups across various social media platforms, social media marketers also try to adapt their writing. Knowing the content style and duration that will best reach the various segments of your audience on each platform is part of this.

Do the longer captions on Instagram appeal to your followers? Which material resonates most with your Twitter followers? Do you need to use GIFs?

How to develop copywriting skills?

The best thing you can do if you want to get better at writing is to write every day. Anything is fair game for writing about, so do it!

In any case, don't restrict yourself to only creating the same kind of material or content that you consistently write. This is your chance to show off your writing skills. Just be careful to perform it each day.

You can enroll yourself in some copywriting courses to get hands-on ideas and greater knowledge. You may also always use AI tools like OpenAI and other ChatGPT alternatives along with apps like Hemingway Editor, and many others, in case you are looking to further sharpen your writing skills.

Graphic designing (Images)

"The art and practice of designing and projecting ideas and experiences with visual and textual information" - In other words, graphic design uses visuals to convey specific concepts or thoughts.

In fact, 49% of marketers consider visual marketing to be extremely important to their strategy. Why? because people consume things better visually than through text.

How to develop good design skills?

Get started by observing what others in your field are doing. Then, to learn the latest design trends and hacks from the experts, subscribe to YouTube channels, courses, and even design blogs such as Canva's Design School, The Design Blog, and so on.

You can gain hands-on design experience by using social media graphic design tools such as Canva.

Video production

Incorporating a video format into your marketing plan to market a company, product, service, or idea is known as using video for marketing. Effective video marketing can enhance audience engagement on social media and other digital platforms.

Did you know, people watch more videos on Facebook than on youtube?

Today, having a strong video marketing plan for social media is crucial given the slow but steady rise of social media over platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Steps to develop your video production skills : 

• Practice storytelling.
• Make use of the right tools: In video production, you need to know how to set up a camera with tools like a tripod. Nowadays, many video creators are using their smartphones to record videos. You also need to have knowledge and hands-on practice with video editing software and tools.
• Learn the keyboard shortcuts to speed up the editing process.
• Video distribution: You must choose the best distribution methods and target the proper audience if you want to increase engagement. And in essence, this means that for an efficient marketing approach, you should upload your video to as many platforms as you can. Share on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest. Use video ads to increase your reach.
• Maximize the reach of the video: Engage with your viewers and observe the metrics and statistics for the video. Keep track of which videos perform best and identify the traits and components shared by the top-performing videos. Consider those conclusions when making future videos.

Project & time management

Social media marketers require strong project management abilities due to their prowess at multitasking. You will also have to handle ad budgets, interact with writers and designers, and run reports. 

You need to stay on top of all tasks, know when material needs to be released, what to plan for, and how to keep track of all the many social media conversations taking place if you have good project management skills.

How to improve your management skills?

A list and a timetable are two things you may use to stay organized and manage your time more effectively. Make a list of everything you need to do for the day at the beginning of the day. Next, schedule how much time (and when) you will devote to each task throughout the day. You can make use of to-do list apps such as SmartTask, Asana, or Todoist to organize your daily activities.

To keep your content structured and to help you plan and stay on top of your tasks, we also strongly advise developing and maintaining a social media calendar.

Social media management

Since social media is available around-the-clock, learning tools that simplify your job will enable you to set better boundaries outside the workplace. It enables you to deliver and amplify content from both the brand and its community.

As a social media manager, you must understand what content works and what does not on social media. It also entails determining which media formats, such as text (articles), video, images, and podcasts, resonate with your specific niche.

How to improve your social media management skills?

Rather than attempting to juggle multiple tasks, schedule specific times to focus on your social media content management strategy. This will prevent you from getting that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you definitely should have been promoting tomorrow’s event on social media for the past few weeks.

There are a few tools available today that help you manage your social media accounts better. It helps you create carefully-curated social media feeds, efficiently schedule, manage, and track your posts and comments, as well as compare your performance to that of your competitors. 

You also have access to daily analytics and insights to understand what’s working and how to improve your campaigns further. 

Relationship building

The social nature of social media should not come as a surprise. A vital component of every social media marketer's job is establishing connections and developing relationships. 

Relationship building is crucial as most consumers only trust businesses if they have connected with them on social media.

You presumably enjoy conversing with people and creating these connections if you work in social media marketing (or are interested in doing so). There are plenty of people to reach, too.

How to improve your relationship building skills?

• Develop connections with your audience on social media as well as with colleagues and influencers.
• Improve your listening and communication abilities.
• Practice empathy, and think from others' points of view.
• Recognize emotional intelligence and cultivate it.
• Ask for feedback.

Social listening

Posting on social media on time is only one aspect of gaining attention on the platforms. You must also keep track of how your customers and competitors perceive your brand in the marketplace. This is where social listening becomes critical to preserving your brand's reputation.

Monitoring your brand's mentions across social networks is what social listening is all about. Discussions can take place on forums or social media channels, or they can be as simple as customer feedback. 

What social listening allows you to do is identify opportunities by monitoring and analyzing such feedback. This can be extremely helpful when developing a social media strategy.

How to improve your social listening skills?  

As already said, there are tools in today’s market that make things easier for social media marketers, including determining what social attention your brand is getting and how to enhance it. 

Iconosquare helps you master your social listening skills and understand market trends faster than ever. It helps you find trends that other industries are using and helps you stack up against them.

You can analyze your competition, track relevant hashtags, monitor, and adapt to what is working well for your target audience. 

Customer support

Good customer service reflects a company's culture; the two go hand in hand. Customers will notice your company culture if you continue to provide excellent customer service.

However, providing excellent customer service has effects that reach beyond company culture. You can retain your customers and earn their loyalty, which boosts your sales, keeps your employees happy, and allows you to remain competitive in the market. 

How to provide good customer support?

You must delve deep into data to gain a better understanding of your audience. Before delivering content, pay close attention to your audience.

Continuously monitor the activity of your online brand and respond to any comments, positive or negative, as well as criticism or feedback. Also, make use of trends that are relevant to your community.

Keep in mind that customers expect you to be responsive to their queries through various channels such as social media, email, phone, and chat as well. A suitable customer service software tool that provides multiple ways to communicate with customers can also help you a lot here.

Strategic thinking

You must be able to see the large picture to keep ahead of obstacles and opportunities as a social media marketer. Strategic thinking can help in this situation.

Finding, gathering, and interpreting information about your followers are the main components of strategic thinking. This can help you develop social media plans and methods that will raise brand exposure, boost sales, and increase traffic to your website by giving you a much better understanding of your clients and how they move through your marketing funnels.

Ways to sharpen your strategic thinking skills : 

• Take initiative: Be ready for the future. Do things before you are asked to. Respond quickly and smartly. 
• Always listen: Never believe that your ideas alone were always right. Your strategic thinking abilities will advance as a result of developing an awareness and appreciation of competing ideas, viewpoints, arguments, or stances since it will help you see the big picture.
• Always improve: Look for methods to optimize and improve the work you create, no matter what task or project you're given. It all comes down to being flexible. 
• Keep up-to-date with news and trends: Join networks, read widely, interact with staff members from various teams inside your company, and seek everywhere you can for hints of emerging trends and concepts.

Use Iconosquare to create a data-driven social media strategy and keep yourself ahead in the market!

Analytical skills

Finally, you must assess whether your marketing is effective in the long run. And for this reason, one of the most valuable and beneficial social media skills is analytical ability. “It is the capacity to comprehend, analyze, and depict both big and simple problems that make sense in light of the available data.”

Every day, you will be inundated with data if you engage in social media marketing. But how do you use such information? You will need analytical skills to process the data you receive and transform it into something you can use to develop better social media ads. 

How to Increase your analytical ability?

Before now, there were no tools to supply data for precise decision-making. Compared to digital marketing, this is a major barrier to traditional marketing. 

Today, however, social media platforms provide a wealth of data to support marketing efforts rather than relying on conjecture. You can use Google Analytics, Google Trends, Iconosquare, and many other tools.

Over to you…

If done carefully, your social media presence can have a significant impact on your business. Even while you might not need to be an expert in each of the aforementioned areas, having some of them down pat will help you become a great social media manager and a significant asset to your business. 

So, that was all! Now it's your turn to brush up on these skills and ace social media management.

‍