Jobhop Jobhop's blog : I Want A Social Media Job But Which One

“I want a social media job”

It’s good that there’s focus on what job is wanted but there’s so much to social media that you have to ask yourself “what type of job in social media?”

If you’re someone who’s decided that getting a social media job is the path you’d like to take but not sure where to place yourself in this field, then this post is for you.

There is a definite need for many social media jobs within companies.

Customer service

Companies are beginning to realise that their customers are using social media to vent their anger instead of calling and having to wait in a queue for ages. If you’re good at customer service and you’re good at keeping customers calm on Twitter or whatever platform they choose to display their annoyance, then this role could be well suited to you. Turning negative situations into positive outcomes can be challenging but very satisfying, to do it online is a skill and one that will become more and more in demand.

Remember it’s not always going to be the negative stuff as you’ll also be acknowledging customers who are happy with their products or services too.

Marketing

Think Brand …Perhaps the company you work for needs to change brand perception or increase awareness of the brand and the company message. The company you work for will want their brand to dominate and leave the competitors behind. Your job is to put a strategy with all the tactics in place, to be carried out by your team.

This could be to make sure that your brand is associated with major events and you get everyone talking about it on Twitter using the allocated #hashtag. Your role could be to successfully launch a new product, how will you get your loyal customers to like the new product and tell all their friends about it? That’s your job, you’re the ideas person, the campaign creator..there you go a new job title!

Community manager

Sharing knowledge of the brand, brand info, its products, its services, and capitilising on real time situations..for example if you’re a coffee shop and one of your customers tweets that they’re having a bad day, how wonderful would it be if that customer received their regular latte to their office because you organised it. Would that customer ever go anywhere else for their coffee in the future? Would that customer tweet about your coffee and tell all their friends? What if that customer had 10,000 followers on Twitter? What if they had the same on Instagram? Knowing your community & what makes them tick is definitely required by companies as they compete with their competition. It’s great to get customers but the community manager is the person who loves the customers online, looks after them and keeps them loyal to the brand.

A job as a community manager is especially good for people loving people.

Social Advertising

We’re not talking traditional advertising and we’re not even talking about advertising online as in PPC or retargeting, we’re talking social. For example how do you reach a community of snowboarders and get them to rave about your new snowboarding widget? You must know what platforms your snowboarders are hanging out on and be able to create adverts that are socially acceptable in that community. You need to be an innovator of social ideas for your product or service, to be able to get placement and be able to maximise all opportunities for the best exposure. This is paid media so your job is to get to as many targeted people whilst keeping the costs of advertising to a minimum and making it work.

Content creation

Are you good at writing great content? Now think sticky content, that means it has to stick in peoples minds. It doesn’t stop there because once you’ve created the content you have to know how to distribute it? How many ways can one piece of content be distributed? For example could it be a blog post as well as a podcast as well as a slideshare presentation and so on. You should also be able to call upon contacts within the industry, can they distribute for you? For example if you’ve created a report how many bloggers could you get to write about your report and feature it on their website?

Social recruiter

Companies are beginning to realise that recruiting via social media is more cost effective for them and they’re able to reach talent a lot faster. Some companies require internal recruiters who are able to tap into peoples online profiles quickly, build relationships with them and create a community of talent to cherry pick from. Social recruiters should also understand “marketing the internal brand” and use social media and the company website to promote it.

Do you now have an idea of what social media job you’d like to do?

JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.

Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk

Picture Credit Ed Yourdon

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