All successful brands today have one thing in common: a strong social media presence. Social media has allowed businesses to expand their reach and target more customers than before. However, managing a successful social media presence requires time, energy, and knowledge. For this reason, many brands are now hiring dedicated social media managers for their campaigns.
No one imagined leveraging social media trends like Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, UCG, etc., would be vital for businesses’ growth and sales. This indicates just how much businesses value the role of a professional social media manager in helping them reach their goals.
To help you find the ideal candidate for your business, this guide outlines seven steps you should follow to hire a social media manager. We also highlight the ten best recruitment sites to find quality candidates.
Why Hire a Social Media Manager?
The digital landscape has drastically changed how businesses interact with customers and promote their brands. Today, it’s essential for companies to maintain a strong online presence to reach their target audience. That’s where social media managers come in.
Here are some of the benefits of hiring a social media manager:
Increased Visibility: Using various tactics and trends, a social media manager can create optimized content that has high sharability and increases visibility.
Targeted Advertising: A social media manager will help you identify target audiences, track engagement metrics and create highly effective campaigns to increase leads and conversions.
Improved Customer Service: A social media manager can help you respond quickly and effectively to customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback. This will not only improve relationships with current customers but also attract potential new ones.
Identify Collaboration Opportunities: A social media manager will help you identify opportunities to partner with influencers, industry leaders, and other brands. This can open up new networking possibilities and bring more attention to your business.
Improved Reputation: A social media manager can help you build a positive image of your business by creating informative content and engaging with customers online.
Cost Savings: Hiring an experienced social media manager to handle your online marketing needs can help you reduce overhead costs while still achieving your marketing goals.
How to Hire a Social Media Manager in 7 Steps
A social media manager is a modern-day marketer who primarily affects your brand’s sales and profits. Here are seven steps to hiring the ideal social media manager.
Define Your Objectives
It is important to clearly understand why you are hiring for this role and what objectives you are hoping to achieve. Defining your objectives should be the first step in finding a Social Media Manager.
Questions to ask yourself when defining your objectives include:
- What types of campaigns do I need help with?
- How often am I expecting content to be posted?
- Who is the target audience?
- What are my goals for this position?
- What results do I expect to see?
Answering these questions will help you determine what qualifications to look for in potential candidates. It will clarify how to structure job requirements and define expectations for the role.
Once your objectives are set, you can start evaluating potential Social Media Managers and move forward with the hiring process.
Decide if You Want to Hire an Employee or an Independent Contractor
When deciding whether to bring on an employee or independent contractor for your social media management, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of each option.
Employees provide more stability as they are full-time and can work closely with you or in tandem with other team members. Employees also require additional paperwork that must be filed, such as tax and payroll information, to remain in compliance with labor laws.
A contractor can provide a more flexible schedule, especially if you need someone for short-term projects or coverage during the busy season. Contractors may also bring specialized skills such as graphic design or videography that your team members don’t have. However, because contractors are not employees, you won’t have the same control over their work as an employee.
Establish Your Budget
Before you start interviewing, it’s important to establish your budget for a social media manager. This will help you narrow down your candidate pool and determine the type of person best fits your company. We recommend taking out time to know how much social media managers make to establish your budget effectively.
A good rule of thumb is to plan on spending at least 20% – 25% of your total marketing budget on social media management. This may vary depending on the size and reach of your company. If you’re a small business with limited resources, hiring a freelancer or virtual assistant instead of an in-house manager is a better choice.
For larger companies, it might make sense to invest more in social media management services. You can also consider other budgetary options, such as outsourcing certain tasks to a third-party agency or hiring individual contractors for specific projects.
Develop a Job Description
After you have defined your objectives and a budget, the next step is to create the job description to outline the social media manager’s responsibilities. This includes the position’s duties and responsibilities and the basic qualifications needed.
When writing your job description, include key attributes that will help you identify the most qualified candidates to fill the role.
The primary duty of a social media manager is to create and maintain a strong online presence for your organization. They should be experienced in developing and managing campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Other tasks may include:
- Audience research
- Analyzing market trends
- Creating content for sharing across all channels
- Responding to comments from customers
- Curating relevant content from industry professionals
- Scheduling posts
- Measuring and analyzing the success of each campaign
They should also understand and benefit from AI for social media. AI has changed the social media landscape by automating content creation, replying to customers, analyzing trends, designing campaigns, etc.
Publer has introduced Publer AI assist, which is already a game-changer for social media managers. It allows them to create unique content and images and manage social media easily with its cutting-edge customer understanding. Social media managers today should leverage tools like these to boost productivity.
Regarding qualifications, you should look for someone with at least one year of experience in social media management or a related field. They should also have outstanding communication and organizational skills.
Post the Job Ad and Review Applicants
Posting the job ad is easy after you have outlined the job description. Make sure you use effective channels to find the perfect candidates, but more on that later. Once you have posted the ad, it’s time to review the applicants. Look closely at resumes and portfolios to find candidates that match your criteria.
Apart from traditional qualifications such as experience and education, look for social media savviness, creativity, an understanding of analytics, and excellent communication skills when assessing potential hires.
To further understand each applicant, ask for cover letters explaining why they want the job and how their skills fit your specific needs. You can also include a mandatory skill test to submit with the application. Finally, make sure to check references – this will give you more insight into how well each candidate would perform in the role.
Interview Candidates
Interviewing candidates is a key step in hiring a social media manager. You should keep a few things in mind when interviewing for social media manager positions. These include:
- Which social media channels do you prefer according to the company?
- How do you plan to enhance the brand’s social presence?
- Which metrics are ideal to assess the brand’s social presence?
- What do you do when a campaign do not perform as expected?
- How do you handle negative responses and comments from social media users?
- What is your scheduling strategy?
Make a Decision and Extend an Offer
Once you’ve decided on the right social media manager for your business, it’s time to extend an offer. Sending a job offer letter is one of the most important steps in the hiring process. It communicates information about the role and formally recognizes that the person has been selected for the position.
Your job offer letter should include:
- Job title
- Start date
- Salary or hourly rate
- Benefits offered (if applicable)
- Location of work (if remote, provide a detailed description of expectations for availability)
- Provision for vacation time and time off policy
- Outline of job duties and responsibilities
- Any special requirements for the job
Be sure to be clear and concise in your job offer letter. This will give the prospective social media manager a better understanding of what to expect from this role.
Top 10 Recruitment Sites for Hiring a Social Media Manager
Finding quality applicants is easier when using the top recruitment sites. Here are ten of the best recruitment sites you should consider when finding a social media manager for your company.
It’s no surprise LinkedIn is the first one on our list. As the world’s largest professional network and LinkedIn is one of the best recruitment sites for finding a social media manager. With over 675 million users, you can search through millions of potential applicants and find the right fit for your company.
Acadium
Acadium is the place for you if you want to hire a social media manager on a budget. You can find many high-quality candidates with relatively low experience looking for internships and apprenticeships.
Indeed
Indeed is one of the most popular job search websites. It offers various jobs in various industries and fields, including social media management. Indeed automatically scrapes jobs from company pages and profiles and matches them with the user’s search. You can also post the job on Indeed directly.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is primarily famous for its stellar information on salaries for various roles and company reviews. But it’s also a job search site where you can post a job and search for social media managers. Glassdoor’s main catch is its sleek and friendly user interface, making finding the ideal candidate seamless.
Hubstaff Talent
Hubstaff talent provides a major platform for hiring freelancers and employees who prefer remote work opportunities. This helps you connect with professionals from worldwide to expand your reach to more creative minds. But you can also find candidates for full-time and office-based jobs.
MarketerHire
MarketerHire is one of the most popular recruitment sites for social media management. It specializes in marketing and digital roles, so it’s a great place to find professionals with the right skills and knowledge. MarketerHire offers proven and pre-vetted matchmaking to satisfy your hiring needs quickly with the best talent. They also provide personal support to ensure you remain satisfied with the hiring.
GrowTal
GrowTal has been thoughtfully established by marketing experts who know best about the needs of brands when it comes to hiring social media managers. While you can only find freelancers and remote workers here, it is safe to say that you will only get the best. They have a careful vetting process to ensure you meet a freelancer of your choice who meets your needs.
ZipRecruiter
This recruitment site allows you to set various screening questions, so it automatically filters the best results for you. You can choose from the recommended questions from ZipRecruiter or set custom questions. Once you have posted the job, ZipRecruiter promotes it to the ideal candidates through e-mail and push notifications.
Upwork
Upwork is one of the top platforms for hiring freelancers and remote professionals. You can use this platform to hire social media managers from a global talent pool. Upwork offers a timeline-based system that allows you to track your project’s progress and ensure it is completed on time. It also offers secure payment methods to ensure the safety of your funds.
Fiverr
Last but not least, Fiverr is another top-quality platform for finding freelance social media managers. Fiverr is an excellent choice if you want to turn around projects quickly, as it allows you to post your job and get bids from freelancers within a few hours. You can see the response time, projects completed, and rating of the freelancers and hire accordingly. The quality and expertise of freelancers vary widely, so you should be careful when selecting candidates.
Key Takeaways
Hiring a social media manager is an important decision, but keeping these steps in mind can be a straightforward process. To ensure you get the right person for the job, remember these steps:
- Define your objectives to know what you expect to find and hope to achieve from this hiring.
- Decide if you want to hire on a full-time or contract basis, as both have their pros and cons.
- Establish your budget to narrow your search and set clear expectations for the applicants.
- Develop a job description mentioning all the responsibilities and requirements of the ideal candidate.
- Post the job on recruitment sites or your company page and review the applicants to screen them for interviewing.
- Interview the potential candidates to assess their skills, quality, experience, and professionalism.
- Decide your preferred candidate and make an offer with all the necessary position details.
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Ervin Kalemi
