4 Main Hats A Social Media Specialist Wears

We’ve come a long way from the intern or youngest person at the company being the de facto social media agent for a brand.

Image sourced from Canva Pro

Today, it’s an ever-evolving, ever-relevant, and ever-important subject matter requiring a diverse and dynamic set of skills. New platforms are still burgeoning, old platforms are still resonating, and the opportunities to drive value for businesses of all shapes and sizes are still proliferating.

But when someone says:

“we need help with social media”

What are they really asking for?

Generally, they’re in need of a specialist who fits in one, some, or (oftentimes) all of these categories:

Creator

Writer, photographer, videography, designer — this hat owns the storytelling and aesthetic for brands that need quality content to be built. The adage content is king is perhaps truer now than it’s ever been and continues to get truer and truer seemingly by the moment. No social presence — whether organic or paid — will succeed without content that is well-formatted and of high-quality specification, that is compelling and engaging to a particular target audience, and that is properly tailored for the specific channels it will publish on. The Creator covers all of these prerequisites.

Manager

This is the lunchpail social media specialist, the one who gets their hands dirty in the weeds. This hat owns the operational elements of a social media presence for brands that have a ton of content but no consistent distribution model, that have a ton of fans but no coordinated community engagement process, or that have a solid foundation of products and services but no strategic way to integrate them into the digital sphere. This role is usually tapped when various efforts in the past have constructed a hodge-podge social media mix. The Manager comes in to make sense of it all and is often a jack-of-all-trades within the social media realm.

Media Buyer