According to the National Institute for Social Media, job posts containing the term “social media” rose by 37% from February 2013 to January 2014. While we don’t have benchmark data to indicate a compound annual growth rate over the last few years, it stands to reason that this is still an emerging area of growth in terms of dedicated job roles. If that’s the case, one would expect a fairly large growth trend going from zero ten years ago to today.
The most common job titles for social media responsibilities include:
- Social Media Specialist
- Social Media Manager
- Community Manager
- Social Media Strategist
- Social Media Coordinator
But while growth in social media dedicated titles continues, we must also consider the fact that social media will never be, and has never been, the responsibility of a single role. In fact, many different stakeholders can benefit from the insights derived from social media. It therefore seems appropriate to back into the resource skills required to support social media and determine which data and tasks different internal stakeholders should be responsible for. We broke social listening responsibilities into three core categories that typically encompass core responsibilities and tasks that align to social media listening:
- Strategic: Planning social media initiatives, developing strategic goals, and maintaining governance/compliance issues.
- Operational: The doers. Day-to-day activities associated with the execution of campaigns, marketing, community management, and general engagement on social media.
- Analytical: Testing and measuring hypotheses for research purposes, granular analysis to isolate and uncover trends that can actually inform business strategy.
In a simplified matrix, social media success requires two skills: social skills and analytical skills. On the surface these seem more like oil and water, and that’s largely why staffing for good social leadership skills is such a challenge. If best practices in social media campaigns have taught us nothing else, it’s that there is an art to engaging consumers on social media. That’s because social is an emotional and personal connection with real people who react to posts and comments just like they do in a person-to-person conversation. That means engagement cannot be robotic and dry – your brand interactions need to feel personal and intimate to the consumer.
Social Media Skills / Resource Requirements Matrix
To learn more about each of these quadrants, check out the Deep Dive “Staffing for Social Media Monitoring Success”
Download the Deep Dive: Staffing for Social Media Success
You can also find additional reports on Social Media Monitoring on the Gleanster research portal.
