Social media marketing is one of the fastest evolving and growing spaces in the marketing realm. Like social itself, things move fast, change is constant, and keeping up can be a big challenge.
To keep pace, integrate, and see the best results from social, a marketer needs to have a lot of different talents, drives, and abilities. Here are five that the best social media marketers must possess.
1) A Drive To Embrace and Try New Things
Social media is constantly changing. There’s always something new happening and these changes often bring big opportunities for marketers.
The best social media marketers will feel a natural need to keep up with these changes and test how they can best use them to benefit their own programs. Testing new opportunities helps to find creative ways to integrate these new options with current tactics and strategy to produce better results.
Even if the new options don’t end up benefiting current programs, experimenting with them gives a marketer a better idea of how they work. They can use the first-hand knowledge of these trials down the road when an opportunity may arise that would be perfect for the inclusion of these new items.
2) Ability To Learn From Your Mistakes
Social media marketers have to be willing to try new things. Not every swing will be a hit. There are going to be plenty of misses. But a good social marketer can not only shake it off but also learn from those misses and mistakes.
Even the failures are learning experiences. They offer insights and can help guide strategy and execution in the future. Knowing how insight from past failures can be applied to future executions brings opportunities to greatly benefit your social media marketing programs. Learning from mistakes really matters.
You’ll learn far more from trying and failing than just continuing to do what you’ve already been doing.
3) An Analytical Mind
You don’t know how you’re doing or what you need to change to see better results without analyzing the current state of performance. While large companies may have an analytics person or department that can do much of the heavy-lifting, knowing how to properly read results is a must. And you must be able to read them right.
Far too often, people don’t dive deep enough into reports or get distracted by fluffy metrics. A great social media marketer knows how to look past meaningless numbers (like reach) and find the real indicators of success. They can see trends and the real reason behind viewer behavior, then adapt their social media strategy and tactics based on this information.
4) The Ability To Change and Adapt Rapidly
As stated at the start, social media is one of the fastest growing and changing areas within marketing. Social media marketers need to be able to adapt and change constantly as the channels we work in roll out new offerings and user behaviors change.
If you’re someone that likes to have a lot of consistency and process to your work, social media may not be the place for you. With things constantly changing in how we connect with our audiences, things are never consistent for very long. Creating formal processes is also difficult because they’re generally only useful for a short period of time until networks change something or user behavior shifts. Processes also often lead to getting stuck in routine and lack of growth or finding better ways.
5) Capacity To Connect Across Marketing Disciplines
For many within the social media marketing space, social lives in its own bubble. Social does its thing while content, sales, and others do theirs. This may work, but it’s not the way to see the best results. Those seeing big success on social see how it fits together and works with the many other areas within an organization to support and better them all.
To be a great social media marketer you have to be able to see outside the silo of social and really be able to connect it to every other area. Content, influencer, sales, support, branding, recruiting, and more, all have to come together and be part of the plan for best success in social. If you can learn to see how those connections can be made then you can stop seeing social as a function that stands alone, and instead as one that ties everything together.
Be The Very Best
The very best social media marketers have a collection offskills and abilities far beyond the couple looked at here. They have the knowledge to build successful strategies while knowing which skills to employ in getting them to those results. Beyond that, they’re constantly keeping on top of ongoing developments in marketing, testing them, and finding ways to employ them in their own programs, then always optimizing for even better return.
Most of all, the most successful people (not just marketers) have the drive to constantly learn, see opportunities, and apply those lessons to make their own work better. They never accept great as good enough and always push for better than what they have now.
Consider your skills, see where you have opportunities to improve, work hard to build the best set of skill possible, and never be satisfied with where you are. You can be one of the great social media marketers.
