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How To Become A Social Media Manager

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How To Become A Social Media Manager

Social media has transformed the business world and opened up new career paths in the social media field.

There are more opportunities than ever to explore fresh and exciting careers, and understanding what is required to pursue your desired career is essential.

Social media manager is a popular job title, but what does it entail, and how do you get that role?

Keep reading to learn what a social media manager does and what skills you need if you want to pursue this social media career path.

How Do I Become A Social Media Manager?

Becoming a social media manager requires many diverse skills and abilities, and you need to ace plenty of things to help you with this.

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Make sure you understand some of the necessary steps to help you become a social media manager.

Here are some of the key elements that are involved in becoming a social media manager:

  • Define your services.
  • Build your manager skills.
  • Establish an online presence.
  • Build up a portfolio of clients.
  • Look at what positions are available.
  • Expand your knowledge and skill set.
  • Learn about the best social media marketing tools.
  • Get better qualified (postgrad, degree, course, etc.).
  • Gain experience via entry-level roles before moving up.

There’s no single path to launching a career as a social media manager.

But focusing on certain steps like building your portfolio and pursuing a degree or certification in this field can give you a major advantage.

What Does A Social Media Manager Do?

Understanding the role of a social media manager is also imperative for helping you find the right opportunities and being able to thrive in your career.

Typically, a social media manager is responsible for strategizing campaigns and content to increase followers, connect with people across different social platforms, and improve their brand’s social media presence.

According to Socially Buzz, 28% of internet users found new products due to social media ads, which illustrates a social media manager’s important role in helping get the best out of marketing campaigns.

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Of course, the responsibilities tend to differ depending on a multitude of factors, such as the size of the company.

Producing compelling content and analyzing data are crucial for developing success as a social media manager.

Check out some of the key responsibilities you can be expected to fulfill as a social media manager:

  • Social engagement: Increasing followers and driving engagement better is important for developing a strong social media presence, and you can do this through written and visual content. With 137 million new internet users in the past 12 months, this is a large pool of users to target when looking to improve engagement.
  • Data analysis: One of the most important roles a social media manager has to fulfill is that of data analysis, which involves assimilating all pertinent data and using it to assess how the company’s social accounts are performing.
  • Posting and monitoring social platforms: It might be necessary to schedule posts across all different social media platforms, as well as observe the performance of these posts and interact with followers and customers.
  • Campaign strategy: Developing a strong strategy for a successful social media content campaign is one of the best things you can do to excel in your role as a social media manager. This makes a huge difference in driving engagement and helps you effectively align your brand marketing strategies and values.

What Is A Typical Social Media Manager Job Description?

Social media manager is a job description that is multi-faceted, and it will allow you to gain a greater understanding of what this role entails.

Mostly, you will find that this is a role where applicants are responsible for overseeing businesses’ interactions with consumers via social media, as well as managing and overseeing their social media platforms and implementing content strategies.

The following are the usual social media manager job requirements:

  • Manage a social budget.
  • Interact with customers.
  • Take ownership of the social strategy.
  • Promote posts and craft new content.
  • Develop new social media campaigns.
  • Research trends and stay ahead of the curve.
  • Monitor and analyze social media campaign data and performance.
  • Streamline social media channels to ensure the tone of voice is consistent.

How Much Is A Social Media Manager Paid?

When choosing any career path, knowing what you can expect to earn is important.

It is important to have an idea of what you want to earn, as well as knowing what the average is, to give you room for negotiation.

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According to Zippia, who claims the tagline “The career expert,” the average social manager salary is $70,287 per year. On the low end, you might expect $50,000 at the entry level and upwards of $98,000 if you have a few years under your belt.

Washington tops the list in terms of the highest-paying state overall, while San Francisco, California, claims the top spot for the highest-paying city.

Via the above link, if you select your location, specific industry, and education level, you can get a more tailored estimate of what you are worth.

What Skills Does A Social Media Manager Need To Have?

So, what makes a good social media manager?

Well, there are several different attributes to consider, and this will play a massive role in helping you secure this kind of career path in a more positive way.

Understanding the skills and abilities needed to help you excel in your role as a social media manager is crucial when seeking a career path in this area.

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So, what is required to be a skilled and successful social media manager? Here are some key social media manager skills you’ll need to excel in this career.

1. They Must Have Solid Communication Skills

It may seem obvious that someone whose primary job is to connect with people from outside the company needs to have good communication skills. In fact, it’s arguably the No. 1 skill social media managers need to be successful.

Communication skills in this realm are slightly different than they are in traditional communication roles.

Social media managers need to be able to understand the audience they are communicating with and speak in a way that will resonate with that audience.

While all social media platforms are similar in what they accomplish, each channel has a slightly different way of communicating. Recognizing and understanding how a person communicates on Facebook is different from how a person communicates on Twitter is essential.

2. They Must Be Social

The best social media managers are people who thoroughly enjoy social media and participate in social media on a personal level.

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To be a truly successful communicator on social media, one has to know not only the ins and the outs of the programs but also be able to use the vernacular common to each.

It sticks out like a sore thumb when an “outsider” posts on a social media channel, which can negatively affect the business’s reputation.

That’s why a social media manager who is well-versed in everything each channel entails is key and why the best social media managers are those who, first and foremost, participated in social media on a personal level before taking it on as their profession.

3. They Must Have Personality & Creativity

One of the biggest differences between social media usage for work and personal life is the formality of the content. This isn’t to say that social media messaging for businesses should be stuffy.

It’s quite the opposite, actually.

Social media channels are a way for businesses to communicate with customers on a more personal level.

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So, a sense of humor, a touch of creativity, and a voice that resonates with the audience are all must-haves.

A business’s social media channels shouldn’t appear as ads or include typical PR jargon.

4. They Must Be Up On Digital Data

The top three skills on this list all deal with the makeup of the person who holds the title of social media manager. The rest are all professionally-based skills.

A social media manager needs to take the content a step further by optimizing and analyzing it.

This means being able to discern whether the social media marketing is working by culling the appropriate data for each channel and then adjusting the content, if necessary.

This aspect of the job requires knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) general practices and, specifically, how search engines treat social media posts.

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5. They Must Be Project Managers

Managing social media channels for a business isn’t all fun and games. It’s a serious job that takes serious management skills.

Some social media managers will be one-man or one-woman teams. If this is the case, the person will need to approach each channel as a separate project with short-, medium- and long-term goals, along with that of the overall social media plan.

Some social media managers have a team of people helping them manage each of the channels. In these cases, the manager must have solid skills in managing people and projects.

6. They Must Write & Edit Well

As a social media manager, you will need to be able to write creatively.

Crafting social media copy can be very challenging, and it takes a creative and talented head to be able to do it well.

Writing and editing as the “voice” of a company can be hugely fulfilling, and this is an essential part of being a social media manager.

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Yes, the social media manager will need to be able to inject some flair into the writing, but it must be done in a professional way.

This goes for the content the manager will write and the content that he or she will edit that others on the team have written.

7. They Must Have Visual Skills

Social media is a very visually-driven form of communication.

Even posts on text-based channels such as Twitter perform better if they have pictures that go along with the text. That’s why successful social media managers must understand how to pair visuals with text.

This means a good social media manager will be able to cull available images from the internet or a company’s database and also must be able to create great imagery on his or her own – or at least, be able to tell a design department in the company what to create.

8. They Must Be Flexible & Adaptable

A social media manager’s job requires a lot of patience and flexibility. Not only are a company’s needs changing all the time, but social media itself is, too. This is where the flexibility comes in.

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A good social media manager will need to be able to digest changes made to each social media channel, as well as how to shift the approach to that channel.

In addition, social media managers need to be able to adapt to each environment they are communicating in, as sometimes the change occurs with the users of a social media channel and not just the channel itself.

This means being up on all the trends on not just how people are using Twitter, for example, but what they are talking about on Twitter – whether that relates to the manager’s company or not.

9. They Must Be Great Marketers

Ultimately, the purpose of a social media channel is to create marketing opportunities. The fun part of social media is communicating, taking photos, creating eye-pleasing posts, and interacting with people.

But the end goal is to market the business.

The social media manager doesn’t need to have a strong direct sales background, but he or she needs to understand that the content the social team produces is ideally supposed to generate sales – if even in an indirect way.

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It’s also important for the social media manager to recognize a sales lead that may come across in a reply to a message and pass it along to the sales team.

10. They Must Have Excellent Customer Service Skills

One aspect of social media that can’t be overlooked is the fact that it’s a two-way communication street. It’s simple for people to reply to your content or share it with all of their followers.

Successful social media managers will understand this customer service aspect of the job and will be able to effectively monitor the activity on each social media channel and respectfully reply to all inquiries in a timely manner – whether the reply is positive or negative.

People can say whatever they want on social media – and they often do – so approaching these people politely and respectfully takes some patience and discipline.

Where Can I Find A Job As A Social Media Manager?

You should consider plenty of options when looking to become a social media manager, and you have several options when trying to get a job in this role.

Finding online openings and opportunities via job boards is always a good option, and you also need to make sure you contact companies directly to see if there are any openings.

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Networking is one of the best things you can do to keep yourself connected to job opportunities, which can prove incredibly useful.

Social media sites are a great way of being able to network with potential clients, and this is an excellent way of finding a job as a social media manager.

Bottom Line On Becoming A Social Media Manager

The best social media managers will be able to draw on a combination of the above 10 skills, as it’s truly a position that requires a diverse set of skills across various traditional disciplines.

As social media platforms keep growing and their algorithms change, the fact remains that any company online, from ecommerce to small businesses and agencies alike, will need you.

You’ll have a lot of opportunities to upskill and pave your own path as a social media manager in whatever industry you desire.

Keep reading about emerging social media channels and trends regularly to keep yourself informed. Also, learn and practice effective social media strategies. Combine them with the skills listed here, and you’ll land that dream job in no time.

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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