SEO
Social Media Career Path: How To Get Started

The social media landscape has changed drastically since we started using Facebook in the mid-2000s.
Nowadays, companies rely heavily on social media platforms to connect with their customers and build communities around their brands.
As a result, many people are getting into social media marketing as new opportunities arise and career paths develop. But it can be challenging to know where to start.
What steps should I take to start my career path in social media? Is it possible to become a professional social media marketer without previous experience or a degree?
I’ll answer these questions and more in this social media career guide.
How To Get Started
Like with most career paths, it becomes easier once you know what you’re doing.
The first step is deciding which platforms you want to learn more about, researching, and using them. If you’re already comfortable with and have a profile with specific platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, you should already have a knowledge base.
Once you’ve got the basics down, you should also consider building out your understanding of other platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram.
The best way to get started with social media marketing is to build your audience on your profiles. It’s the best place for trial and error. And it will help clarify which platforms you actually want to work on within your career.
Once you understand the different platforms, you can start evolving your social media skill set.
Essential Skills
Over the years, businesses have relied upon social networks to gain insights into consumer psychology and gauge public opinion.
This has enabled them to identify trends or changes before they take place. But what skills do you need to identify these trends or create engaging social media posts?
1. Copywriting
Now I’m not talking about copyright or intellectual property rights. I’m talking about crafting compelling copy to market a brand, product, or service.
Even if you don’t have a background in writing, you can still develop the skills to become an effective copywriter. Pay attention to the ads and social media posts today.
Who’s getting it right, and what brands are clearly missing the mark? You can start practicing copywriting by simply editing brand copy that misses the mark.
While copywriting is a career in itself, it’s important to practice and perfect the art of social media copy.
2. Research And Analysis
Whether you’re researching a brand and its competitors to get the lay of the land or finding the right time to post, becoming a good researcher will save you time and help you with social media marketing.
You’ll also need to be able to interpret the key performance indicators (KPIs) for different brands. This is usually based on the platform’s insights or other programs used to analyze social media performance.
Comprehending and utilizing the insights social media platforms and programs provide are necessary skills to have in this career path. And things change fast online, and that’s no different for social media, so becoming a great researcher and analyst is a beneficial path.
3. Understanding Brand Personality And Tone
If you’re working as a freelance social media manager or with a marketing agency, you’ll need to be able to understand a brand guide.
These guides usually include the brand tone, colors, fonts, and the target market personality.
Surprisingly, not all brands have this, and sometimes, you’ll need to help establish a brand guide for a company.
Understanding and utilizing a brand guide will help you keep the right tone and personality when addressing customers and creating social media copy for brands.
4. Creative Development
You’ll need to develop a creative perspective incorporating the brand identity when producing videos and graphics for a brand’s posts. In addition, staying within the brand’s colors and font types can help create unity across posts.
Now, you don’t need to be an expert graphic designer to create social media posts. There are numerous free platforms out there, like Canva and Adobe Express, that can help you create professional and unique social media posts.
5. Customer Service
If you go the route of social media manager, you’ll also likely be monitoring the comments and direct messages for a brand’s social media accounts.
Customer service generally requires critical thinking and problem-solving, which you’ll also need in this career field.
In addition, it’ll be important to be polite, respond quickly and thoroughly, and know whom to direct your questions to if you can’t answer them yourself.
Recommended Education
There are numerous ways to educate yourself on social media marketing, from getting a bachelor’s in social media management, interning and getting some hands-on experience, online courses, and countless free online resources.
If you’re entirely new to the field and are serious about learning about social media management, get a bachelor’s in marketing or social media management. The courses within these programs can lay the foundation to understand the business world and prepare you with the skills you need and practice and excel in the field.
If you’re not entirely sold on the career field or simply want to expand your knowledge, you can take a seminar or course for social media management or a specific skill.
For example, let’s say you want to get better at copywriting. Try the Comprehensive Copywriting Academy (CCA) or Copy Posse.
You will benefit immensely from learning more about copywriting and dealing with brands from the CCA course.
Usually, online courses like these also allow you to join online communities, like private Facebook groups. These groups can help give feedback on coursework, answer questions, and even help you land a job.
You can also read online resources such as ours on Social Media Strategy and Social Media Advertising. There are many excellent and free online articles, tools, and ebooks that can help you stay on top of social media trends and learn more about specific skills and strategies.
Roles Available In Social & Career Path To Follow
Today, social media plays a crucial role in advertising, customer service, and brand management. Social media marketers play a vital role in helping businesses scale and grow.
Several career paths are available, from freelance social media manager to social media strategist. Here are a few career paths you might want to consider:
Social Media Strategist
A social media strategist will help develop the brand’s strategy for each online social media platform.
They will help identify and track the KPIs to ensure the social media strategy stays on track. This could include monitoring incoming followers, likes, shares, mentions, and comments across posts.
This role will likely work with different teams within the brand to create a cohesive and accurate portal of the brand. They will also need to understand search engine optimization (SEO) and how to incorporate it into the social media strategy.
On average, social media strategists make anywhere from $46,000 to $73,000.
Social Media Manager
A social media manager needs to know how to create content for various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The social media manager must also understand how to optimize each platform and use analytic tools to measure performance.
In addition, a social media manager should be able to communicate effectively with both internal and external audiences.
As mentioned earlier, you’ll also need to use your customer service skills to respond to comments and direct messages on each platform.
Your income could vary depending on whether you are a freelancer or work for an agency, but salaries usually range from $42,000 to $66,000.
Social Media Influencer
People who create content using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are social media influencers or simply influencers. Many companies hire them to promote their brand or products through images, tweets, posts, video clips, blogs, and more.
In addition, they usually pay influencers to post content on their behalf because they want to reach targeted audiences.
This can be a lucrative and unique career path. Like being a freelance social media manager, being an influencer gives you the autonomy to create your career path and solely work with brands that align with your values.
Depending on your following and the brands you work with, a social media influencer could make between $41,000 to $69,000. Now, if you have a Huda Kattan level following, this could extend far past that.
Social Media Consultant
A brand might hire a social media consultant if it needs someone to evaluate its current strategy or social media profiles.
Sometimes getting a fresh set of eyes and an unbiased perspective can help take a brand’s social media presence to the next level. They can also help brands set goals and evaluate their SEO for their platforms.
Social media consultants generally make between $50,000 to $82,000.
Final Takeaways
Social media has changed our world, from how we interact with our friends, family, and followers to how brands market their products and services.
The career opportunities in social media are only expanding. You can move through different career paths if you practice the skills mentioned in this article and stay on top of social media trends.
More Resources:
Featured Image: 13_Phunkod/Shutterstock
window.addEventListener( ‘load’, function() {
setTimeout(function(){ striggerEvent( ‘load2’ ); }, 2000);
});
window.addEventListener( ‘load2’, function() {
if( sopp != ‘yes’ && addtl_consent != ‘1~’ && !ss_u ){
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
if( typeof sopp !== “undefined” && sopp === ‘yes’ ){
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, [‘LDU’], 1, 1000);
}else{
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, []);
}
fbq(‘init’, ‘1321385257908563’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
fbq(‘trackSingle’, ‘1321385257908563’, ‘ViewContent’, {
content_name: ‘social-media-career-path’,
content_category: ‘careers-education social’
});
}
});
SEO
Google Discusses Fixing 404 Errors From Inbound Links

Google’s John Mueller responded to a thread in Reddit about finding and fixing inbound broken links, offering a nuanced insight that some broken links are worth finding and fixing and others are not.
Reddit Question About Inbound Broken Links
Someone asked on Reddit if there’s a way to find broken links for free.
This is the question:
“Is it possible to locate broken links in a similar manner to identifying expired domain names?”
The person asking the question clarified if this was a question about an inbound broken link from an external site.
John Mueller Explains How To Find 404 Errors To Fix
John Mueller responded:
“If you want to see which links to your website are broken & “relevant”, you can look at the analytics of your 404 page and check the referrers there, filtering out your domain.
This brings up those which actually get traffic, which is probably a good proxy.
If you have access to your server logs, you could get it in a bit more detail + see which ones search engine bots crawl.
It’s a bit of technical work, but no external tools needed, and likely a better estimation of what’s useful to fix/redirect.”
In his response, John Mueller answers the question on how to find 404 responses caused by broken inbound links and identify what’s “useful to fix” or to “redirect.”
Mueller Advises On When Not To “Fix” 404 Pages
John Mueller next offered advice on when it doesn’t make sense to not fix a 404 page.
Mueller explained:
“Keep in mind that you don’t have to fix 404 pages, having things go away is normal & fine.
The SEO ‘value’ of bringing a 404 back is probably less than the work you put into it.”
Some 404s Should Be Fixed And Some Don’t Need Fixing
John Mueller said that there are situations where a 404 error generated from an inbound link is easy to fix and suggested ways to find those errors and fix them.
Mueller also said that there are some cases where it’s basically a waste of time.
What wasn’t mentioned was what the difference was between the two and this may have caused some confusion.
Inbound Broken Links To Existing Webpages
There are times when another sites links into your site but uses the wrong URL. Traffic from the broken link on the outside site will generate a 404 response code on your site.
These kinds of links are easy to find and useful to fix.
There are other situations when an outside site will link to the correct webpage but the webpage URL changed and the 301 redirect is missing.
Those kinds of inbound broken links are also easy to find and useful to fix. If in doubt, read our guide on when to redirect URLs.
In both of those cases the inbound broken links to the existing webpages will generate a 404 response and this will show up in server logs, Google Search Console and in plugins like the Redirection WordPress plugin.
If the site is on WordPress and it’s using the Redirection plugin, identifying the problem is easy because the Redirection plugin offers a report of all 404 responses with all the necessary information for diagnosing and fixing the problem.
In the case where the Redirection plugin isn’t used one can also hand code an .htaccess rule for handling the redirect.
Lastly, one can contact the other website that’s generating the broken link and ask them to fix it. There’s always a small chance that the other site might decide to remove the link altogether. So it might be easier and faster to just fix it on your side.
Whichever approach is taken to fix the external inbound broken link, finding and fixing these issues is relatively simple.
Inbound Broken Links To Removed Pages
There are other situations where an old webpage was removed for a legitimate reason, like an event passed or a service is no longer offered.
In that case it makes sense to just show a 404 response code because that’s one of the reasons why a 404 response should be shown. It’s not a bad thing to show a 404 response.
Some people might want to get some value from the inbound link and create a new webpage to stand in for the missing page.
But that might not be useful because the link is for something that is irrelevant and of no use because the reason for the page no longer exists.
Even if you create a new reason, it’s possible that some of that link equity might flow to the page but it’s useless because the topic of that inbound link is totally irrelevant to anyting but the expired reason.
Redirecting the missing page to the home page is a strategy that some people use to benefit from the link to a page that no longer exists. But Google treats those links as Soft 404s, which then passes no benefit.
These are the cases that John Mueller was probably referring to when he said:
“…you don’t have to fix 404 pages, having things go away is normal & fine.
The SEO ‘value’ of bringing a 404 back is probably less than the work you put into it.”
Mueller is right, there are some pages that should be gone and totally removed from a website and the proper server response for those pages should be a 404 error response.
SEO
Site Quality Is Simpler Than People Think

Google’s John Mueller, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes discussed site quality in a recent podcast, explaining the different ways of thinking about site quality and at one point saying it’s not rocket science. The discussion suggests that site quality could be simpler than most people know.
Site Quality Is Not Rocket Science
The first point they touched on is to recommend reading site quality documentation, insisting that site quality is not especially difficult to understand.
Gary Illyes said:
“So I would go to a search engine’s documentation.
Most of them have some documentation about how they function and just try to figure out where your content might be failing or where your page might be failing because honestly, okay, this is patronizing, but it’s not rocket science.”
No Tools For Site Quality – What To Do?
Gary acknowledged that there’s no tool for diagnosing site quality, not in the same way there are tools for objectively detecting technical issues.
The traffic metrics that show a downward movement don’t explain why, they just show that something changed.
Gary Illyes:
“I found the up-down metric completely useless because you still have to figure out what’s wrong with it or why people didn’t like it.
And then you’re like, “This is a perfectly good page. I wrote it, I know that it’s perfect.”
And then people, or I don’t know, like 99.7% of people are downvoting it. And you’re like, ‘Why?’”
Martin Splitt
“And I think that’s another thing.
How do I spot, I wrote the page, so clearly it is perfect and helpful and useful and amazing, but then people disagree, as you say.
How do you think about that? What do you do then?
How can I make my content more helpful, better, more useful? I don’t know.
…There’s all these tools that I can just look at and I see that something’s good or something’s bad.
But for quality, how do I go about that?”
Gary Illyes
“What if quality is actually simpler than at least most people think?
…What if it’s about writing the thing that will help people achieve whatever they need to achieve when they come to the page? And that’s it.”
Martin Splitt asked if Gary was talking about reviewing the page from the perspective of the user.
Illyes answered:
“No, we are reframing.”
Reframing generally means to think about the problem differently.
Gary’s example is to reframe the problem as whether the page delivers what it says it’s going to deliver (like helping users achieve X,Y,Z).
Something I see a lot with content is that the topic being targeted (for example, queries about how to catch a trout) isn’t matched by the content (which might actually be about tools for catching trout) which is not what the site visitor wants to achieve.
Quality In Terms Of Adding Value
There are different kinds of things that relate to site and page quality and in the next part of the podcast John Mueller and Gary Illyes discuss the issue about adding something of value.
Adding something of value came up in the context of where the SERPs offer good answers from websites that people not only enjoy but they expect to see those sites as answers for those queries.
You can tell when users expect specific sites for individual search queries when Google Suggests shows the brand name and the keyword.
That’s a clue that probably a lot of people are turning keywords into branded searches, which signals to Google what people want to see.
So, the problem of quality in those situations isn’t about being relevant for a query with the perfect answer.
For these situations, like for competitive queries, it’s not enough to be relevant or have the perfect answer.
John Mueller explains:
“The one thing I sometimes run into when talking with people is that they’ll be like, “Well, I feel I need to make this page.”
And I made this page for users in air quotes…
But then when I look at the search results, it’s like 9,000 other people also made this page.
It’s like, is this really adding value to the Internet?
And that’s sometimes kind of a weird discussion to have.
It’s like, ‘Well, it’s a good page, but who needs it?’
There are so many other versions of this page already, and people are happy with those.”
This is the type of situation where competitive analysis to “reverse engineer” the SERPs works against the SEO.
It’s stale because using what’s in the SERPs as a template for what to do rank is feeding Google what it already has.
It’s like, as an example, let’s represent the site ranked in Google with a baseline of the number zero.
Let’s imagine everything in the SERPs has a baseline of zero. Less than zero is poor quality. Higher than zero is higher quality.
Zero is not better than zero, it’s just zero.
The SEOs who think they’re reverse engineering Google by copying entities, copying topics, they’re really just achieving an imperfect score of zero.
So, according to Mueller, Google responds with, “it’s a good page, but who needs it?”
What Google is looking for in this situation is not the baseline of what’s already in the SERPs, zero.
According to Mueller, they’re looking for something that’s not the same as the baseline.
So in my analogy, Google is looking for something above the baseline of what is already in the SERPs, a number greater than zero, which is a one.
You can’t add value by feeding Google back what’s already there. And you can’t add value by doing the same thing ten times bigger. It’s still the same thing.
Breaking Into The SERPs By The Side Door
Gary Illyes next discusses a way to break into a tough SERP, saying the way to do it is indirectly.
This is an old strategy but a good one that still works today.
So, rather than bringing a knife to a gunfight, Gary Illyes suggests choosing more realistic battles to compete in.
Gary continued the conversation about competing in tough SERPs.
He said:
“…this also is kind of related to the age-old topic that if you are a new site, then how can you break into your niche?
I think on today’s Internet, like back when I was doing ‘SEO’, it was already hard.
For certain topics or niches, it was absolutely a nightmare, like ….mesothelioma….
That was just impossible to break into. Legal topics, it was impossible to break into.
And I think by now, we have so much content on the Internet that there’s a very large number of topics where it is like 15 years ago or 20 years ago, that mesothelioma topic, where it was impossible to break into.
…I remember Matt Cutts, former head of Web Spam, …he was doing these videos.
And in one of the videos, he said try to offer something unique or your own perspective to the thing that you are writing about.
Then the number of perspective or available perspectives, free perspectives, is probably already gone.
But if you find a niche where people are not talking too much about, then suddenly, it’s much easier to break into.
So basically, this is me saying that you can break into most niches if you know what you are doing and if you are actually trying to help people.”
What Illyes is suggesting as a direction is to “know what you are doing and if you are actually trying to help people.”
That’s one of my secrets to staying one step ahead in SEO.
For example, before the reviews update, before Google added Experience to E-A-T, I was telling clients privately to do that for their review pages and I told them to keep it a secret, because I knew I had it dialed in.
I’m not psychic, I was just looking at what Google wants to rank and I figured it out several years before the reviews update that you need to have original photos, you need to have hands-on experience with the reviewed product, etc.
Gary’s right when he advises to look at the problem from the perspective of “trying to help people.”
He next followed up with this idea about choosing which battles to fight.
He said:
“…and I think the other big motivator is, as always, money. People are trying to break into niches that make the most money. I mean, duh, I would do the same thing probably.
But if you write about these topics that most people don’t write about, let’s say just three people wrote about it on the Internet, then maybe you can capture some traffic.
And then if you have many of those, then maybe you can even outdo those high-traffic niches.”
Barriers To Entry
What Gary is talking about is how to get around the barrier to entry, which are the established sites. His suggestion is to stay away from offering what everyone else is offering (which is a quality thing).
Creating content that the bigger sites can’t or don’t know to create is an approach I’ve used with a new site.
Weaknesses can be things that the big site does poorly, like their inability to resonate with a younger or older audience and so on.
Those are examples of offering something different that makes the site stand out from a quality perspective.
Gary is talking about picking the battles that can be won, planting a flag, then moving on to the next hill.
That’s a far better strategies than walking up toe to toe with the bigger opponent.
Analyzing For Quality Issues
It’s a lot easier to analyze a site for technical issues than it is for quality issues.
But a few of the takeaways are:
- Be aware that the people closest to the content are not always the best judges of content is quality.
- Read Google’s search documentation (for on-page factors, content, and quality guidelines).
- Content quality is simpler than it seems. Just think about knowing the topic well and being helpful to people.
- Being original is about looking at the SERPs for things that you can do differently, not about copying what the competitors are doing.
In my experience, it’s super important to keep an open mind, to not get locked into one way of thinking, especially when it comes to site quality. This will help one keep from getting locked into a point of view that can keep one from seeing the true cause of ranking issues.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Stone36
SEO
Is Alt Text A Ranking Factor For Google Image Search?

Alt text is used to help computers read images.
But can alt tags affect your organic search rankings?
Read on to learn whether there is any connection between alt text and improved rankings in Google Image Search results.
The Claim: Alt Text Is A Ranking Factor
What is alt text?
Alt text is an HTML image attribute. It allows you to create an alternative text version of your image if it cannot load or has an accessibility issue.
Because of its importance to Google Image Search, it is considered a ranking factor.
[Ranking Factors 2023] Download the free ebook + cheat sheet →
Alt Text As A Ranking Factor: The Evidence
Google emphasizes how alt text plays a vital role in getting your images recognized by Google Image Search.
You will find a page on image best practices in Google Search Central’s Advanced SEO documentation. In a section called “about alt text,” Google discusses the use of alt text.
“Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image. Also, alt text in images is useful as anchor text if you decide to use an image as a link.”
While the company doesn’t specify that alt text will improve your rankings, it warns website owners that improper use can harm your website.
“When writing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.
Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (also known as keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.”
It also offers the following examples of good and bad alt text usage.

Google Sites Help documentation indicates that images may come with pre-populated alt text, including keywords for which you may not want to optimize.
“Some images automatically include alt text, so it’s a good idea to check that the alt text is what you want.”
For example, when I download stock photos, a text description of the image is embedded in the file.


When uploaded to a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, the text descriptions may need to be moved to the alt text field or modified to remove unnecessary keywords.


In Google Search Central’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide,” it offers the following advice about alt tags when using images as links:
“…if you’re using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don’t recommend using too many images for links in your site’s navigation when text links could serve the same purpose.”
In 2020, John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, answered a question about the alt text of a quote image during a Google Webmaster Office Hours. In the answer, he talked about how Google uses it:
“For Search, what happens with the alt attribute is we use that to better understand the images themselves, in particular, for Image Search. So if you didn’t care about Image Search, then from a Search point of view, you don’t really need to worry about alt text.
But if you do want these images to be shown in Image Search, which sometimes it makes sense to show fancy quotes in Image Search as well, then using the alt attribute is a good way to tell us this is on that image and we’ll get extra information from around your page with regard to how we can rank that landing page.”
Moz mentions ranking factors about alt text. Instead of saying that the alt text itself is a ranking factor, Moz advises:
“…alt text offers you another opportunity to include your target keyword. With on-page keyword usage still pulling weight as a search engine ranking factor, it’s in your best interest to create alt text that both describes the image and, if possible, includes a keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting.”
In 2021, during a Twitter discussion about ALT text having a benefit on SEO, Google Developer Martin Splitt said:
“Yep, alt text is important for SEO too!”
Later in 2021, Mueller noted that alt text is not magic during a conversation about optimization for indexing purposes.
“My understanding was that alt attributes are required for HTML5 validation, so if you can’t use them with your platform, that sounds like a bug. That said, alt text isn’t a magic SEO bullet.”
[Recommended Read] → Ranking Factors: Systems, Signals, and Page Experience
Alt Text As A Ranking Factor: Our Verdict
Alt text is a confirmed ranking factor for image search only. You should craft descriptive, non-spammy alt text to help your images appear in Google Image Search results.
Alt text is definitely not a ranking factor in Google Search. Google has clarified that alt text acts like normal page text in overall search. So it’s not useless, but it’s not a separately considered ranking factor in your page content.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore alt text. It’s a helpful accessibility tool for screen readers. When you’re writing alt text, ask yourself what you want someone who can’t see the image to understand about it.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/SearchEngineJournal
-
FACEBOOK4 days ago
Indian Government Warns Facebook, YouTube About Deepfakes, Misinformation Violations
-
MARKETING3 days ago
Whiteboard Friday Recap 2023: AI Edition
-
MARKETING6 days ago
“Undercover” Case Studies: Why the Future of Marketing Is Proving Yourself in the Field
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Follower Count Is Not A Google Search Ranking Factor
-
MARKETING7 days ago
Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) Advertiser’s Guide
-
SOCIAL6 days ago
17-Year-Old Claims To Make 6 Figures A Year
-
SOCIAL5 days ago
Meta Stock: Still Room For Upside In A Maturing Market (NASDAQ:META)
-
SOCIAL7 days ago
U.S. Senators Accuse X of Profiting From Terrorist Propaganda in the App
You must be logged in to post a comment Login