social media channels

What Does It Mean to Be a Social Media Strategist?

Data from Statista shows that in 2021, nearly 4.3 billion people used social media. That number is projected to increase to almost six billion by 2027!

With easy access to so many people, it’s unsurprising why social media content is a necessary component of anyone’s digital marketing strategy. So much so that now, plenty of people work as social media strategists.

But what does it mean to be a social media strategist? Read on to learn more about this position and how a strategist can help your business with its social media marketing.

What Is a Social Media Strategist? 

A social media strategist designs campaigns over various social media channels to achieve your company’s goals. Their role focuses on the “big picture.”

Simply put, a social media strategist comes up with a strategy for your social media campaigns and hands it off to a social media manager to implement it.

While a social media strategist may help manage the day-to-day activities and help drive engagement, their most important role is to build brand awareness. In addition, they focus on bridging the gap between offline and online activities.

A social media strategist will be able to handle the following:

  • Plan and schedule content
  • Collaborate with other team members, such as graphic designers, copywriters, and content creators, to create marketing campaigns
  • Measure campaigns’ performance
  • Analyze how other channels such as search engine optimization (SEO), email, and PPC complement and interact with your social media campaigns
  • Monitor business mentions
  • Analyze competitors’ social media campaigns

If you have a social media team, the social media strategist is the backbone of that team.

What’s the Difference Between a Social Media Strategist and Social Media Manager? 

Now that we’ve answered the question, “What is a social media strategist?” you may wonder how the role is different from a social media manager. While many use the two job titles interchangeably, these creative services have some crucial distinctions.

Social media managers focus mainly on the day-to-day activities of social media. Generally speaking, a social media manager helps to implement the strategy given by the strategist by managing a team of social media specialists.

Further, social media managers are usually only thinking about executing one campaign at a time, and their focus is on the execution of the campaign.

Some of their duties include:

  • Content creation (focusing on high-quality content)
  • Engaging with customers on different social media accounts, such as

    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Linkedin
    • TikTok

  • Identifying customer trends
  • Planning and implementing digital campaigns

Some social media managers will analyze engagement and web traffic metrics to help build online communities, but this is not a requirement. Strategists tend to have more skills when it comes to analyzing statistics.

Conversely, while social media strategists may also aid in daily activities related to social media, they do much more. Strategists think about the long-term goals of the company. They need to do research and create more comprehensive marketing campaigns and strategies.

However, the required skill set for both industry professionals is quite similar. They usually need the following:

  • Analytical skills
  • Communication skills
  • Copywriting skills
  • Management skills
  • Multitasking skills
  • Some graphic design skills
  • Time-management skills

Although their roles differ, managers and strategists work together to increase your business’s online presence and help achieve its goals.

What Does a Social Media Strategist Do? 

We could give you a long list of responsibilities for a social media strategist. Instead, we’ll cover what we believe to be the three most important responsibilities of any social media strategist.

Develop, Implement, & Manage Social Media Plans

A social media strategist must identify the following:

  • Potential customer demographics
  • Where the target audience engages on social media
  • How they communicate
  • What makes them tick

With this information, they can analyze social media trends and develop a social media strategy. Once fully developed, social media specialists will implement and manage it through various social media posts.

They may work with a social media manager during the implementation stage.

Define the Most Important Social Media KPIs

With the social media campaigns in place, your strategist will then track the results. Social media analytics is instrumental to the success of your campaigns and offers powerful insights. Of course, your strategist needs to be well-versed in the basic metrics, such as

  • Clicks
  • Comments
  • Likes
  • Shares

But they may also focus on even more important KPIs, like:

  • Brand mentions
  • Engagement
  • Followers
  • Impressions/views
  • Leads
  • Email signups
  • Sales
  • Website traffic

Your strategist will use these KPIs to alter the digital marketing strategy when necessary for the best results.

Build an Online Community on Social Media 

Although daily engagement is essential for a social media strategist, what matters more is building a community and cultivating influence.

Your strategist will use different tools, like storytelling, humor, and polls, to create a following of responsive and loyal customers. They will also guide your business in connecting with its target audience so that the customer relationship can go beyond sales and leads.

Do You Need a Social Media Strategist?

To know if you need to hire a social media strategist, look at who is already on your team.

A strategist is an excellent idea if you need someone to help with your big picture and create an overarching social media strategy. But if you only need someone to help with content creation, posting, and engaging with customers, you may be better off with a social media manager.

Additionally, if your current social media strategy isn’t getting the ROI you expected, a strategist can help assess why. Then, they can create a plan to reach your desired targets.

If you feel completely lost when it comes to anything social media-related, then a strategist can definitely help you.

Social Media Strategist Salary: Pricing to Expect

A strategist isn’t free, so you’ll need to add their fee to your social media marketing costs. According to Indeed.com, the average salary for a full-time social media strategist is around $52,000 per year. This is if you hire someone to join your in-house team.

However, you can also employ a strategist on a project basis. The strategist can deliver a strategy that is ready to implement. Prices will vary depending on the scope of the project and your strategist’s experience.

Grow Your Business With the Right Strategy

Growing your business’s online presence through various social media platforms is necessary to build a loyal customer base and reach your goals. Bringing a social media strategist on board can expedite achieving those goals. Want to learn more about our digital marketing services at EraserFarm? Reach out, and let’s have a chat!


social planning blackboard

What Is a Social Media Campaign? 7 Reasons Why You Need One

So everyone thinks they know what a social media campaign is right? Or so they think. But if your online business is struggling to generate income, then maybe there's a few things you're falling short of. More often than not, online businesses fail without their owners knowing why. Some fail because of poor website design while some fail because of financial mismanagement. But the most prominent reason why online businesses fail is that they lack an online presence. This means that when people look up anything related to their business on search engines like Google, other business will come up first on the list. To help boost your online visibility, you’re going to need a good social media campaign.

Why do you need it, you ask? Excellent question indeed. It's a way for you to increase your revenue by integrating social media into your business. Some people may have second thoughts about making one because social media doesn’t fit their business’s tone.

Here's a few things we've found to keep in mind when creating a campaign regardless of your business's tone.

 

1. Drive That Brand Recognition North Of The Border

The main reason why people overlook a certain brand or business is that they don’t necessarily recognize it. Recognition is important because this is a key to gaining the trust of customers. Having customers trust your brand is the first step towards a successful business.

Social media marketing will is a sure-fire way to help with all that. Many other businesses are already turning to Facebook and Twitter to increase their brand’s awareness, in fact. And that's because they know most people log in to their social media accounts whenever they go online. You know, like when they're in meetings they're bored with. Or in the bathroom. Or basically anywhere.

So, they make their own business page, post content, and pay for ads on social media platforms. Doing this introduces their brand to people and while it takes a while, the constant presence is a start to familiarizing potential customers to your brand.

2. Increase That Cha-Ching Sound For On-Site Sales

Ah that's music to your ears, no? After a while, people should have enough time getting to know your brand and you should start noticing an increase in your sales when this happens. Yep, it's a big perk you can get when you get a good social media strategy together. This happens when someone likes what they see about your business while they browse and often gets them clicking away on the content they see. If the links you made are right, then it should lead them back to your business’s website. Customers are then free to browse your website. They’ll either arrive at the landing page or the page of the product they clicked on. If it’s the latter, chances are they'll buy the product.

This will result in a big ol' leap in on-site sales over a period of time and it's also a great way to increase the traffic going to your website.

3. Referrals, Referrals, Referrals. Get More of 'Em.

What’s great about social media is that everyone is, in different ways, connected with one another. This gives your business a chance to thrive in a social media community because people tend to share positive experiences with other people who may like them.  Basically what this means is that running a social media campaign may ensure success if you’re targeting a niche. You'll have no trouble getting the word out about your product and customers who liked your products or services will be the ones to do it for you.

Also, because your existing customers who are doing the referring are also those who find some interest in your product, retention in your website will increase as well. People will spend more time on your website checking everything out. So, making a functional website will allow your new visitors to have a good time exploring your site.

4. It Increases Your Marketing Opportunities

Another great perk with social media marketing is that it ensures your future. Through social media marketing, your website will never die because active users will be the ones keeping it alive. There have been times where Google struck out high-ranking businesses before. Inactivity was the root cause of Google’s move. Not enough people were visiting them even though they were at the top of the search results.

A good social media marketing strategy prevents that from happening to your website because there are a lot of ways you can market through social media. Using your existing customer base, the content you post, and ads for marketing can all provide a new opportunity for someone new to become a potential customer.

This can bring in new customers for an indefinite amount of time. As long as you have a way to reach customers, your website will never be inactive.

5. Want More Partnership Opportunities? Done And Done

Social media platforms are great places to discover amazing partnerships and can vary from small companies to big ones, even to individual people. Regardless of which one you will have a partnership with, they can help your business out a lot. You can collaborate with small business. Doing this will allow you to share each other’s demographic to boost traffic with one another. Big business collaborations could do the same but with a larger crowd.

Individuals, also known as influencers, talk you up to their audience for a price and, quite often, they have a large audience to showcase you to. So, their prices tend to be worth the exposure.

6. Climb The Ladder Of SEO Ranking

Your SEO score is huge and, yes, social media marketing helps improve your organic growth rate. All the actions that we mentioned above, from customer retention to link building with different social media organizations all work towards increasing your search engine optimization score. Increasing your SEO score will help your website appear on the first page of search engines. This will allow even more people to discover your business and means you can nab more customers and visitors for your website.

7. Stay Hungry And Stay Competitive

The main benefit you can reap from social media marketing is you can stand toe to toe with your competitors. In fact, great social media strategy planning will put you ahead of your competition because of everything mentioned above. Everything works towards making your website the next big thing on the internet. It’s true that all other websites already do everything I've mentioned but, rest assured, you can make it better because you can take your time to personalize it. And personalization becomes easier through social media marketing because you know what your customers like by looking at their profiles. It'll give you a significant edge over people who don’t perform any kind of marketing.

So Now You're A Social Media Campaign Expert Right?

What is a social media campaign and why is it important? I hope this guide answered all your concerns and provided a little more insight into what you should do to move forward. But if you need help planning your social marketing campaign, we'd be ecstatic to partner up with you. Contact us here and we’ll get in touch as soon as we can.


photo of lake next to coniferous forest and mountains

The Flipside of User Generated Content

Consumer distrust. It’s a problem that runs through a marketer’s nightmares like a runaway train. User Generated Content is a good start to pull that train back into the station. And to no surprise, it’s become such a big part of current trends like influencer marketing. UGC is a more authentic than typical content. It is more relatable to consumers and is a great way to connect with them in real ways. Do we really believe a product or service is better because a celebrity is telling us so? I certainly wouldn’t. I am more inclined to believe someone who seems just like a regular Joe like me. The rub is that when brands engage their UGC with influencers who have tons of followers, relatability and authenticity of the content can get a little dicey. Particularly when you’re trying to differentitae between ad and advocacy.

One of the unique elements of UGC is that it taps into consumer trust and relationship building. It’s a good tactic, for sure.  Particularly when used with influencer marketing because the content users create is presented organically to those users’ social audiences. In fact, I recently saw a study conducted by Reevoo that said “61 percent of people would be more likely to engage with an advertisement if it contained user generated content.” And another from Bazaar found that “51 percent of Americans trust UGC more than other information on a company website.”

But….

And this is a big “but”. UGC is just half of a story that needs the whole story told.  I wholeheartedly believe that organic distribution is perceived as more authentic than paid, but when all brands care about or hone in on the size of someone’s audience, they risk missing out on the other powerful half of the user content story. And that is User Inspired Content.

Organic stories are more powerful than organic reach. And that’s why we should stop focusing in on how content is distributed and instead create the kind that people actually want to listen to. Content people want to read about and content people want to watch. The kind that places the user in the spotlight.

Take Patagonia, for example. This is a company whose mission is rooted in social responsibility. A lofty and worthy goal, and not one that’s easily communicated through banners or 30-second ads. To get its message across, Patagonia uses content to build a passionate community of people who share those values – and eventually support the company through purchases. They’ve produced and supported short films that tackle environmental issues, such as “The Refuge”, about two women from the Gwich’in people of Alaska who are on a quest to protect their land. They didn’t send them gear with the agreement that they’d post images wearing their stuff. Instead the powerful and emotionally charged story connects with users because it’s real and far from feeling anything remotely close to advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4DH5cK37Y8

REI, another outdoor company with strongly held beliefs and a passionate and devoted following, released the 30-minute film “Paul’s Boots,” that tells the story of a hiker who dreamed of completing the Appalachian Trail but passed away before ever starting. A group of hikers carried his boots along the trail to realize Paul’s dream. The film has garnered more than 1 million views on YouTube.

The risk you run by passing your voice to an influencer is you are fueling the relationship they have with your consumers. Is that a risk you’re willing to take considering the investment you’ve made cultivating followers and reach through your own channels, your paid media and PR?  Instead, why not give your advocates the podium, like Patagonia or REI did? Their story is the star. And because your brand plays a supporting role, the User Inspired Content is real and authentic. And it’s content a consumer will believe. And become an advocate themself.