Hiring for a social media
role isn’t easy – procuring a job from the other end is just as difficult.
However, understanding that the hiring manager is under the same amount of
stress as you are in finding a job is the key to getting your foot in the door.
You have to show them that hiring you – even as an intern – is worthwhile - worthwhile
to the hiring manager, worthwhile to the entire organization. Understand that they are held responsible for
your performance should they hire you; you may want to show them that you are
indeed a happy, incredible person, but they have superiors that they wish to
dazzle as well.
If you have read this far
then you still feel that you have the skills to be a social media manager.
Well, I am sorry to disappoint but there is no such thing as a generic social
media role (Blanchard, 2011, p. 72). That would be the equivalent of saying that
you are a professional answering machine or email reader. Social Media is a
medium – a tool used to carry out an objective. In addition to being fluent in
multiple forms of social media, your resume, and subsequently your skillset,
has to have a little more oomph
behind it. Since you have to care about what the recruiter wants – to impress
his superiors or to fill the role perfectly for the sake of the organization -
then you should subsequently care what his superiors are looking for.
Management teams care about
sales, revenue, costs, and impact – which means that as a social media manager
(or whatever role you fill that reflects that title in some way) you will need
to utilize your social media accounts as a method of communication to increase
the frequency, reach, and yield of the companies objectives. The way you
accomplish this depends on whether you are searching for a strategical role or
a tactical role – meaning your skills have to reflect the abilities required to
fill this role. To make it even simpler: even though you possess the know-how
of social media, you have to have other skills that would back up that know how
in such a way that would make your communicational endeavors useful. Any idiot
can post a tweet or write a blog, you want to be the one who can post it in
such a way that can make a positive impact on receiving audiences in a such a
way that generates an increase in the frequency in which the public buy from to
organization you work for or wish to work for, increases the ability to reach
new customers through word-of-mouth, and getting existing customers to spend
more with you every time they buy something.
We have already mentioned
what all of this means: managing social media is more than type and post, or
write a blog and post it – it is about how you communicate with your audiences
in a way that mutually benefits the consumer and the organization. Your ability
to do that backs up your ability to use social media and makes you a more
likely candidate of hire. Your resume, then, has to reflect your ability to do
the prior while mentioning you have skills in social media in passing. So to be
a successful candidate you need to prove to the hiring manager that you have
skills in research and management, that you have the mental capacity for
strategic, critical, and tactical thinking, that you have participated in
multiple projects on behalf of an organization – preferably taking on a
leadership role at some point, and, amongst a plethora of others, the ability
to manage a budget. Each one of these that you can meet will increase your
chances of being hired as a social media manager.
Hey, we had some ‘lulz’ here but this humor was conveyed
among solid logic and reason in order to assist you in attaining the job you
seek. Just as we have been able to sway and persuade while informing, you will
be expected to do the same – to invoke emotions through your writing in order
to persuade an audience. Do the same and you could be an amazing social media
manager.
References
Blanchard, O. (2011). Social media ROI:
managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization. Indianapolis:
Que Pub.
