So You Want to Work In Social Media?

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.

           One more thing: on your resume, cover letter, or wherever you can, you are going to want to include the active social media accounts you have had. Show them that you are on social media without saying “Hey! I can use social media”. Just as putting your phone number down on a resume shows, in some capacity, that you are able to use a phone, putting down ways to access your social media accounts shows your recruiter that you can use, and have been using various social media accounts. Word of caution, though, according to Blanchard (2011), if you are going to perform the aforementioned, you should hope that you have maintained a professional appearance on your social networks for two to five years – two being minimum five being the preferred. Trust me, give them a link and they will check you out. Give them a link that isn’t professional and you may end up on the hiring wall of shame. Hey, you may be able to give them a few ‘lulz’, but you want to show them that you exist to be a professional not a comedian.

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.