Has there ever been a more exciting or complex time to be a marketer? The rules are changing constantly and rapid shifts in technology are giving marketing best practices the shelf life of a ripe banana. It’s an era where social business success favours the nimble and experimental social media marketer.
But who’s in the driving seat on your social media success? What makes them tick? And more importantly – what does a social media manager do, anyway?
In a survey carried out in February we asked a series of these no-holds-barred questions to our digital communities to get to know them a little bit better. We covered everything from their work, their salary, their budgets, their KPIs, their challenges and we got some very interesting results.
Managing social media effectively is crucial to a brand’s success so in this last post, we wanted to see what social media marketers had to say about their work culture, success drivers, rewards and overall job satisfaction!
Day-to-Day Work
Managing social media for an organization is a complex role – often requiring an adept understanding of psychology, evangelism, storytelling, and of course, firefighting. Bearing this in mind – it’s interesting to see that 44.7% of US participants and 22.7% of UK participants replied that they see themselves not just as social media managers or marketers, but rather as the “Jack of all trades” in their organisation.
Furthermore, it’s interesting that while 13.6% of UK respondents listed themselves as social media managers, there was not a single UK-based community manager among the respondents – unlike their American counterparts, who had 9.4% of respondents spread across both categories.
This could correspond to the fact that 31.8% of UK respondents also described themselves as “Digital Something’s” – meaning that perhaps roles like community management and social media management are seen as either more synonymous or undefined.
Social Media Marketing Salaries & Budgets
As the digital landscape matures and changes, it can be difficult for employers to gauge if they’re paying their current community, social or digital manager enough to stay with their organization or offering enough to ensure that they’re attracting the most qualified candidates in the first place.
We did some digging into the figures and found that the going rate for community managers in the USA is listed on Glassdoor as ranging from a low of $29,000, to a high of $105,000 with the national average being about $47,000.
However, in our survey we did not actually ask for concrete numbers, but rather for participants’ subjective opinions about their own compensation and also about their level of industry experience – which was listed on average as being between 4-7 years of experience.
What we found was that 1 in 3 U.S. based employees in the social arena is happy with their compensation, whereas in the UK, only 1 in 5 believe that they’re appropriately remunerated. For the respondents who said that they weren’t happy, their responses varied from saying that their compensation is “ok, but it could be more” or that they were unhappy with their salary.
Interestingly, those most unhappy came from a range of experience levels, but described themselves on average as being a “jack of all trades” (53%) or “digital something” (25%.) Furthermore, 80% of those that are were unhappy with their salaries also seemed not to have any budget for social media, with a further 56% mentioning that they probably will not get any budget in the short-term.
In contrast, marketers across all levels of experience actually seemed to be the most satisfied. Across the board, only 1 in 10 marketing professionals mentioned being unhappy with their salary.
Like the “jacks of all trades” – 50% of marketers still mentioned having no budget for social. However, 1 in 4 marketers said that around 25% of their budget goes to social media and the remaining participants had social media budget, but less than 25%. 1 in 3 of all marketers also mentioned upcoming budget increases, enabling them to include social PR and social media advertising into their strategies
The trend that we identified is that those who seem to be “jack of all trades” seem also to be stretched in terms of resources and this is affecting their levels of satisfaction in their work and compensation.
Achieving and measuring social success
Our survey participants came from a variety of different specializations which means that the way their performance is measured can vary hugely.
For example, a Community Manager’s performance can be measured somewhat subjectively, in terms of the value it adds to your social media communities, whereas a Social Media Manager’s performance is often analyzed with hard data and numbers that result from campaigns. A social media manager also requires a tremendous amount of strategy in order to visibly prove a positive ROI. Despite being completely crucial to a marketing strategy, connecting the dots between social media and increased business is just starting to come into its own.
Despite these differences – driving high engagement and response rates are recognized as key performance indicators against which all of our participants are measured and these are also the areas where our survey participants mention attributing the most effort and budget.
Driving strong engagement rates of course depends on providing great content and when we asked the participants to our survey about their recipe for driving virality and engagement, a startling 58-68.4% mentioned that staying on top of current trends is the main instrument they use in helping them to create viral content because it helps them to push out real-time, relevant content at scale.
This is followed in importance by video marketing – reflecting the value of video as an engaging marketing medium and contests also seem to be considered relatively important as a mechanism for generating engagement. However, leveraging humour and VIP brand ambassadors seem relatively out of focus for all but a small margin of U.S based marketers.
via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/TcQquC
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