Are you a fresher excited to start a career in Social Media Marketing or a career professional who wants to spice things up and try out a new career path that is fun and exciting?
Social media now plays an important role for most organizations. Many businesses use social media to advertise, reach out, and carry out all other marketing functions via social platforms. Many new brands are also channelizing all their efforts on building a social media following base.
This realization has resulted in a dramatic spike in the demand for social media professionals( young peeps or mid-aged professionals, or anyone who knows how to use Instagram decently and run Facebook ads to help these new businesses get the eyeballs of the people who might be interested in their offerings).
This might sound all goodie-goodie if you like social media and are glued to it all day long, and yes, if you can create content that is going to go viral and help small brand things, will be goodie-goodie for you for most of the time.
However, it takes more than just being glued to social media every day to get a job in hand that pays you decently. How do you get a job like that?
Well, we’ll be going over everything you need to know about starting a career in social media marketing in this blog so stay glued.
Skills You Need To Become A Social Media Marketing
Here is a list of some key skills that you’ve got to polish to ensure that you’re ready to start a career in social media marketing.
- Social Media: Though you may have a decent understanding of how things work on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms, but is it enough to become a social media manager? Why should a brand trust you with its account? Even as a fresher, you need to have a basic understanding of various social media platforms and what does well on each.
2. Analytical Tools: These become even more important if you’re going to seek a performance marketing role and in general too if you’ll be running a campaign, you’ve got to analyze its performance. There are several tools that can help you analyze your performance. Some of the popular ones are HubSpot, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial.
3. Content Creation: Content creation can vary from platform to platform however, some skills come in handy for the platforms:
- Good writing skills
- Hooky Video Ideas
- A subtle sense of aesthetics
How To Build A Career In Social Media Marketing As A Beginner?
If you are a complete beginner who wants to learn how to start a career in social media marketing with no degree and zero work experience, these are the steps you need to follow:
Step 1: Learn Social Media Marketing
To start getting paid for something you’ve got to ensure that you can prove yourself to be worth it.
The internet is full of free and paid resources that you can use to learn social media marketing. As an agency, we understand they are not enough.
You don’t just need how-to tutorials to become good at something. You need practical experience.
This is why we offer a live training program with a simultaneous internship. This way, you already have your portfolio ready by the time you finish your training.
Step 2: Apply For Jobs Or Internships That Require Less Experience:
Entry Level jobs and internships are a good place to start if you have got the relevant skills but lack experience. These arrangements are often paid and also give you some hands-on experience on how things work in the real world.
Here are some non-traditional ways to become a social media marketer without a degree:
- Freelance: Offering your services at a nominal rate as a freelancer can help you hone your skills and turn out to be a nice learning experience. You can also further use your freelance projects as your portfolio and apply for more demanding full-time roles.
2. Volunteer: You can offer to help out a close friend, family member, or an acquaintance who has a business that has the potential for being online (which to be honest, every business has in today’s world).
Create a website on WordPress or any other free website developing tool, or an Instagram Facebook page to begin with. You can run ads with a minimum budget just to try out and learn and if you can help their business in some way or the other using your social media expertise.
It’s a field where experience speaks and matters more than a degree.
3. Start your own social media page: If your friend’s business doesn’t interest you, then what does? There’s got to be something, right? Food, games, traveling, comics, books, stones, postcards, bottle caps, you get the point. Make a social page for it and try building a decent follower base on it, cause if you can do that, it acts as the most concrete proof in front of a recruiter that you can do it for them as well.
Step 3: Expand Your Professional Network
Networking can seem intimidating especially when you’re a newbie and don’t have much to offer. But that makes networking even more indispensable for you, so don’t doubt yourself, just hit that connect button whenever you come across someone who you think might have something to offer to you.
Try building a genuine conversation first, let them know about yourself, and be genuinely equally interested in their work. Refer to some pieces of their work that you really like, and then just ask for some advice, to begin with.
It sounds tedious and awkward but building networks and connections can help you get straight into the interview with HR, so it’s worth a shot and especially when you’ve got nothing to lose.
If you’re just starting and have zero connections, try joining a small group on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms). This will expose you to what is really needed in your work and what all skills are people looking for. Moreover, some groups also have job postings, which can help you land your first job if you have the relevant skills and a portfolio to prove it.
Key Takeaways
To sum up, if you really want to become a social media marketer, here’s what you’ve got to do: learn the skills following which you’ve got to try out for yourself and record your learnings/experience, and then you may reach out to people who you can help out with your skills.
Lastly, having the right attitude. Learning a skill, and being able to make a substantial difference using it, takes time, patience, and consistency.
