What is the difference between a social media manager and a social media strategist?

Should I hire a social media strategist or a social media manager?

What’s the difference between a social media manager and a social media strategist?

Some of the basic things a social media manager might do for your when you hire one to work with your team can include: scheduling content, content creation and community management.

A social media manager’s main responsibility is to ensure that your brand is showing up consistently online and utilizing your brand’s voice to come across cohesively on all platforms.

A social media strategist on the other hand, will work with your team to develop a social strategy, allowing your brand to show up strategically online. This means creating content that helps your brand reach your business goals, testing different content variations while tracking performance and analytics. Using psychology to research and understand your audience, their pain points and needs, and crafting content to target them specifically.

“When should I hire a social media manager vs. a social media strategist”?

You should hire a social media manager when you already have a strategy in place and you’re looking for help executing it. You already understand your audience, you know what they like, you understand their needs but keeping up with social media is an extra task on your plate that you want to get rid of as a business owner.

Your social media manager will help you plan some of that content, they can potentially create/design graphics for your business, and they can help you manage your community by responding to DM’s, comments, and engaging with your audience.

You should hire a social media strategist if you don’t have a PLAN for how to show up on social media. Your strategist will map out exactly how you come across on each social media platform, giving you specific goals for each platform and tying everything together with your overall marketing goals.

Your social media strategist will also help you analyze content for performance, make changes to the strategy as needed and implement insights to increase desired customer behavior.

So if you’re looking for help with your social media, ask yourself which of these sound more like the type of help that you need.

Here at May De Almeida Digital Strategies, we offer a combination of social media management and social strategy. This means we will work with you to develop a custom strategy for your brand and implement the strategy as well.

We also offer these services individually. Strategy only services means we put together a strategy for you to implement with your our social media manager. Social media management only services means you have the bulk of content (blogs, newsletters, photographs) and you’re looking for help piecing it all together.