18 Skills All Social Media Managers Need To Have
Want to know what social media skills you need to be a social media manager? I’ve got you covered.
The social media job market is highly competitive. Skilled social media managers are always in demand, but to stand out in the huge pool of applicants, you need to make yourself as employable as possible and outshine the competition.
That means developing and demonstrating the key skills employers are looking for. If you want to land the job—or keep growing in your career—you need to prove you’ve got what it takes.
With that in mind, I’ll break down the essential skills every social media manager needs in this post. Plus, I’ll also share some tips to help you work on them.
What is a social media manager?
A social media manager is responsible for managing a brand’s social media presence.
The nature of the role—and the responsibilities involved—can differ greatly depending on the employer.
Often, a social media manager works alongside a team of other social media specialists, such as content creators, copywriters, strategists, and customer support reps.
In these situations, the social media manager will oversee the overall strategy, coordinate team efforts, and ensure the brand’s voice remains consistent across channels.
Other times, a social media manager may be the only person involved in the brand’s social media operations, juggling multiple roles and handling everything from strategy development and content creation to customer support on their own.
Managing all those responsibilities requires a diverse set of skills. With that in mind, let’s look at the essential skills all social media managers need to have…
1. Strategy planning
The role of a social media manager has changed over the last few years.
Brands are now increasingly turning to AI tools for tasks like caption writing and graphic creation.
As a result, the primary responsibility of social media managers is no longer content creation—it’s strategy development.
If you know how to plan a winning social media strategy that helps brands achieve their goals, you’ll be super employable this year.
How to improve
Building a social media strategy starts with setting clear goals that align with the business’ broader digital marketing objectives.
Read our guide on how to set social media goals to learn how to do this the right way.
Once you’ve set your goals, you can build your social media strategy around them. You’ll need to:
- Plan your content mix. Consider the mixture of different types of posts (e.g. memes, promotional posts, videos, stories, etc.) that you’ll share on each social media platform.
- Create a posting schedule. Find your best time to post on each platform and optimize your posting schedule based on this. A good social media scheduler like SocialBee can help with this.
- Define your KPIs (key performance indicators). Choose what metrics you’ll track to measure progress toward your goals and evaluate the effectiveness of your social media strategy. That might be follower growth, post impressions, engagement rate, etc
2. Creativity
Social media managers need to be creative. You’ll need to constantly think up new ideas for social media posts that will resonate with your audience—and that’s no easy feat.
Too many brands post boring, repetitive promotional content on their social media accounts that audiences have seen dozens of times before. Anyone can do that. It’s not enough.
To make yourself employable, you need to demonstrate that you can come up with engaging, original, innovative ideas that haven’t been done before.
You’ll need to flex those creative muscles and create posts that keep followers hooked and help the brand stand out from its competitors.
How to improve
Study successful brands on social media and learn from them. Look at what makes their posts engaging and consider how you can incorporate that into your own ideas.
Follow social media trends, explore hashtags, and keep a swipe file of interesting ideas for inspiration. This will help you on those days when you’re having writer’s block and struggling to think of something to post.
Remember also that AI tools can help you brainstorm fresh concepts when you’re out of ideas.
3. Writing
While it’s true that brands are now increasingly using AI to write social media posts, that human touch is still important.
If you can demonstrate strong copywriting skills and show that you can write captions that bring your social media posts to life and make them stand out in a sea of artificial slop, brands will be snapping you up.
Tips to improve
Writing for social media is very different to writing copy for other channels, like email or landing pages.
Brands tend to prefer to get more creative on social media and write in a more casual, informal way that makes them relatable to their audience.
So, it’s less about technical proficiency and more about tone. You’ll need to show that you can write in a distinctive tone of voice that engages audiences, and maintain that same voice consistently across channels.
A social media style guide can help with this.
4. Graphic design
Using photos, graphics, and videos in social media posts has been shown to significantly boost engagement compared to text-only content.
As such, most brands now prioritize visuals in their social media strategies.
Therefore, as a social media manager, your day-to-day responsibilities will likely include overseeing the creation of post visuals.
You may have to create the visuals yourself or delegate graphic design tasks to your marketing team and oversee their work to make sure everything they create is on-brand.
Tips to improve
You don’t need to be a professional graphic designer to create visuals for social media—but you do need a strong grasp of the basics.
I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with Canva.
It’s an online graphic design tool made for beginners with a huge asset library of prefabricated templates, images, and graphics that you can use in your designs, so you don’t have to make everything yourself from scratch.
The interface is drag-and-drop. You just grab assets from the library, drop them onto the page, and use the built-in tools to edit them as needed.
A lot of the templates are for social media specifically so you can be sure all your designs will be in the right dimensions/format for each platform too.
If you want to go the extra mile, it could be worth learning professional-grade software too, like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—but this isn’t essential.
5. Video creation
Short-form video is huge right now.
Pretty much every social network now allows users to share videos, and they tend to perform better than other post types.
As such, being able to record, edit, and produce videos with a compelling story and a great hook is a key skill for social media managers.
Tips to improve
At a minimum, you’ll need a good grasp of how to record and edit videos using the native tools available in social apps like TikTok.
Ideally, you should also know how to work with third-party editing tools like CapCut, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro.
6. Project management
Social media managers have to manage their client’s social media campaigns from start to finish.
They have to create publishing schedules, manage their team, run reports, and see everything through to completion.
This will require strong project management skills. You’ll need to manage complex workflows and juggle multiple responsibilities while making sure everything runs smoothly.
Tips to improve
Social media management software like Sendible can help you stay organized with your social media projects.
They come with features like built-in content calendars, shared team asset libraries, approval workflows, and other collaboration tools to help you keep things organized and manage your campaigns.
7. Customer service
A lot of brands don’t just use social media as a marketing channel—they also use it as a customer support channel.
Customers will often reach out to brands on social with queries and complaints, and part of a social media manager’s job is to handle those interactions in a way that protects the brand’s reputation and provides the best possible customer experience.
As such, strong customer service skills are essential.
Tips to improve
A good social media inbox tool like Pallyy can help you manage customer support on social media.
It can combine all your comments and messages from across multiple social media channels into one unified feed.
Plus, some social media inboxes also often come with features to help you to reply to customers more efficiently at scale, such as saved replies and automations.
8. Time management
Managing social media campaigns is a ton of work, so it’s important to manage your time effectively.
Social media managers juggle a lot of different responsibilities—content creation, scheduling, community management, reporting, and more.
You’ll need to learn how to prioritize tasks, streamline your workflow, and automate where you can to make the most of the time you have.
Tips to improve
Social media automation tools can help you to manage your time more effectively. For example, you can batch-schedule posts ahead of time in one sitting or set up automated reporting to free up time for other tasks.
I’d recommend SocialBee as it’s one of the few tools that allows you to schedule content categories, which is much more efficient than scheduling posts individually.
Plus, it has a bunch of other time-saving features, including end-to-end AI strategy generation.
9. Outreach & collaboration
Social media isn’t just about posting content—it’s about building relationships.
As a social media manager, part of your job might be to connect with influencers, industry leaders, and other brands to drive engagement and expand your reach.
Strong outreach skills will help you secure brand partnerships, influencer collaborations, and cross-promotions that benefit your brand. And strong collaboration skills will help you to work with those partners effectively.
You’ll also need effective communication skills to collaborate with other internal departments within the business, like sales and customer service, to align your social media efforts with broader business goals.
Tips to improve
The first step is to learn how to write effective outreach emails and DMs. There’s an art to this—you’re aiming to build genuine relationships rather than just cold-pitching. Social media outreach tools can help you find social media influencers and brands you might want to work with.
10. Research skills
Research is something social media managers have to do every day.
You’ll need to keep track of your competitors, uncover trending topics, keep up to date with changes to the social media algorithm, and more. As such, strong research skills are essential.
Tips to improve
Keep track of popular social media news and blog sites to stay informed about relevant changes to the social landscape that might impact your strategy. Likewise, follow competitors and thought leaders in your brand’s industry to stay informed.
11. Data analysis
Good social media managers make decisions based on data.
You’ll need strong data analytics skills to be able to track your KPIs, dig through your analytics data, and extract useful insights to inform your strategy.
For example, you should be able to measure and prove ROI to your clients. Plus, work out which post formats and social media platforms work best, find your best time to post, and more.
Tips to improve
Familiarize yourself with social media analytics tools like Social Status, as well as general website analytics tools like Google Analytics.
You’ll need to know how to interpret metrics like engagement rates, follow growth, website traffic, audience demographics, and so on, as well as how to build easy-to-understand reports to share with your clients.
12. Platform knowledge
Social media managers should have a good knowledge of all the different social media platforms their clients might be active on—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, and so on.
Some social media marketers specialize in one or more networks to make themselves stand out from the competition. For example, you could position yourself as an expert in B2B marketing on LinkedIn specifically.
Tips to improve
Hone your social media expertise by taking the time to learn about the leading social media platforms, paying particular attention to any you want to specialize in.
Understand the audience demographics that use each of them, what content works best on them, how to format posts for each platform, and anything else you might need to know.
13. Paid advertising
Social media managers may need to run paid ad campaigns for their clients. This will require a good level of knowledge of things like ad targeting, budgeting, and optimization. You’ll need to be able to set up paid campaigns that offer the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS).
Tips to improve
Learn how to use the most common social media ad platforms, including Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads.
Experiment with A/B testing and audience segmentation to refine ad performance.
14. Budgeting
Many brands have a dedicated budget for social media marketing. Social media managers need strong budgeting skills to ensure this gets spent effectively.
You’ll need to budget for things like content creation, influencer partnerships, software and tools, paid media, etc. optimally to get the most bang for your buck.
Tips to improve
Use budget-tracking tools and prioritize spending on high-ROI activities. Analyze past campaigns to optimize future budget allocations.
15. Crisis management
News spreads like wildfire on social media. Crises like negative PR and viral backlash can happen anytime. Knowing how to respond in those situations to mitigate the damage to your brand is crucial.
Tips to improve
A good social listening tool like Brand24 can help with crisis management.
They keep track of brand mentions and alert you when there’s a sudden change in mention volume or brand sentiment, so you can quickly identify developing crises and react accordingly.
16. Trendspotting
Social media managers should know how to spot emerging trends that align with their brand. Getting involved in relevant social media trends early can boost your reach and engagement.
Tips to improve
Follow popular influencers and creators in your niche and keep a close eye on the for-you page to see what kind of content is trending. If you see something that resonates with your brand, get involved.
17. SEO for Social Media
Consumers are increasingly using social media as a search engine, which has opened up a new frontier of social media SEO (search engine optimization).
Social media managers who have a good understanding of how to optimize their social media profiles and content for maximum search visibility will have a competitive edge this year.
Tips to improve
Learn the basics of SEO. Always try to use relevant keywords in captions, hashtags, and profiles to boost discoverability, and optimize your video titles, descriptions, and meta text for search.
18. AI skills
Like it or not, generative AI looks like it’s here to stay—and it’s going to play an important role in all social media campaigns in the future.
Social media managers should be able to use AI effectively to optimize their workflows and automate repetitive tasks, but know how to balance that with a human touch.
Keeping the human touch is important because audiences are already beginning to unfollow accounts that are relying 100% on AI for their content.
And let’s face it – most written content created with AI is quite bland.
Tips to improve
Learn how to use tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Midjourney, and Runway to generate text, images, and videos for your social media posts.
Practice ‘prompt engineering’ by experimenting with different ways of prompting AI tools to get the most out of them.
Final thoughts
There you have it—the skills all social media managers need to have this year.
Remember that the social media marketing skills you need to succeed are constantly changing, so you’ll need to stay agile.
Every year brings new tools, algorithm updates, platforms, features, and trends. What works today might be outdated tomorrow.
That’s why the best social media managers aren’t just skilled—they’re flexible, forward-thinking, and always evolving. Stay sharp, and you’ll always be in demand.
