Social Media
According to 34-year-old entrepreneur Jason Nazar, “Social Media is NOT a Career. These job titles won’t exist in 5 years. Social media is simply a function of marketing; it helps support branding, return on investment (ROI), or both. Social media is a means of increasing awareness, users, and revenue. It’s not an end in itself. I’d strongly caution against pegging your career trajectory solely to a social media job title.”
While it is true that platforms are destined to change, this revolution in marketing will not fade away; rather, it will evolve and transform to adopt new technologies and new channel streams. Below are some of the job titles specific to this field.
Careers
Software / UX Developers
Whether it’s the Social platforms themselves, the apps and games distributed on social, or the sites that social accounts promote and link to, all these things require software developers to put them together in the first place and to continuous redevelop them to meet user expectations. The vital importance of a good User Experience to the success of such developments means that UX specialist will continue to be in high demand.
Social Media SEO Specialists
In order to be visible to potential and current customers, search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists are essential and will continue to be so in the future as the leading search algorithms continue to evolve. Social channels have become a vital component in most organisations SEO strategy and this shows no sign of changing any time soon.
Community Managers
Having attracted an audience on social media it’s important to ensure that they are engaged and feel part of a community. A social media community manager encourages active engagement, moderates the day-to-day conversations, measures performance using various social media analytics tools and recommends/commissions content in line with user demand.
Data Analysts
Social media produces an incredible amount of real time data every second of every day. Until recently the processing power required to successfully analyse this data to discover meaningful trends put such insight beyond the reach of most organisations. Technological developments accompanied by falling computing costs have ushered in an age of Big Data, where data analysts are the gatekeepers to the gold hidden in real-time social signals.
Personal Customer Service Managers
Social media gives businesses and brands the opportunity to create and maintain a genuine one-to-one relationship with their customers. Of course, actually delivering this in the real world takes time, effort and resources, namely an army of customer service managers skilled in nurturing relationships via social channels. Expect demand for this type of position to grow rapidly over the next few years.
Digital Marketers/Media Buyers
Advertising is by far the largest component of the social media industry’s revenue growth. The flexibility, cost-efficiency and effectiveness of social media ads mean that digital marketing agencies will continue to require a high volume of digitally-savvy marketing consultants. Likewise, navigating the complex media buying environment created by social channels will continue to require specialist support.
Content Creators
A steady stream of fresh, engaging, timely and relevant content is the lifeblood of social media success, which is great news for creatives of all kinds: writers, designers, artists, musicians and video makers. As new platforms emerge and become popular, new types of creativity will be required, e.g. the short-form videos popular on Vine and Instagram. (Source)
Resources and Job Boards
- The Muse
- “Resources for Aspiring Social Media Professionals”
- “22 Tools and Applications Used by Social Media Professionals”
- Social Media Week (SMW)
- SMW Internship Program
- Online Porfolio Sites
- Cargo (online porfolio site). Please visit Handshake for the Student Code which offers free access to this service.
- Wix
- SquareSpace
- And many others!
