What is the profession of an SMM manager and what is it for? SMM specialist is the profession of the future.

Modern life is hard to imagine without the influence of the Internet. People buy various goods there, order services, communicate, get acquainted and just relax. The Internet has also become a place of work for many different specialists. Blogs, websites and social networks are what you can earn tens of thousands of dollars on, and there are a lot of ways to earn money. Every day the number of sites increases, the number of users of social networks increases. All this leads to the emergence of new professions related to the development and promotion of Internet resources. Today we will talk about social promotion. I think that it is not necessary to explain why social networks are the object of our attention. I can only say one thing - 180 million. This is exactly the number of registered users of Vkontakte, and 50 million of them visit the site daily. This is a huge platform for making money, promoting your own brand and developing the site. And of course, there is a separate caste of people who are engaged in promotion in social networks, these are SMM specialists.

SMM and SMO promotion - what is it?

Those who were previously interested in social promotion have probably already met with such abbreviations as SMM and SMO. What is it and what is the difference between them? If we consider in detail, then SMO (from the English Social Media Optimization) is one of the types of modern external website promotion, which consists in filling the site and promoting it in social networks. In fact, you do not need to look at search engines, all the emphasis, and all the traffic you will receive from various social networks. networks. SMM (from the English. Social Medial Marketing) is the process of attracting visitors to the site using the possibilities of social networks. Also, SMM specialists are engaged in the development of brands in the network, the formation of its positive image. To a greater extent, this is the work of marketers, only the main focus is on the social sphere. I am sure that after reading the two definitions, you will ask “What is the difference between SMM and SMO?”. Although these concepts are very similar, they are not the same. We can say that SMO is an integral part of SMM. The main task of SMO is to attract social network users to your site. For this, special groups are created, advertising campaigns and various promotions are held. SMM includes SMO, but the main goal is to popularize the brand, project, resource in the social network itself. The methods used in SMM promotion are more diverse and more creative. Here you need to think not in a stereotyped way, but to select more and more new ways to implement the tasks.

SMM Specialist - Prospects for the Profession

With the advent of the Internet, many large companies began to understand that the future lies with it, but if 10 years ago the prospects for various professions on the Internet were vague, then with the advent of social networks and the strengthening of their influence, it finally became clear that there would be a huge demand for good specialists. Such specialists used to be SEO optimizers, and now more and more companies are focusing on promotion and creating a positive image in social networks. That is why they need SMM-shchiki. As you understand, a specialist, in whatever field he works, has always been appreciated. The Internet is no exception. Today, a master of social promotion can earn from $ 3,000 per month, and every day the opportunities for earning, and, accordingly, profits, are only growing. The main thing here is to find your niche in time, while there is still good demand and there is an opportunity to make a decent name for yourself.

How to become an SMM specialist?

As Lenin said, "Studies, studies and studies again." In order to become an SMM specialist, you do not need to wipe your pants at the university for 5 years and receive an unnecessary diploma. Self-education is the basis of this promising profession. There are already a lot of manuals on the net that will help you take the first steps. Pay attention to the phrase "first steps". You only have to take the vector of movement, understand the basics, all further study is only on your own. Try to create your own group, promote it using various methods. You can create a website and experiment, start driving traffic from social networks to your website. Believe that no webinars and books will give you the experience that you will get on your own. Only real practice and understanding of the thinking of network users can turn you from an ordinary user into a real SMM master.

Why is SMM better than other promotion methods?

Speaking about SMM, it is worth dwelling in more detail on the advantages of such promotion over other types of development of your own brand, product or resource. After all, I declare that SMM is the future, and it would not be bad to show you the real advantages that social media has today, not to mention what will happen in a couple of years, given the frantic pace of development of social networks.

1. SMM promotion is cheaper than SEO or search engine advertising. This factor can be decisive for a young businessman who does not have much money for promotion. Over time, the effect of SMM will only increase, and there will be more and more ways to promote. It can be assumed that the price will not rise either.
2. Incredible prospects. It would seem that the largest social network Vkontakte already unites 180 million people, much more. But no, it is actively developing, more and more new people are being attracted, the audience is growing. This means that SMM also has good prospects, and not just good, but excellent.
3. Virus intensity promotion. With SMM, you can easily launch viral ads that can take your brand from rags to riches in a matter of days. Social networks are the best place for this type of advertising. Very fast dissemination of information, easy exchange between users, accessibility - perhaps these are the determining factors that speak for SMM.
4. No big competition. Not everyone has yet managed to understand the possibilities of social networks, although the development trend is good. If in search engines, in order to take top positions and attract a visitor for a competitive query, you need to work very hard, then with social networks, everything is much easier. Of course, over time, competition and the struggle for the user will only increase, but in any case, SMM has more prospects and options for attracting people.

SEO cannot boast of such an effect, since this type of promotion is not intended for viral marketing at all.

We have released a new book, "Social Media Content Marketing: How to get into the head of subscribers and make them fall in love with your brand."

An SMM manager is a specialist who, his task is to draw people's attention to the promoted brand and convert them into customers.

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The main secrets of such an expert:

• Constantly learning.
• Knows the secret tricks of social media.
• He masterfully owns auxiliary tools to quickly and efficiently do his job.
• He knows how to correctly express his thoughts and your audience likes it.
• Tracks trends.
• Understands psychology.

SMM manager - who is it: functions, tasks

• You composed the text - topic, title, post content (1 hour).
• Then they looked for a photo (1.5 hours - for a long time they could not choose what they needed).
• We picked up hashtags (1 hour and only because we didn’t bother with it much).
• We came up with the design, because it is important to hook people.
• Post your masterpiece on social media.
• We were waiting for an explosion of likes, comments, reposts.

Not having received the desired reaction, you made a new publication without desire. And then another, and so on. Sometimes daily, sometimes every other day, sometimes once a week. But the subscribers did not increase, only you and your mother liked you, and sales from social networks began to seem something unreal, like unicorns or children.

You realized that you spend a lot of time on what is necessary, but you don’t like it (it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and in general, who invented it). And we decided to entrust this matter to a specialist.

What does an SMM manager do?

First, it saves you time, effort and nerves. This person understands how your potential customers behave on social networks, so he knows how to attract them. He learned how to do quality work. And it doesn’t matter if he went through trainings or filled bumps for years - he has more experience and knowledge than you.

He is not upset by the lack of likes in public, because he knows how to stir people up, set things in motion and shake up communication. Engage the audience in some kind of social process.

Secondly, it creates content and engages in dialogue with your potential customers. Thanks to this, the recognition of your brand and product grows, more people come to the site and get into the funnel. It also wins their trust for you.

Thirdly, he does everything professionally. Starting from the writing of the text, ending with the time of publication. He is aware of any changes on your page, he understands the trends, his actions give results. Even before the start, you should discuss your wishes, goals and methods with the SMM manager.

Fourth, he constantly analyzes his work and looks for ways to make it better. This is already a sign of a real pro who understands that his task is to bring money to the client.

For this, you pay him a salary, qualitatively delegating an important task, the implementation of which helps your business grow.

SMM manager: salary as the price of success

If we take the average, then the salary of an SMM specialist starts from 40,000 rubles. This is according to bulletin boards. But this figure can both decrease and increase depending on various factors:

• Region.
• Knowledge, experience, professional duties.
• Office or remote work.
• The level of "immersion" in the customer's business.

The greater the volume of work, the higher the salary of an SMM manager. It is worth considering the fact that the offer on the market from such applicants is very high. This gives employers an excuse to offer lower fees for services.

Therefore, it is important for a person who maintains social media accounts for companies to:

• Constantly improve.
• Find ways to get better results at a lower cost.
• In every possible way to show that in his person the employer receives more benefits than he pays for it.

Plus, when working remotely, you can take on more than one project, but several. Especially if you are a master of various tools that make your work easier.

What you need to know to become an SMM manager

At first glance, it may seem that there is nothing complicated in such work. But if you dig deeper, it turns out that a specialist in - a real universal soldier. He needs to understand:

1. The laws of social networks, because each of them has its own specifics and it must be taken into account.
2. Copywriting to prepare posts and engage the audience with them.
3. Work with image processing programs and create catchy pictures for posted publications.
4. Psychology, to know how to behave with subscribers and what they need to give in order to push them to a certain action.
5. Strategic planning and business processes, because he should understand where to move and what to broadcast.
6. Building and increasing brand awareness based on information about the company that is being promoted.
7. Analytics - to see what the numbers show, to know how to evaluate their dynamics and how to adjust the promotion strategy so that the indicators change for the better.

These are the necessary skills that will allow you to perform the duties of an SMM manager with high quality. But besides this, it is also important to be a literate, erudite person with a great sense of humor.

How to become an SMM manager

Although this profession is in high demand, there is no educational institution where you can learn it. Therefore, there are two ways to become an SMM specialist:

• Himself - it's free and long.
• Learn from those who have already achieved success in this area.

When mastering the right skills, focus on the following areas:

• Marketing.
• Web design basics.

It is important to understand:

• How people behave on the Internet.
• What drives them.
• How to get their attention.
• Why do they like, comment, repost, subscribe to pages.
• How to interest them and send them to the customer's website.

• Create accounts and for what purposes they are intended.
• Manage client pages: prepare posts, develop a promotion strategy, work with visual content, track the reaction of subscribers, read statistics.
• Conduct an audit of social networks to prescribe a strategy for further actions and improvement of performance.
• Run ads on selected sites and get the maximum result from it.
• Use content marketing to achieve your goals.

Keep evolving because social media is a very dynamic environment. Therefore, regularly read books, posts of opinion leaders (including foreign ones), go to training courses and just be in trend. Understand how everything works here in order to be able to convey your vision to the client, because he relies on you as a pro.

How does the work of an SMM manager begin?

When you dive into a new project as an SMM specialist, carefully study the information about the company or person you will be promoting. You must clearly understand:

• What exactly are you suggesting.
• What is its main feature.
• What problems does it solve.

• Become more popular.
• Gather a group of like-minded people in one place and bring up brand “fans”.
• Drive more traffic to your website or blog.
• Sell.

Now it is important to understand who your target audience is. Make a detailed portrait of the person you will target when posting on social networks:

• Is it a man or a woman.
• How old is he.
• Where does he live.
• What are you interested in.
• What is his marital status.
• Does he have children.
• Who does he work and how much does he earn
  What problems does he have and why does he need to solve them.

Knowing this information about potential customers, you can easily determine in which social networks these people spend the most time and are most active. On these platforms you also should work.

• Carefully study their pages and save links to them so that you can monitor them periodically.
• What content are they posting?
• How people react to it.
• What would you do differently.

Having collected this data, you will draw up a strategy for promoting the company / brand on the selected sites, you will be able to develop a content plan for the first 2 weeks and decide on the frequency and time of publication.

This is enough to get started. Review the results after about a month. Perhaps the statistics will show that it is worth adjusting the content plan because you are not attracting the right audience. Track the numbers in dynamics and learn to adapt to the reaction of potential customers. Over time, you will figure out in practice how to become an SMM specialist.

Maintaining the pages of companies and brands in social networks has long gone beyond the publication of cute quotes and funny cats. This task has become a set of targeted actions that help to attract traffic to the client's website and “educate” buyers for him. The better you do it, the more valuable you are to customers.

Build your knowledge, experience and competitive edge to become a truly in-demand social media master.

Social networks are not only a place for communication, but also a popular tool for promoting goods and services. True, like any other instrument, SMM (Social media Marketing) becomes effective only in capable hands. This predetermined the emergence of a relatively new, but, of course, promising profession - SMM-specialist. SD figured out who they areSMMclerks (or smmschiki), where they teach this, how they can help the business and which of them should be trusted.

What kindsuchsmmmboxes?

The explosive growth in the popularity of social networks, whose potential to attract new users has not yet been exhausted (although the largest of them - Facebook (1.7 billion users) - has been available to all users for 10 years), of course, quickly made social networks not only communication tool, but also advertising platforms and marketing tools. A huge audience in one place, which is also quite clearly segmented, is just a treasure for marketers. Here it is easy to single out the target audience from the mass of users by gender, age, interests or place of residence. Social media users quickly share information about the product with other people, promoting it in this way. At the same time, SMM promotion is relatively low-cost compared to other types of advertising and marketing - no budgets are required for the purchase of expensive advertising space or for the production of advertising materials, there are no distribution costs, and so on. - and also provides fast feedback. The difficulty is that traditional marketing techniques in social networks do not work: user feeds are updated continuously and in order to be noticed, you need to learn how to compete not only with advertising from direct competitors, but in general with all network content - publications of popular groups, news, personal events users, etc. Creating such content for a brand is the job of an smm manager.

At the same time, the specialists themselves find it difficult to clearly describe the standard functionality of the SMS operator - as a rule, this functionality is determined by a specific project. However, the ideal SMM manager, according to SMM specialist Roman Vostrukhin, should not only have communication skills, but also understand special tools, which will distinguish him from just an active user, for example.

In my opinion, there are two main areas in which SMM workers work, Roman explains. - The first is communication in social networks, involvement, placement of information, etc. The second is the software component, the ability to work with special programs and services. Ideally, when an SMM manager knows how to do both.

Aleksey Mokrushin, co-owner and technical director of IA Susanin, is sure that SMM cannot do without special software, which expands the possibilities of analytics, strategy, and impact on the audience by an order of magnitude.

Each social network is special in its use, each needs a special approach, - adds Tatyana Pavlova, commercial director of Internet Active. - For example, posts on Instagram can only be made from the phone, but this is not very convenient for a manager who works with several accounts. Therefore, he needs to use applications related to the processing, storage and publication of photos. Special programs allow you to publish posts systematically, provide targeting, monitoring, and statistics. Fortunately, all the necessary tools are available on the Internet. Part is free, the rest is available on a monthly fee or subscription.

Our experts note that in the regions in general and in Udmurtia in particular, there are literally only a few specialists who are well-versed in working with social networks, marketing knowledge and special software. Usually there are specialists who can do one thing. For example, work with the content of the brand page - making it popular, collecting likes and subscribers. Such people are at home in social networks, but their communication talents are not backed up by marketing professionalism. That is, the popularity of the page is not converted into sales of goods or services and the profit of the employer.

And this often undermines the trust of customers in SMM as a tool. Already a minimal knowledge of working in social networks allows you to start selling your services as an SMM manager, and the market is simply flooded with such offers. And it’s good if the brand page at least becomes popular. It’s worse if there are no sales, and working with content, thanks to the clumsy sms manager, only compromised the customer’s brand. It turns out that in this case, the novice manager received at least experience, and the customer did not receive anything at all, or maybe he lost something.

Where do they come fromsmm-managers?

It is useless to look for a certified SMM specialist: SMM specialists actually appear out of nowhere and sometimes disappear into nowhere. All trainings, seminars, master classes, educational programs in non-state universities are, as a rule, conducted by practitioners with 5-7 years of experience decent for SMM. According to experts, this profession is too young to not give a chance to newcomers: the experience of a specialist determines the success of a business, but where do new professionals come from?

There are many courses, learning materials and distance schools. Therefore, with a strong desire, the theoretical part can be well pumped. It remains the matter of practice, - Tatyana Pavlova is sure. - an SMM specialist is someone who understands all the intricacies of popular social networks, has trained in marketing and can make friends with a couple of hundred people with one post. He is able to constantly communicate with people, no matter how simple it may seem, and it is experience that can teach all of the above.

Our experts believe that if a company expects to use social networks as a permanent promotion tool for the long term, then it would be an effective and budget option to provide resources to a beginner and grow their own social media manager. Moreover, a hired specialist receives an adequate salary - in Izhevsk from 20 to 30 thousand rubles. True, there are no guarantees that, having received training and experience, this specialist will not rush to leave the company in order to earn money on his own. In any case, there is an alternative - to work with a specialist and an agency that provides such services.

Why businesssmm?

Experts emphasize that SMM can be used for a wide range of business tasks: from direct sales to image projects. Currently, the most massively working with social networks are businesses related to the provision of services aimed at a wide audience, as well as small businesses. For the latter, the choice is due to low costs and efficiency.

Anyone who has minimal social media skills can promote their business. This is very different from "outdoor", media, etc., where, without resources, a person cannot advertise. Therefore, SMM promotion is very popular in microbusiness areas, that is, where the owner provides a service: beauty salons, hand-made, construction and real estate services. Only one condition is important here - that your client is online. That is, user behavior must be taken into account. There are products that people use, but it is difficult to promote them online, because, for example, it is not clear how to buy it. For example, an insurer can promote itself in social networks, but it will not be very clear to people what to do next, how to buy insurance. But, let's say, with some kind of beauty salon or store, everything is clear: you saw a phone or a website, you came - you cut your hair, ordered - they brought it, everything is simple.

Where do they work and how much do they earn?

Most small businesses are promoted in networks through the efforts of the entrepreneurs themselves - at least, as long as they have enough time for this and the effect of this work is there. When the performance is low or the owner has no time, you have to turn to professionals. And this is not such a rare story when a very small business that sees potential for growth in attracting customers through social networks hires an SMM specialist - not every entrepreneur knows the networks enough, understands what content will be of interest to the audience, and knows how to communicate.

Small companies most often in such cases turn to the help of outsourcing specialists - freelancers or digital agencies. Large companies use both options: either shift these responsibilities to full-time specialists, or hire freelancers. Most large companies working with individuals (banks, telecommunications companies, airlines, etc.), as a rule, already have SMM managers on their staff, whose responsibility is to maintain company accounts in social networks and communicate with users. At the same time, agencies are often hired for SMM promotion of special projects.

It all depends on the result that the company receives from SMM promotion. If a freelancer is deeply immersed in the specifics of the business, copes well with the tasks, then why not? - says Tatyana Pavlova.

Worse, when SMM becomes just a burden on the work of the press service, then people who are inexperienced in promoting on social networks often take up the job and have to learn on the go.

The presence of a full-time SMM manager depends on the structure of the company, on its attitude to its costs, outsourcing, HR strategy, says Roman Vostrukhin. - At one time in Russia it was customary to have a separate person for each case. Now companies quite often use outsourcing - people are beginning to understand that everyone should do their own business. When you hire an accountant or a sales manager, you can control him. And how to control the smsman is difficult to understand: count the number of posts, the number of likes that he put? Well, he will make a bunch of stupid posts and a bunch of likes there, add a bunch of bots - that's great. Therefore, to take a person on the staff - it can be absolutely useless, because there will be no one to control his work.

A full-time specialist is closer to the company's products and employees. It is easier for him to get interesting information, - Marina Sukovatkina intercedes for full-time SMM workers.

The work of SMM managers is evaluated at the level of specialists in related specialties - press secretaries, journalists, etc.

As elsewhere, payment can vary greatly depending on the region, business area and qualifications, - explains Alexey Mokrushin. - In our region, the price of a monthly labor of such a specialist can start from 20-25 thousand rubles, there are segments where even 15 thousand rubles can become the reason for concluding a contract. But in general from 25 and above. In the Volga Federal District and the Urals - from 30-40 thousand per month, in Moscow - from 45-50 thousand.

If a person just sits and does something for a salary, then yes - 20-25 thousand rubles a month, Roman Vostrukhin agrees. - If this is a business and you are your own boss, then it is very different: you can earn 10 thousand, or you can earn 300 thousand rubles per month.

Aleksey Mokrushin believes that the rush demand for SMM services, blind faith in the omnipotence of this technology and the salary cap passed a couple of years ago and now "the market has calmed down, it has understood who is who."

There are methods for evaluating the work of such specialists, they are not universal, but in general they are available, - the expert says. - There are successful examples of work, there is a need for systematic work, all this leads to the understanding that special people working with social networks are needed and will be needed in the future, especially those who constantly develop themselves and achieve the results that business puts before them.

Help SD

How much does SMM cost?

In SMM, there is no concept of a "fixed price". The cost is determined by many factors. The main ones are: whether you are working with a freelancer or an agency, the reputation and experience of the contractor, the complexity of the project: the tasks set by the customer, starting conditions and the amount of work needed to get the result. Thus, the same amount of work can be estimated differently and the difference can be very significant - dozens of times.

That is why you will not find fixed price lists for the “social media promotion” service on the websites of the largest Russian digital agencies. They (and their prices) are focused on working with large customers and large-scale projects. But smaller agencies tend to find their niche, clearly indicating the amount of work and their cost.

An analysis of their price lists shows that the cost of the service starts from 8 thousand rubles per month for a minimum set of works (one post per week, automation of cropping materials from the customer's website - as a rule, it is already provided by the site engine, but not all customers know about it) . In this case, there is no need to talk about any kind of marketing and even “promotion” - in fact, this is just maintaining the account in a “live” state.

If we talk about work that is more in line with the meaning of the word "marketing", then the maximum standard set: analysis of competitive sites, from three posts a day, contests, polls, "sowing" on thematic sites, detailed analytics and reporting - will cost five times more expensive - in the amount of about 40 thousand rubles a month.

Damir, compiled a high-quality checklist of skills for smm-specialists.

For my part, I would add that the SMM specialist must know and understand the theory of classical marketing. This is exactly the skill, the absence of which is very noticeable in the smm market. That is, conditionally yesterday's seo-shniks, they can write scripts, buy bots, catch up with traffic, tell stories to the client, but there is no understanding why all this is done, except for mastering the budget.

Directly in their work, the SMM specialist must understand that the goals of the social media strategy are subject to the overall marketing strategy, which in turn is subject to the overall business strategy of the company.

Sites are selected not by personal attitude and subjective assessments, but by the maximum concentration of target audience and the cost of achieving the goal. Goals are subject to SMART criteria. The goals in the smm strategy are again aligned with the company's business goals. Selected metrics measure the approach and achievement of the goal.

It would seem that everyone understands things, but at these points people often pierce, following fashion trends.

As a client, the most important skill of an agency-side SMM specialist for me is knowing how Social Media relates to business. It’s funny to read arguments like “We will gather 1000 people in the VKontakte group. They will become fans of your company and will attract friends.” In the vast majority of cases, these people have almost no effect on the client's business performance. And here it becomes not so important whether the SMM manager knows how to create a point in Foursquare or buy banners in applications. Any student can learn all this. But today, few people know how to correlate their work and the return for the client's business. Sooner or later, the understanding will come that real KPIs do not come from the number of subscribers or clicks, but from the number of services or goods sold.

Supplementing Damir's article is useless: it is written as fully and in detail as possible. Although it is unlikely that this list can be applied in life: it will not be easy to find someone for the position of an SMM manager with all the listed skills :) I would simplify the list to three points: the SMM manager must be able to plan, must be well aware of the capabilities of all tools and the market and finally, write well. Of course, projects are different - somewhere you will need knowledge of marketing, and somewhere the ability to tweet with a trochee. It is impossible to be able to do everything, but you can competently delegate and manage work.

Thanks to Damir for the article, excellent material. However, he missed something. For example, literacy. I often see messages from “brands” with a bunch of errors in the same tweet feed. I immediately want to take the position of facepalm and tell their smsman: “well, is it really so hard to write 140 characters correctly?”.

Attentiveness is no less important - this quality is very useful for an SMM specialist at all stages of work, and in its absence, all the above 100 skills fade.

In general, a good article, but I would like not only bare facts, but also a more detailed presentation of the author's thoughts on each of them.

Alexander Bakeev

Digital expert

Thanks for the skill sheet, it's great to have this list! It will be of great help to HR-specialists in the field of social media. But this list does not at all give an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhow qualified a person is who claims to be able, for example, to "negotiate" or "find contractors and manage the process of working with them." In other words, such a list is good for starting a long and hard dig deep into the competencies of each individual candidate. At the same time, it should be understood that only a specialist with similar competencies can assess the depth of a candidate’s knowledge in any young field.

Vicious circle, no?

A good article that structures the experience of Damir Khalilov, CEO of GreenPR, one of the largest SMM agencies in Russia. Here are the skills of a salesperson and the skills of an analyst, and the skills of a promoter ... Reminds me of job advertisements for system administrators:

1. Must make websites
2. Must promote sites
3. Must repair and set up computers
4. Must communicate with the company's customers on their concerns
5. Must lay, configure and administer computer networks

I am sure Damir is aware that content creation and community management are two polar skills that cannot be combined in one specialist simply by virtue of psychology. And the ability to “analyze the client’s niche” alone is worth the position of CEO of an SMM agency.

On the other hand, the article really gives an idea of ​​what you need to be able to do in SMM. There is a lack of information regarding the processes in SMM - where, when and why you need to direct your experience.

To quote an HR friend: "Today's companies need specialists who understand the deep processes of their business." That is, those people who not only have a thorough knowledge of the tools of social services, but understand: why the brand needs it and what benefits this or that online activity will bring.

True, I would like to warn young professionals who are armed with this “checkbox”: analytics (including critical analysis) and creative thinking are no less important than skills. Without the involvement of convolutions in SMM, the output will be a robotic effect.

SMM stands for Social Media Marketing or social media marketing. An SMM specialist or SMM manager promotes a company, its brand, goods and services on social networks - Vkontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Odnoklassniki, Youtube, Telegram and others.

The profession of an SMM specialist involves complex, multi-purpose work - writing posts, maintaining publics, advertising, communicating with visitors and customers, launching activities for users, and other tasks. Such work requires constant communication and being online. You need to prepare mentally for this.

To better understand who an SMM specialist / manager is, I will describe how he looks from the outside:

Artem, my colleague "in the shop", did not work at his desk, but sat on the couch all the time. He had a laptop on his lap, an iPhone on the left, a notebook and a tablet on the coffee table. Constantly something beeped, buzzed and vibrated. He regularly picked up the phone, looked, laughed, poked and ran his finger across the screen and whispered something with his lips. Nobody called him, but they wrote and liked tons and he kept track of everything and reacted to everything.

Places of work

SMM managers work in Internet agencies, digital agencies and in companies that build sales and promotion through social networks.

Tasks and responsibilities of an SMM specialist

The main responsibilities of the SMM manager are as follows:

Requirements for an SMM specialist

As a rule, the SMM manager is required to:

• Competent speech (oral and written). Ability to write interesting texts.
• The ability to develop communities and attract subscribers without cheating and their direct purchase.
• Experience in targeted advertising. Knowledge of programs and services that automate and simplify work (for example, Cerebro Target or Pepper.ninja).
• Knowledge of web analytics (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica).

Sometimes the requirements for an SMM specialist include:

• Experience and portfolio of completed projects.
• Knowledge of graphic packages for photo processing, creating pictures and infographics.
• Excellent knowledge of English.
• Event organization experience.
• Knowledge of marketing and the ability to promote products and services in the market.

The first way to become an SMM manager is through self-learning and freelancing. The development of your publics and blogs (for example, about a hobby or an interesting topic), freelance work with entry-level orders in six months or a year will give you practical experience and allow you to develop a portfolio. This, in turn, will give a chance to get a job in a digital agency and grow to a professional. This is one of the shortest paths to the profession, but it requires self-discipline.

The second way to become an SMM specialist is to get a degree in PR, journalism, marketing or take courses in SMM and find a job in social media promotion. Even an entry-level position is suitable - an assistant SMM specialist or a copywriter. In the process, you can quickly gain experience, grow and start leading serious projects.

SMM specialist salary

Market analysis shows that SMM-specialists earn from about 30 to 90 thousand rubles a month. The higher the salary, the closer the SMM manager is to marketing and the more serious the tasks he solves.