Social Media Marketing uses social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service, interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, drive website traffic, and connect with your audience. 

Delaney Gembis wanted to work in marketing or PR, specifically social media, after graduating from Westfield State University. She did her internship with a Pediatrics Speech and Language Pathology Practice, which was for public relations and social media. Through her experience there, she realized PR was not where she wanted to be but social media was.

She is currently working as a Social Media Manager at Aware Inc. Gembis gravitated towards social media marketing because it hit all the skills she was good at. Like being a good communicator, being creative, designing, writing, and copywriting, and she loves to get her hands dirty with work.

Gembis believes that to work with social media, you have to be very good at customer service and people skills because you’re managing communities and trying to build communities and nurture relationships. You also have to go back and forth with customers and teach team members how to communicate well with each other.

What does social media marketing involve? According to Delaney, content creation, so by designing images, infographics, videos, Twitter threads, and copywriting. It is also taking marketing assets and pulling pieces out of them that are interesting to create them into a social post. 

Math is not usually a common link to social media, but analytics and metrics are important. They measure how the company is doing and if what is being posted is working or not working. After taking in this data, Gembis and her team then use the information to create content. The analytics collected are put together in a report so her manager can review and understand what is going on.

Gembis believes that educating team members on best practices for using social media marketing will improve their content and allow her team to be on the same page. She tries to teach her sales team, which does social selling, good practices for how to do social selling. She also tries to teach her recruiting team, which tries attracting higher caliber clients, how to best approach that and creates content to help guide them. On her own, she is ghostwriting or ghost-managing executive accounts, which she views as a great experience for someone in her field.

Some of her main responsibilities in her work are ghostwriting, fact communication, and crisis communication. If something bad or big is happening in the company or industry, she would jump on it and position herself as an expert in what is happening. If the communication is bad, her job is to put out the fire, as everyone knows people on social media can be cruel. She is the one monitoring the social media and reporting back what she sees to her manager. On a good note, when there are questions or false information, she makes sure to answer the questions and correct the false information.

Working in the social media marketing field, depending on the industry or company, you would be working with a big team or small team. Some companies care about their social media, and others do not care as much. You may have some managing responsibilities if the company cares about their social media status. 

Gembis says a typical day working as a social media manager can be overwhelming. She has to monitor everything, so checking for crises, answers questions and engaging on platforms, helping and supporting people, publishing content daily, and general meetings. 

She has a lot of meetings, along with a list of tasks that she has to get done. Some tasks do not happen daily, but on a weekly and monthly basis, she is pulling metrics. These metrics help her and her team understand what they need to improve and what works by checking for patterns and trends. 

“If you work for social media, first take everything with a grain of salt. Because a lot of people that use social media think they know what’s going on and think they’re experts. Every time someone gives advice or feedback on what you’re doing, take it with a grain of salt. People are always going to have opinions on the content you are putting out. At the end of the day, you just gotta build your skills and gain confidence, and that would come with time.” – Delaney Gembis said in my interview with her. 

Some other advice she gave was to not be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes happen a lot, but that is why there are people to check for those mistakes. Not everyone is going to like what you do, but that is ok. So taking feedback seriously, you are representing a brand or business, so you have to balance what you like and what the company wants. Make it follow the brand or company, not what you like personally. Set yourself up for success and learn about the brand and company. 

Choose a job that you are interested in or a company. It is important to pay attention to the hiring manager or who you will be reporting to. A good or bad manager will make or break the job for you. Sometimes it is more important to choose the manager over the job or company. It is good to look out for yourself and what will make you happy in the long run, although sometimes the money is more important or desirable. Making sure you are comfortable with the choices you make at the end of the day matters.

Hard skills for social media marketing are communication because you have to be prepared to talk to anyone. Organization skills because there is always going to be something going on. Having creativity is important for making engaging content, analytical skills or capable of learning those skills, a personable attitude when you can be friendly and easy to talk to it helps to create connections and build relationships, and being teachable. Gembis gave me one soft skill, which is to be resourceful. It is good to have all the resources you need.

For a beginner, the salaries vary. Expect to see a very different range based on the industry and how much the company is using social media. The low end for entry-level is $40k, and it can definitely get higher than that. On the higher end, it is $50-$60 for entry. The more responsibilities you have, the more money you have. Check out the industries before you apply; sometimes, they will show you how much to expect before you apply. 

Social media marketing is a fun and creative way to support your company or industry and work with something you love.