I follow Twitter Lists of Black folks on social and digital marketing. Once in a while, they’ll share opinions and thoughts that most brands wouldn’t agree with. These opinions cement the one’s I’ve had and struggled with.

Reading these tweets from other people in my career choice validates my thoughts on being a social media manager. There are so many struggles of working in digital while living in a digital age.

1. Social Media Marketing is a Job on Its Own

It should not come with additional roles especially if a brand is heavily online media reliant. Additional roles add confusion to the social media manager especially if many roles are under the social media manager umbrella. More often than not, brand social media managers get scatter brain if :

1. They come up with content ideas the morning the post is supposed to go out.
2. They have no social media content calendar which results in content that lacks uniformity. This leads to more scatterbrain.
3. They are responsible for more than one social media channel or all channels. They’re also possible for posting, managing, engaging and looking at analytics. Other marketing responsibilities are website management and email marketing.

As a role, social media managing is not given the attention and the remuneration it deserves. While I get where social media managers are coming from, I also get where brands are coming from. An employee who has more skills is more attractive than an employee who has fewer skills.

But brands fail to realize that creating content is mentally intensive. Even though a brand has content, there’s a difference between content and copy. Content is what one has on their site as articles, products or educational materials. A social media manager needs to transform content into marketing copy to a suit particular social media platform. The copy should engage the reader and sell the product or get people to visit the website.

This process requires someone who has attention to detail. Left to one person to create content, marketing copy, schedule posts and manage schedules, the margin of error increases.

The takeaway here is the person creating the marketing copy should not be posting and managing social pages. This reduces the margin of error as the one posting will catch the typos and errors with graphics.

2. Going Viral Doesn’t Always Translate To Sales

A few months back, I watched as small businesses guilt-tripped us into watching their videos on TikTok. The audio started with, ‘Stop, don’t scroll.’ The creator proceeded to tell us how she lacked support from her friends after she launched her business et al. We were supposed to feel sorry and buy her products. This tactic doesn’t communicate power on the brand’s side.

One of these candle-making small businesses went viral and recorded 12 sales.

Any company or brand fixated on going viral as a deliverable or a performance metric is one to be wary of. There are so many factors that go into making a viral piece of content or product. It’s either a controversial piece of content, a great product or used clickbaity audio like the TikTok videos above.

3. A large audience doesn’t always translate to high engagement

This depends on how you acquired your audience. An organic audience has a higher engagement and takes longer to grow. However, a quick way is audience acquisition with ads. It’s quick, but your audience might have a lower engagement as they haven’t grown with you, neither have they taken time to know you.

After getting your freebie and filling their interest, they may leave or put you on the backburner.

4. Followers, Users and Pageviews are Vanity Metrics

The lifetime value of these metric always moves to the right. They can guide and direct your marketing, but you should not dwell on them. Unless you own a media company and monetise through ads, it’s always best to look at metrics that directly affect revenue.

Look at your sales funnel and determine the global metrics that are applicable to your company, and if they’re other inhouse metrics you can come up with.

Are you a social media manager and what other sentiments do you feel should be in this article? Let me know in the comments.