As an entrepreneur, you understand that social media is an important part of staying relevant and in business. But what will it take to do it right? Can you do it, yourself? Do you have all your social bases covered, or should you hire out?

Don’t fret. You’re about to get the inside scoop on professional social media management tips, tricks, and insights. We’re going to break down exactly what a professional social media manager does, so you can either implement these strategies yourself or perhaps delegate some of these tasks in order to live longer and keep more of your hair intact.

Typical Social Media Objectives

Ok, so in order to determine what tasks you should be doing, let’s first identify what the four primary areas of social media management include. Each of these four areas is vital to a successful social media strategy. So while you should not omit any of these areas, you might be able to delegate one or two and save some money doing the other two or three yourself (your call).

1. Profile Setup
   There are a lot of different platforms out there to choose from, but once you’ve chosen, you need to set up your profiles with consistent branding, optimized keywords for your target audience, and all the right contact info so that audience will know where to find you to do business with you.

2. Routine Maintenance
   A lot goes into maintaining these profiles and growing them. This will be the bulk of your activities once everything is rolling. But we’re going to go through these tasks and how to save time on them.

3. Reputation Management
   PR is a huge function of social media, and with the right tools and tips, you can monitor your brand’s health and craft the right image for your business.

4. Content Generation & Distribution
   This is the one that everyone likes to ignore, yet creating interesting and valuable content is the best way to rock social media like a pro! If you want SEO and constant traffic, you need quality content. Don’t overlook it.

8 Tasks Every Pro Social Media Manager Does Routinely

Ok, now that we have our basic categories covered, let’s dig into the eight most important tasks you can do to rock social media like a professional.

1. Technical Setup When the average person sets up a social media profile, he only takes advantage of maybe half of the options afforded him. But the true social media marketer digs deeper into the settings and takes full advantage of any copy space and graphic real estate. Banners need to be branded and consistent from one platform to the next. Use the About section or Experience section to plug your skills, your unique selling points, your elevator pitch. Synchronize your posts to go out to other platforms automatically. Load your profiles down with SEO keywords.
   

2. Audience Targeting/Building Don’t be that guy at the social media party who just talks about himself all the time. Seek out your target audience in groups, forums, and pages to chat, ask questions, and provide insights related to your business. This drives people to your site and builds your audience.
   

3. Customer Service Customer service has become so personalized and immediate thanks to social media. But many brands haven’t figured this out yet, and their brand suffers for it. Professional social media managers are quick to answer questions and address concerns for their clients’ brands.
   

4. Reputation Monitoring/Management This builds on the previous point. You can go further than just customer service. Pay attention to what others are saying about you and your products or services. You can actually find these conversations by searching hashtags, keywords, or hanging out in the right places to monitor the health of your brand and take steps to improve your weak points or play to your strengths.
   

5. Engagement The sign of a true social media novice is a ghost town for a profile. Professional social media managers know how to ask the right questions, share the right kind of content, and even post at the right times (each audience is unique) to bring about the most interaction and social media engagement.
   

6. Content Creation Visual media is huge right now on social media. If you want to rock social media like a pro, you need to have a content creation plan. Social media marketers rely on strategic content marketing, not only in the form of blogs, but also with vivid photos, quote memes, and most importantly, video. Video marketing is hugely important, not only for capturing interest, but also for converting sales.
   

7. Content Curation Professional social media managers typically set up RSS feeds for different blogs and content sources in the industry they are targeting. This keeps them up to date on relevant and interesting material to share with their target audiences. In turn, those audiences view those pages as valuable dispensaries of useful and exciting content, which means they will keep coming back. Running a non-stop commercial for your business is a sure-fire way to turn your audience off. But concocting a mix of third-party material alongside your content will build engagement and loyalty.
   

8. Ad Campaigns I hate to break it to you, but social media is NOT free. But it IS the most affordable venue for advertising left on the planet. Professionals run Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns to boost their pages and posts or bring in highly targeted audience members.

Tools the Professionals Use to Make Life Easier

I told you this was an inside scoop. Here’s a sampling of what the pros use to automate, optimize, and enhance the effectiveness of these tasks.

• Hootsuite or SproutSocial: These are great for scheduling posts, measuring results, and listening for mentions and keywords.
• FanPage Karma: This tool provides some rather impressive options for audience targeting, analytics, and competition research.
• PicMonkey: Great for easy image editing and social media banner designing.

So now you have some insider insights on what goes into running a successful social media strategy like a pro. Are you up for it? Here’s another tip: many social media managers offer consulting services to help you master this yourself. You may find in the end it’s simpler to delegate some of these tasks, but you might also find that this is something you enjoy doing on your own.

Tell us in the comments which of these tasks you’re most likely to do on your own and which you’re most likely to delegate. We would love to hear your feedback!