HOW TO BECOME A FREELANCE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
WHY BEING A FREELANCE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER IS SUCH A COOL JOB
I’ve been freelancing as a social media manager for about 5 years now. It’s a great job, I get to work at home and can schedule my own hours so that I can work flexibly. Meaning that I get more time to spend with my family and lead a restful and happy life! If I wanted to, I could work anywhere in the world and lead a “digital nomad” lifestyle.
When I was an agency employee I had my commute to worry about, I had no choice over which clients I worked for and I had to get every major decision about how I work (such as which software I prefer to use) approved by the board. I also got no extra money for doing extra work. If my boss took on a new client, that was just more work for me with no reward.
Now I feel like I can do better work because I have full autonomy over how I work, and each new client is a pay rise for me. That’s not only great for me it’s good for my clients too. I care greatly about retaining work because each project I work on for them has a big impact on my security and standard of living. There’s a mutual benefit to us both, we are both trying to make money together. Project success has a benefit to my life, as well as to their business.
I also work on monthly contracts, meaning that my income is relatively stable and predictable. This makes social media management more reliable than other freelancing jobs such as copywriting or design, where you are always waiting on the next big job. Usually, I am at full capacity and can make accurate forecasts of how much I will be earning for the rest of the year. If I feel up to it, I take on a new client.
BUT IT’S NOT ALL FUN AND GAMES
Social media is a medium of the marketing profession. Any job in sales and marketing is extremely high pressure. If you aren’t meeting your targets, you will get fired. And it’s not as easy to do your job reliably well as a sales or marketing person than it is for a job like admin.
As a sales or marketing person, you’re responsible for the growth of the business. You’re responsible for the income of the business. As a social media manager, you are the voice of the business. That’s a huge amount of pressure. If you don’t perform, you will be fired for someone who can.
You not only need a huge amount of understanding and knowledge about your clients business and ideal customer, you need to be confident in your ability to sell. In the case of social media marketing, you need to be confident that you can sell the business digitally.
BEFORE YOU BECOME A PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER YOU NEED ONE THING
And that’s to be fully confident that you will be able to get results for your client.
HOW TO BECOME A CONFIDENT AND SKILLED SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
DO YOU NEED A DEGREE TO BECOME A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER?
You won’t find many people working in marketing who have a degree in it. I myself don’t have a marketing degree. Marketing degrees are a relatively new field of study, particularly digital-based courses.
In marketing, your work experience and portfolio are priority. If you have a marketing degree but no work experience or portfolio, you’re starting out from the bottom. But, you may have an advantage over people with no degree or portfolio.
If you’re studying marketing, do everything you can to build portfolio and experience up. Even if that’s working on your own blog and social media presence.
If you don’t have a degree, the same applies. Do everything you can to build portfolio and experience up.
If you need to do voluntary work, do voluntary work.
SHOULD YOU PAY FOR A COURSE?
There are plenty of digital marketing and social media courses you can buy. Should you take a course? Well, it’s really up to you. But make sure you’re doing it to expand your own knowledge and not because you’re trying to qualify yourself. Most paid online courses won’t qualify you to become a social media manager. Your client is not going to give two shits about which course you took, only that you can get results for them.
CIM (The Chartered Institute of Marketing) is one of the most prestigious and recognized training bodies in the marketing industry. Many marketers have a professional CIM certificate. It can look good on your C.V — but it isn’t totally necessary. I took my CIM level 3 foundation certificate when I was doing my first job. My employer had a budget for training and I chose CIM. However, I didn’t find the course very useful. It was over 10 years ago, but I thought the course was a little outdated at the time. You can find a list of CIM courses here. I personally, would like to take an MBA in future, but I don’t think the impact on my career will be that great. If you’re wanting a course that you can actually put on your C.V a CIM certificate will look 100% better than any Udemy course.
When it comes to training that can actually help you get ahead in your career that you will actually find useful — I recommend Social Media Pro I’ve worked with this training provider myself so I can vouch for them. For $97 per month (that’s about £70) you get access to a 20 module training course, community and weekly live training with social media pros like myself who will give you the advice that we don’t write about on our blogs! There’s a certification for you to take too. I honestly wish something like that had been around when I was starting out. It was lonely and I didn’t have anyone to chew over problems with or run past ideas, so I made a lot of (quite costly) mistakes at the beginning.
FREE COURSES WITH CERTIFICATIONS
That being said, there are plenty of useful free online courses.
I recommend:
HubSpot Academy: HubSpot is a really amazing marketing resource in general and their free training is quite comprehensive. There are many certifications you can take, which you can put on your C.V or LinkedIn profile.
Google Analytics Academy: If there is ONE certification I’d recommend you get it’s Google Analytics. Google Analytics is massively important for any kind of marketer. Not being able to use it well will put you at a disadvantage in your career. You basically need to take this certification if you’re a newbie.
Twitter Flight School: I personally haven’t taken any of Twitters free courses or certifications, but it’s free so it can’t hurt.
LinkedIn Learning: Formerly Lynda, you can get plenty of courses here and your first month is free. After that, it’s something like $30 a month. Well worth it really if you’re starting out.
EDUCATE YOURSELF IN OTHER WAYS
Courses and education isn’t the be all and end all of education. Reading books is such an important thing to do at every stage in your career, I am constantly reading and each book ads value to me as a marketer. Here is a curated list of books I recommend.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR PORTFOLIO
When you’re starting out, get work experience any way you can.
If your university offers real-life projects to work on, paid internships or work placements. Take them.
Shadow other people unpaid, if you can. If someone is paying you, they’re going to put you on jobs that have the most benefit for them. If you have no experience, that’s going to be the boring jobs they don’t want to do. They aren’t going to spend time mentoring you, sharing their secrets and let you put your skills to the test if you’re being paid hourly. If you can’t afford to do a full-time unpaid internship, ask if you can do a few hours after school or in your holidays.
Work as a marketing or social media assistant for another company.
Volunteer for charities or start-up local businesses so you can get your own campaigns in your portfolio. Make sure this is a time limited offer so they don’t expect it to go on forever. 3–6 months would be enough time for you to start seeing some results. Don’t ever do unpaid or cheap work in the hope that someone will pay you after you’ve done it for free. They likely won’t no matter how good you are.
Help out with running social media for your friends or families businesses.
Offer to run an advertising campaign for free, providing the company pays for the advertising spend. It’s a great way to build port and social advertising is not as time intensive as running a content calendar.
Create your own movements, activism accounts, media outlets, Twitter chats, Facebook Groups etc. If you’ve shown you can build up social media hype from nothing, you’ll look great.
SKILLS YOU NEED AS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
An ability to run Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram ads and get good results. Good results = low cost per clicks/conversions and plenty of them.
Good content writing and research skills.
An understanding of how to create engagement on social media and how to grow audience.
An understanding of marketing in general. You need to know about stuff like click funnels, pipelines, buyer profiles and conversion optimization. In fact, not just know about them but be shit hot at them.
Wider digital skills such as how to create landing pages and web buttons, how to install code on websites, how to use API’s etc.
Design and video skills to create social media assets, although you could outsource this as part of your strategy if you struggle. I work in a mixture of ways, some parts of design I do myself on Canva.com. Some I do with a pro designer. And often I buy templates from Creative Market Place and just edit them with a clients branding on Canva. This is what many social media managers do. Get started with your own templates here.
If you’re working as a freelancer, you need additional skills to run your own business such as sales ability.
Analytic knowledge will help you advise your client. Understanding numbers is important. Familiarize yourself with Excel and Google Analytics and work on improving that knowledge throughout your career.
