Social Media Managers: What They Do and When to Hire One

A social media manager handles the day-to-day execution of a brand’s social presence: content creation, scheduling, community engagement, and performance reporting. Done well, the role connects creative output to commercial objectives. Done poorly, it becomes a posting service with no strategic anchor.

Whether you’re hiring your first social media manager, evaluating an existing one, or trying to understand what the role should actually deliver, the fundamentals are the same. Clarity on scope, accountability for outcomes, and a clear line between social activity and business results.

What Does a Social Media Manager Actually Do?

The job title implies a narrow remit. The actual scope is considerably wider. At a minimum, a social media manager is responsible for content planning, content creation or briefing, scheduling and publishing, community management (responding to comments and messages), and reporting on performance. In many businesses, they also own influencer relationships, paid social coordination, and brand tone of voice across channels.

The challenge is that this breadth creates ambiguity. I’ve worked with businesses where the social media manager was effectively a one-person creative studio, copywriter, analyst, and customer service rep rolled into one. That’s not a job description, it’s a compression of four roles into one salary. The work suffers accordingly.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen social media managers in large organisations who are so narrowly scoped that they’re essentially a scheduling tool with a pulse. They receive approved content, post it, and report the numbers. No creative input, no strategic contribution, no connection to what the business is actually trying to achieve.

Neither extreme works well. The role needs clear ownership, a realistic scope, and explicit accountability for outcomes that matter to the business, not just platform metrics.

If you want a broader view of how social fits into the wider marketing mix, the social media marketing hub covers strategy, channels, and content across the full picture.

What Skills Should a Social Media Manager Have?

Platform knowledge is the entry requirement, not the differentiator. Every candidate will claim fluency in Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and whatever platform launched last quarter. What separates a good social media manager from a competent one is the layer underneath: audience thinking, commercial awareness, and creative judgement.

Audience thinking means understanding who you’re trying to reach and why they’d care. It’s the difference between posting because the calendar says Tuesday and posting because you have something worth saying to a specific group of people. Most social media managers are trained in the former. The best ones operate in the latter.

Commercial awareness means understanding how social activity connects to business outcomes. Not every post needs to drive a conversion, but every post should serve a purpose. Brand awareness, consideration, community building, demand generation , these are legitimate objectives, but they need to be explicit. A social media manager who can articulate why a piece of content exists in commercial terms is considerably more valuable than one who can’t.

Creative judgement is harder to assess in an interview but critical in practice. Can they tell the difference between content that performs because it’s genuinely good and content that performs because it gamed the algorithm? Can they adapt tone across platforms without losing brand coherence? Can they write copy that sounds like a human being rather than a brand account? These are the questions worth asking.

Beyond these, the practical skill set includes content planning and editorial calendar management (tools like Sprout Social’s calendar or Buffer’s scheduling workflow are widely used), basic design and video editing, community management, and the ability to interpret analytics without over-indexing on vanity metrics.

How Do You Structure the Role for Commercial Impact?

This is where most businesses get it wrong. They hire a social media manager, hand them the login credentials, and expect results. The brief is vague. The KPIs are impressions and follower counts. The reporting cadence is a monthly screenshot of the analytics dashboard.

I spent years running agencies where clients would bring in social media managers with exactly this setup and then wonder why the channel wasn’t delivering. The problem was never the person. It was the absence of a commercial framework around the role.

A well-structured social media manager role starts with clarity on three things: what the business is trying to achieve, which audiences matter most, and how social fits into the broader channel mix. Without these inputs, the manager is operating in a vacuum. They’ll default to what gets engagement because that’s the only feedback signal available.

Early in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel signals. Clicks, conversions, direct response. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand that a lot of what we were crediting to performance channels was demand that already existed. The people converting had already been influenced somewhere upstream. Social, at its best, is part of that upstream influence. A social media manager who only gets measured on direct conversions will never invest in the content that builds the audience that eventually converts.

The metrics that matter depend on the objective. Reach and impression share for brand awareness. Engagement rate and save rate for content quality. Profile visits and link clicks for consideration. These are proxies, not proof, but they’re more honest than follower counts. For a practical framework on how to think about social media strategy and measurement, Buffer’s resource is one of the cleaner overviews available.

When Should You Hire a Social Media Manager?

The honest answer is: later than most businesses do, and for clearer reasons than most businesses have.

Many businesses hire a social media manager because they feel they should have one. The competitor is active on Instagram. The founder doesn’t have time to post. The marketing team is stretched. These are understandable pressures, but they’re not strategic reasons to hire.

The right time to hire a social media manager is when you have a clear audience, a content strategy (even a rough one), and enough volume of activity to justify a dedicated resource. If you’re posting twice a week across two platforms, a freelancer or a part-time resource is probably sufficient. If social is a genuine acquisition or retention channel for your business, and the volume of content, community management, and reporting justifies it, then a full-time hire makes sense.

For smaller businesses, the calculus is different. Semrush’s guide to social media for small businesses makes the point well: consistency and relevance matter more than frequency. A small business owner who posts thoughtfully three times a week will outperform a social media manager posting daily without a clear brief.

When you do hire, be specific about the scope. Are they creating content or briefing it to designers? Are they managing paid social or just organic? Are they responsible for influencer relationships? Are they expected to contribute to strategy or execute against it? These distinctions affect who you hire and what you pay them.

How Should a Social Media Manager Approach Content?

Content is the core of the job, and it’s where the quality gap between average and excellent social media managers is most visible.

Average social media managers think in formats: carousel, reel, story, post. Excellent ones think in ideas first and formats second. The question isn’t “what should we post this week?” It’s “what does our audience need to hear right now, and what’s the best way to say it?”

I remember a brainstorm early in my career, working at a digital agency on a Guinness brief. The founder had to leave mid-session and handed me the whiteboard pen. My immediate internal reaction was something close to panic. But what that moment forced was a shift from waiting for direction to generating it. The best social media managers have that same quality: they don’t wait for the brief to be perfect before they start thinking.

Content planning should be built around an editorial calendar that reflects both the brand’s commercial priorities and the audience’s interests. These two things are not always aligned, and the tension between them is worth managing explicitly. A content mix that’s 80% promotional and 20% genuinely useful will underperform one that’s 40% promotional and 60% valuable. The principles of optimising social media content are well-documented, but the underlying logic is simple: give people a reason to follow you that isn’t just self-interest.

Repurposing is underused. A long-form article can generate five social posts. A customer case study can become a carousel, a quote graphic, and a short video. A product launch can be broken into teaser content, launch content, and post-launch social proof. A good social media manager isn’t just creating content from scratch, they’re extracting value from content that already exists.

For a broader view on content strategy across the social mix, the social media marketing section covers how content, channel, and audience strategy fit together.

How Do You Manage and Evaluate a Social Media Manager?

Most social media managers are under-managed, not because their managers don’t care, but because their managers don’t know enough about the channel to push back effectively. This is a structural problem in many marketing teams, and it leads to a feedback loop where the social media manager reports the numbers that look best, the manager nods along, and nothing improves.

Effective management of a social media manager requires three things: clear objectives, regular content reviews, and honest performance conversations.

Clear objectives means agreeing upfront what success looks like. Not “grow our following” but “increase average engagement rate on LinkedIn from 1.2% to 2.5% over the next quarter.” Not “post more consistently” but “publish four pieces of original content per week across Instagram and LinkedIn, with at least one video format per week.” Specificity creates accountability.

Regular content reviews mean looking at what’s been published, not just the metrics. Is the content on-brand? Is the copy good? Is there a clear point of view? Does it look like something a person would actually stop scrolling for? These are qualitative judgements that matter as much as the quantitative ones.

Honest performance conversations mean being willing to say when something isn’t working and exploring why. Not every piece of content will perform. That’s fine. What matters is whether the team is learning from what doesn’t work and adjusting. A social media manager who can articulate why a campaign underperformed and what they’d do differently is more valuable than one who only reports the wins.

AI is changing parts of this workflow. Tools that assist with content ideation, caption drafts, and performance analysis are genuinely useful. HubSpot’s overview of AI in social media strategy covers the practical applications well. The caveat is that AI-assisted content still needs human editorial judgement. The tools are useful; the thinking still has to come from somewhere.

What’s the Difference Between a Social Media Manager and a Social Media Strategist?

The distinction matters more than most job descriptions acknowledge.

A social media manager is primarily an executor. They take a strategy and bring it to life through daily content, community management, and reporting. The skill set is creative, operational, and analytical in roughly equal measure.

A social media strategist works upstream. They define the channel strategy, identify target audiences, set the content framework, and make recommendations on platform mix, posting cadence, and content types. They may or may not be involved in day-to-day execution.

In practice, many social media managers are expected to do both. That’s sometimes reasonable and sometimes not, depending on the size of the business and the complexity of the social programme. A solo social media manager at a 50-person B2B company probably needs to think strategically because no one else will. A social media manager at a large brand with a dedicated strategy function can focus on execution.

The problem arises when businesses expect strategic output from someone hired and paid to execute. If you want strategy, hire for strategy or carve out explicit time and scope for it. Don’t assume it comes free with the execution role.

A connected approach to social media marketing , one where strategy, content, and community management are aligned , consistently outperforms a fragmented one where each element operates independently. This isn’t a controversial point, but it’s one that requires deliberate organisational design to achieve.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes When Hiring or Managing Social Media Managers?

After two decades of building and advising marketing teams, the same mistakes come up repeatedly.

Hiring for platform familiarity rather than marketing fundamentals. Someone who uses TikTok personally is not the same as someone who can build an audience on TikTok for a brand. Platform fluency is useful; understanding of audience behaviour, content strategy, and commercial objectives is what actually drives results.

Measuring the wrong things. Follower counts are a lagging indicator of brand interest, not a measure of marketing effectiveness. Reach without engagement is noise. Engagement without conversion intent is entertainment. The metrics that matter are the ones that connect to business outcomes, and most social media managers are never given clear guidance on what those are.

Under-investing in briefing. The quality of content that comes out is directly proportional to the quality of the brief that goes in. A social media manager given a clear audience brief, a content framework, and defined brand voice will produce better work than one left to figure it out independently. This is true at every level of seniority.

Confusing activity with strategy. Posting consistently is not a strategy. It’s a habit. Strategy means making choices about who you’re trying to reach, what you want them to think or do, and how social fits into that. A social media manager who posts daily without a strategic framework is generating activity, not building an audience.

Treating social as a broadcast channel. The platforms that reward genuine community interaction, responding to comments, starting conversations, engaging with other accounts, consistently outperform those that use social as a one-way announcement feed. Community management is not a nice-to-have. It’s a core part of the job.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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For more on how social media fits into a broader acquisition and content strategy, the social media marketing hub covers the full range of channels, tactics, and frameworks worth knowing.