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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Careers in Social Media Marketing

Social Media is a platform easily accessible by anyone with access to internet. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and often, improved customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. With emergence of channels like Twitter, the barrier to entry in social media is greatly reduced. Social media marketing is known as SMO or Social Media Optimization and benefits organizations and individuals by providing an additional channel for customer support, a means to gain customer and competitive insight, recruitment and retention of new customers/business partners, and a method of managing reputation online.

1.    Social Media Marketing Manager: A social media marketing manager oversees the implementation of different social media programmes for clients. Such programmes could include social bookmarking, news, networking and tagging sites that include Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Stumbleupon.
2.    Reputation Manager: Due to the nature of the Internet, there can be times when negative information about a company or product shows up in search engines. A reputation manager strives to have negative information removed or takes measures to lower it in the search rankings.
3.    Copywriter: While a copywriter is typically employed to write sales letters, brochures, websites or ads, he can prove valuable in the area of social media marketing as well. Writing articles for social bookmarking and news sites or strategic updates for social networking sites can drive traffic to a client’s website.
4.    Link Builder: Backlinks are one of the most important elements to online marketing. A link builder creates these links to lead to your website. Search engines view a click on a link to your site as a “vote.” The more votes received, the more important your site is in the eyes of search engines, and the higher your ranking will be. A link builder uses all elements of social media to place links and create high-quality backlinks.

Social media is also being used to collect valuable data on trends in the marketplace, as almost all networks now feature applications to track popular subjects. A marketing professional may simply research the number of searches and likes of a particular subject or could undergo a process as complex as creating quizzes and inviting users to surveys in order to gain feedback to be used in marketing research. Many marketing degree programmes are now teaching students these new methods of information gathering.

1. Social media strategist/digital strategist
Chris Marlow calls this job “the top of the heap” in social media. These experienced marketing strategists understand how to create social-media marketing campaigns and measure their success. They may oversee a social-media team at bigger companies. “They’re the people who put together a plan,” she says.

2. Community manager
At Spherion subsidiary Mergis Group, recruiting practice director Greg Bennett says he recently filled a $120,000-a-year community manager position with a major company. Community managers oversee company blogs and forums, keeping visitors coming to the site through outreach on social sites, and moderating conversation to make sure nothing libelous or insulting is being said. The job calls for marketing experience as well as work in Web publishing, copywriting, project management and social media. Bennett says his recruiting research turned up several other, similar positions already earning in the same range. “Everyone I see wants the same thing,” he says. “Someone who is a marketing person but has been heavily involved in social media – they know how to run online symposiums, draw people into the company’s community, and keep them in.”

3. Blogger
Posting short articles filled with links to related Web sites has become a popular technique for improving a site’s rankings in search engines, such as Google. Marlow says $35 to $75 an hour is typical corporate blogger pay. Many bloggers have journalism training, but others who enter the field have their own personal blogs and use them to audition for corporate blogging jobs.

4. Social media marketing specialist
The virtual-world version of a marketing specialist, this job entails taking existing company marketing materials and circulating them effectively in various social-media channels, says Durbin.

5. Search engine marketing associate
A lower-level position than a social-media strategist or marketer, search engine marketing (SEM) associates work on building a company’s results in “natural search,” the unpaid results delivered by Google and other search engines.

6. Online customer service representative
A growing number of companies are watching social sites for customer complaints on social media sites – prominent examples on Twitter include Comcast Cares and Best Buy’s Twelpforce. “There’s a lot of work here, because it’s so expensive to take calls,” says Durbin of JobsInSocialMedia. Workers with call-center experience who write well are ideal candidates to cross over into this field.

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