I bet you spend a significant amount of your day on social media. What if told you that you could make money while on social media? Being a social media manager allows you to have fun and make money at the same time. What’s the catch? You must prove yourself useful and learn skills the average person doesn’t have.

At a basic level, the job of a social media manager revolves around doing three things:

1. Increasing the number of followers on a given social media page.
2. Increasing engagement.
3. Converting followers into sales.

If you can do all of the above, you are better than 80% of all the people out there who claim to be social media managers. You can specialize in one area but you’ll be better off if you master all of them.

Trading Attention

People on social media have very limited attention spans. If something doesn’t catch their attention within the first few seconds, they will be off to the next shiny thing.

Your job as a social media manager is to find ways to get your social media followers to engage more with the brand you are working for. Higher engagement means that you have more opportunities to persuade your audience to check the products and services you offer.

If you can learn how to grab attention and retain it, you will be a successful social media manager.

Most of the skills you need to be a social media manager can be learnt for cheap on Udemy. To be truly great at it, though, you need to go beyond Udemy and look for resources that will help you understand all the concepts at a deeper level.

Getting Clients

Every business is on social media so finding your first client shouldn’t take you long if you really know what you are doing.

Even the average businessperson appreciates the power of social media. Convincing small business owners that you can help them explode their sales through social media will take some effort but it is totally doable.

The easiest way to get clients is to offer your services to a few local businesses for free and then have them send you referrals. They will be more than willing to send a few referrals your way if you actually go out of your way to help them.

Where the Money Is

You can make a significant amount of money managing social media ads. If you structure your compensation as a percentage of revenues generated or ad expenses, your remuneration will be performance based and you will have greater freedom to influence how much money you make each month.

It is rather hard to track revenues generated through social media for brick and mortar businesses but it is totally doable for eCommerce stores and other online businesses. For a brick and mortar business, you can peg compensation on ad expenses or work out an arrangement based on the relative performance of all the advertising channels the business is using.