Everything I Knew About Being A Social Media Manager Has Changed.
I used to be a social media manager for an online media marketing company back in 2011. After a couple of years, I left the company to continue school instead. I ended up getting into an entirely different industry for many years so I didn’t have any social media managing experience for years after that. I just started interning as a communications intern at my church that I’ve been going to for many years. I knew I needed to have this communications experience at the forefront of my resume if I want to make a serious career out of it.
What I can tell you is that I’ve been struggling a lot already as an communications intern in 2021! Everything that I knew about social media back then has changed drastically today. I feel like I’m starting from scratch. There’s so many new techniques, programs, apps, metrics, and various skills that are needed to be successful along with the MAJOR change in social media for churches during a pandemic.
According to Kogan Page, I have realized that for businesses and brands, this means that social media can no longer be a bit on the side, a place to play and experiment, while the proper channels get on with making money and building your brand. That’s exactly what I did back then — trial and error with social media almost every day. I never had a clear, thought-out social media strategy! Social media, like digital, is now an integral part of all marketing and branding, and as such needs to be embedded in any business or marketing strategy development.
The church closed for at least eight months during the pandemic. Because of this, we lost MANY members of the church. We’ve had to accept the reality that the church has basically left the building. Though we’ve had in-person worship services in our churches again, it will never be the same. The crowd is much smaller. We were once a “big” church — not anymore.
We’ve had to get creative in our social media strategies. We’ve been faced with the difficulty of being relevant in a world where traditional communication has substantially changed. We’ve had to focus on the need for having a social media following during these times! Consider these statistics by Ominscore: Facebook has 2.5 billion monthly active users, Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users with over 50 billion photos shared to date, Snapchat has 360 million active monthly users and Twitter has 300 million active users with over 500 million tweets sent per day. I believe that a church without an integrated social media strategy in today’s tech world is on the brink of dying or diminishing in relevance. Covid-19 changed the game for our strategy and it’s been up to me to figure out how to make sure we share the message via online platforms.
I’ve learned that creating content that matters is most important. Our purpose is to keep and gain the audience. If I’m creating valuable and sharable and engaging content, it would only strengthen our church’s brand. We’ve been focusing on recording and uploading vertical videos of various members of our church’s staff. It feels a lot more personable for people who choose to stay home. It’s been a great way to connect with members of the church. With elements and apps like Facebook Live, and Instagram Live, live videos are becoming more and more important on social platforms. And social media managers everywhere have observed this change, with 42 percent of marketers saying they want to make more live videos.
Designing and creating visual content is becoming an essential skill for social media managers. I have been actively using Canva and Adobe Spark to create content for our social media posts. While I know this is a great tool to have, I don’t know how to use programs like Illustrator and such to design content. I feel like I’m a “fake” graphic designer. Can I get away with becoming a successful social media manager by only practicing with Canva and Adobe Spark? Is that enough? I’m still trying to figure that out. I want level up in this area, though. Now, in 2021, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s become apparent and even essential for all of us social media mangers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms too.
That being said, my goal is to become a valuable asset to my church. I will make sure to learn new skills and level up!