Should You Hire a Social Media Manager in 2021?

hire a social media manager

There’s no debate that social media is now crucial part of growing your business. What is less clear, however, is whether or not it’s worth hiring a social media manager.

To give you an idea of just how essential social media now is for your business, consider these three stats about Instagram:

  • Over a  billion users now use Instagram
  • 60% of users find new products on Instagram
  • 75% of  users take action after seeing a post (visiting a website, for example)

How to find and connect with this willing audience is where social media managers used to thrive. However, with many of the duties required to grow a thriving social media presence now being automated, the need to hire a social media manager is less clear than ever.

What Does a Social Media Manager Do?

A social media manager is responsible for maintaining and growing a brand’s online presence. This includes:

  • Strategy: Successful online presences depend on careful planning. For a social media manager, this includes planning and launching creative campaigns, monitoring their progress, and adjusting as necessary in order to meet a company’s goals.
  • Content Management: A social media manager is responsible for creating original, high-quality content that resonates with your audience. In addition, content management includes creating a publishing schedule, scheduling posts for weeks in advance, promoting content, and researching relevant hashtags for your brand to tie into. Even if you as a business create your own content, a social media manager can help you come up with new content ideas, perform competitor analysis, and find the best times for you to post for the best engagement from your audience.
  • Identifying Target Audience: A social media manager will be able to identify the users that will provide value to your brand through meaningful interactions (follow your business page, convert to customers, create partnerships, etc.) and share your content with their own followers. This includes the following relevant users and unfollowing fake accounts and others that add no value to your feed.
  • Follower Engagement: In addition to finding valuable followers, social media managers make engagement easy and streamlined. This includes liking your followers’ content, commenting on the posts of those that follow your competitors, and quickly responding to comments and direct messages.
  • Customer service: 89% of messages to brands on social media being ignored, so responding to a customer’s message is an easy way to stand out from the competition. Therefore, a good social media manager should take the responsibility of handling most, if not all of your messages. This includes sending mass messages for lead gen, answering common questions, welcoming new customers to your client’s business, making public announcements, providing discounts to your followers/customers, and so on.

The Argument for Automation

Depending on your company’s budget, you might not be able to hire a social media manager to perform all of the duties outlined above.

To hire a social media manager, according to Indeed, you can expect to have to invest anywhere from $20,000/year to $120,000/year, with the average salary (at least in Toronto, Canada) being almost $50,000/year.

Even on a freelance basis from a site like Fiverr as shown in the images below, you can expect to pay a pretty penny:

Fortunately, if you’re lacking the resources to hire a social media manager, you can use a tool like AiGrow to reap nearly all of the benefits of having a dedicated social media manager for a fraction of the price.

AiGrow is a fully-loaded social media manager packaged into a customizable and easy-to-use tool.

Here’s a glimpse into what AiGrow offers:

  • Unlimited automated Likes, comments, follows, unfollows, and DMs
  • Ability to target users based on hashtag use, location, and competitor connection
  • Ability to target specific users from an excel list
  • Ability to send DMs, respond to DMs, and manage your DM inbox all from your desktop
  • Content scheduler to schedule your posts for days, weeks, and/or months ahead (all from your desktop)
  • Daily safeguards for all actions (Likes, comments, follows, DMs, etc.) to help prevent your account from being flagged
  • Customizable comments
  • Customizable DMs
  • Alternating tags for comments and DMs (Hey/Hello/Hi/What’s up… etc.)
  • Daily safeguards to help prevent your account from being flagged
  • Free one-on-one appointments to help get your account properly set up
  • In-app analytics
  • Automatic email notifications in the rare case you encounter an issue with our service (and a proposed solution to the issue)

AiGrow’s most recent feature, automated engagement pods, also provides a great way for groups of people on Instagram to help each other out by guaranteeing more Likes and comments every time you or another group member posts.

While AiGrow only manages Instagram, as touched on at the beginning of the article, Instagram is where your business belongs on social media.

If you’re unsure whether or not to hire a social media manager, AiGrow offers most of the same services as a hired social media manger for just $29/month.

Want to see if AiGrow is the right fit for you? Try it free for five days by clicking here.

(Alternatively, depending on your location, you could try a digital marketing agency Melbourne.)