What skills are needed to be good at social media?

If you, one of your employees or even someone you hire is going to manage your social media accounts or blog for your roofing company, what skills should they have beyond knowing the in's and out's of Twitter, Facebook and search engine optimization (SEO) to generate the results you are looking for? Here is a short list of skills I recommend looking for. They are basics before the basics of digital marketing and social media:

Is the person a good writer?

Writing is the foundation of most content creation. Even things like audio or video often rely on a written script in order to deliver the maximum impact to your audience. Can you communicate ideas clearly? Can you create language that is persuasive? If you can write well, you can apply that skill to nearly every form of content generation.

Is the person a good analyst?

Given a set of information or data, can they extract something of value (insight) from it? They don’t have to be a statistics expert, but they should be able to look at a pile of data and make a chart from it or at least see if there’s some kind of trend because that is the foundation of web and social media metrics.

Is the person a good researcher?

When posed with a question, can they come up with a solution by any legal means necessary? Can they use Google intelligently? Can they put together discrete information sources and find an answer? Can they learn independently without much guidance or hand holding? The ability to find the right answer and the persistence and willingness to get one is also a foundation skill.

The truth is that there really isn’t a lot that is needed to be good at social media content creation (have a command of the English language, be decent at math, and have the ability to perform basic research online), but you do need to be able to use the tools you have with excellence and consistency.

In our constant pursuit of the newest shiny objects we often lose sight of the prerequisite fundamentals that can make us great. While it’s great to have the newest, shiniest, most buzzworthy tools and services at our fingertips, it’s ultimately meaningless if we don’t have mastery of the basic skills to use them properly.

If you have any questions about this blog post or would like assistance with establishing or managing your roofing company's social media accounts, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.