It’s a nice racket

I clicked on a wrong link on Mashable today and was taken to a job advertisement rather than an article I wanted to read (about the whole Facebook / employer story that’s still going on).  And I was amazed. I saw an ad for a social media manager … oh dear.

This was a full time position and the company advertising said that the social media manager’s responsibilities were:

1. Source, develop and execute compelling content strategies across various social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Pinterest and blogs, to drive aggressive community growth and engagement
2. Monitor and manage analytics to measure the impact of social media programs, and provide regular weekly and monthly reports to senior management
3. Work with creative team, copywriters and designers on innovative social campaigns
4. Monitor forums, external blogs and industry dialogue, and work with Customer Service and Contributor teams to handle any relevant issues
5. Manage PR Campaigns, maintain PR logs and campaign reporting
6. Work with PR, Social Media and Event agencies to execute successful multi-platform campaigns and support overall PR and Social Media efforts
7. Develop content and write posts for customer and contributor blogs
8. Stay on top of competitive landscape, emerging social media technologies, activity and trends

Woo hoo – you know I’m going to have fun with this one! I feel another social media rant coming on – always good fun. OK then, here we go – hold onto your hats

1. To anyone experienced in social media they can do this with one hand tied behind their back in about an hour a day. (I’m loving this)
2. Another half hour? Hardly. Well, the monitoring part anyway. Anyone who is using social media professionally creates a report as  they go so it’s quick and easy to create the reports
3. “Yes, I’ll tweet that and add it to our Facebook page”.
4. Automatically done by any social media manager, this will take hardly any time at all.
5. “Yeah, I’ll tweet your press release and copy and paste the statistics I get from the PR service”
6. I wish I understood this. Is it “Yeah, I’ll take a few Instagrams of your event and put them on Pinterest”?
7. Three blogs a day (the minimum I suggest for a full time social media manager) take about forty five minutes each when you know the subject well
8. Any social media manager automatically does this anyway. Social media changes every day and any manager is no good at all if he or she is using last week’s criteria

So, what does the social media manager do after  his or her mid-morning break? People are certainly wasting a lot  of money.