3 Core Skills Every Good Social Media Marketer Should Possess

This post is authored for Sarah, our very own co-founder, for her application to be Standard Chartered Breeze‘s World Coolest Intern (WCI). We promise this is a good read.

Hiring a good digital marketer is hard, but hiring a great one is even harder. What differentiates the great from good is attitude.

The best talents are usually positive, curious, humble, hungry… you get my point. Attitudes are hard to determine. They are only revealed when you work with that person over a period of time.

You bet. My working experience with Sarah has been a fruitful one. Out of passion, we founded Penn Olson. This blog exposed us to multiple roles – content generators, geeks and marketers.

Each role taught us core skills needed in the marketing world. If you were to ask what’s our best portfolio, I would say its Penn Olson.

To fly, we have to have resistance. Sarah stumbled, learned and bounced back every time she faces an obstacle. In all honesty, she may not be there yet. But at least she’s trying hard to fly. She has the right attitude.

Through her journey, she also acquired 3 core skills which I believe every good digital marketer should possess:

1. Communicator

To market, you have to communicate, and communication comprises of writing, speaking and even body language. These are three communication forms any marketer would have to master. As a marketer, you communicate to sell. Depending on the circumstances, you could be selling your product, brand or even yourself. It can be trained but when performed it has to be natural.

A social media marketer tweets and updates multiple times a day. Hence, a natural communicator with good writing abilities is needed. The training starts from your own personal social account; but many wouldn’t understand the pressure to tweet on behalf of a brand. What seems similar is actually not. When pressure piles up, your mind lays out the different consequences when you’re about to make an update. You tend to be more cautious with your updates and that kills off either the brand’s or your personality. Tweets become mundane as you’re more concerned about being professional and “getting it right”. Can you live the pressure?

Social media marketers aren’t just people who hide behind the screen. We organize conferences, meetups, and tweetups. These are the situations where we have to sell ourselves before we can even sell our brand or products. It’s more than just the words we speak. Body language plays a big part in face-to-face communication. A good marketer should be able strike a good impression with others pretty quickly. Especially with journalists or bloggers who are usually very particular with the way marketers approach them.

Sarah as a communicator: