A social media marketer is a marketing specialist who uses social media platforms to promote a companys offerings. They use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to reach new customers, engage with current ones, and announce new products or services. Social media marketers can work in-house in a dedicated role within a company, but many work as freelancers and are hired to work for an hourly rate. Social media managers and social media marketers have very similar roles, and the two titles are often used interchangeably. However, the term marketer is more commonly used for freelance specialists.

Here are some tasks a social media marketer might do:

• Oversee an organization’s overall social media strategy
• Work with copywriters and designers to create and publish social media posts
• Monitor social media metrics to optimize future performance
• Stay up-to-date with social media trends, technologies, laws, and best practices
• Respond to and engage with user comments and messages
• Use social listening tools to understand what people are saying on social media about a company
• Manage negative complaints and make sure they don’t explode into a fiasco, appeasing or defusing situations whenever possible
• Increase site traffic by utilizing different social networks, identifying the target market, getting more followers, engaging those followers, and increasing site traffic

Social media marketing is becoming more popular for both firms and consumers. Social media is a relatively inexpensive source of market intelligence which can be used by marketers and managers to track and respond to consumer-identified problems and detect market opportunities. Social media can be used not only as public relations and direct marketing tools, but also as communication channels targeting very specific audiences with social media influencers and social media personalities as effective customer engagement tools.