Social media has become a fierce marketing battlefield among businesses. Those who can wield a solid social media presence stand out and win customers’ hearts.
As brands seek ways to elevate their social media marketing, a new career path has become highly in-demand—a social media consultant. If you have marketing skills for social media platforms, this lucrative option might suit you.
What is a Social Media Consultant?
A social media consultant collaborates with brands or businesses to build and grow their social media presence. They provide advice, suggestions, strategies, and campaign plans to help their clients. Consultants may also offer training sessions and workshops to share their marketing knowledge and expertise.
Many consultants also partake in content creation, auditing, and analytics processes. However, they’re more of a “thinker” than a “doer” as their focus is primarily on the “strategy” and “planning” side while you or other staff execute the work.
What are the Services Offered by a Social Media Consultant?
Versatility is expected of a social media consultant. They must be prepared to offer a wide range of services to their clients, such as:
- Comprehensive Social Media Strategy: The consultant provides detailed and long-term plans and campaigns to guarantee social media success. This includes selecting specific platforms to use, creating a complete content calendar with a consistent posting and management plan, and identifying key performance metrics tailored to the brand’s goals and visions.
- Social Media Research: The consultant performs in-depth competitor research on social media channels, providing a benchmark to guide your social media strategy.
- Content Creation: The consultant conceptualizes content that resonates with your audience, plans posting schedules, and finds the right creators to bring their ideas to life.
- Social Listening: The consultant creates dashboards to monitor and analyze user conversations and interactions to assess sentiments about your brand or business.
- Crisis Management: If your account suffers from penalties due to violations against platform standards, the consultant can give solutions to get the gears running.
- Social Media Training and Workshops: The consultant offers learning sessions to help clients effectively manage their social media accounts on their own.
Pros and Cons of Working as a Social Media Consultant
To help you decide if being a social media consultant is right for you, consider the pros and cons of working in this profession:
Pros:
- High flexibility: Many social media consultants work on a freelance basis with no fixed working hours or physical location.
- High earning potential: According to Glassdoor, the average annual salary of a US-based social media consultant is around $45,000–$75,000, which is substantially higher than the average annual minimum salary.
- Diverse range of clients: Social media marketing is essential for businesses, so expect numerous opportunities to work with different clients, from startups to well-known brands.
Cons:
- High-stakes job: The plans and strategies of a social media consultant will directly impact a business’s online public reputation. A single misstep or poorly executed strategy could damage your client’s online presence and affect your future job prospects.
- Ultra-demanding work: Being a social media consultant requires staying updated on relevant techniques and tools for effective digital marketing. You must also be ready 24/7 to respond to the latest trends and unexpected situations to boost the brand’s online presence.
Essential Skills of a Successful Social Media Consultant
If you're leaning towards becoming a social media consultant, make sure you have these essential skills to succeed in this career path:
Social Media Marketing Skill
You need expert-level knowledge of platform algorithms, guidelines, trends, marketing tools, and analytics to craft a robust and effective strategy.
Client Relationship and Communication Skills
You must convey your ideas and suggestions clearly to your clients and ensure you understand their requests and instructions. Respond promptly to their requests and avoid making changes without their permission.
Content Creation Skill
Although consultants rarely create the actual content, it's still important to possess skills in graphic design, copywriting, proofreading, and research. This helps in producing outlines, mockups, or pitches for your clients.
High-Level Tech Skills
A successful social media consultant knows how to leverage social media management platforms to streamline marketing workflows. These high-performing software tools can automate social media tasks at scale, such as cross-posting across channels, auto first comments, and draft auto-copy.
AI proficiency
AI is the present and future of marketing, so consultants must be well-versed in this technology. Master how to use AI for social media write-ups as it turns your rough ideas into creative and compelling draft posts.
Team collaboration skill
If you work with large companies, you'll likely be part of a social media marketing team consisting of a manager, content creators, and marketers. A good consultant promotes an organized workspace where members can actively collaborate, manage dashboards, view analytics, set schedules, and delegate specific roles.
How to Become a Social Media Consultant: 5 Steps
Here’s our five-step roadmap to carving your path to becoming a social media consultant.
1. Acquire Knowledge and Experience
A formal degree in marketing, communications, business administration, or public relations can give you an edge in becoming a social media consultant. While reading books or watching tutorials online can help, they’re not as foundational or comprehensive as a college education.
Afterward, you must gain hands-on experience in social media marketing. You can take freelance gigs as a social media content creator, manager, or marketer to build your portfolio and resume.
Collaborating with startups or small businesses can also be beneficial. These experiences will solidify your credibility as a consultant. Eventually, these experiences will solidify your credibility as a consultant.
2. Prepare a Portfolio
As you gain experience in social media marketing, compile your previous work to showcase to prospective clients. A quality portfolio can easily earn clients' trust.
Include the following in your portfolio:
- Written works for social media (e.g., blog posts, “how-to” guides, articles)
- Graphic designs (e.g., photos, videos, GIFs, presentations)
- Pages and accounts managed (include the number of followers, top posts, and other relevant details)
- Tutorials and workshops given
Save your compiled works in Google Drive or other cloud storage. You can also present the portfolio as a PDF file or a website (using tools like Canva or Wix).
3. Define Your Rates
Before you start hunting for clients, determine how much you’ll charge them. This can be tricky as you don’t want to set rates that are too high or too low for your skills and experience.
Consider the following:
- Frequency of payment: An hourly pay basis is recommended for long-term projects with dynamic goals or tasks but requires time-tracking software for accurate invoicing. A monthly pay basis is best for long-term projects with specific monthly objectives. A fixed project-based payment is recommended for clients who don’t need recurring help.
- Overhead costs: Working as a freelance consultant is like running your own business with overhead costs. So, make sure to consider expenses like software subscriptions, taxes, insurance, and internet.
- Other consultant rates: Scour freelance platforms like Upwork to determine benchmarks for your potential service rate. Based on our research, social media consultants usually charge around $20-$300 per hour, depending on the project’s scope and time frame.
4. Search For Clients
Winning clients can be challenging due to competition, but you can improve your chances by knowing where to look. Once your portfolio is ready, start hunting in these spots:
- Job boards: Check LinkedIn, Indeed, Jobstreet, Glassdoor, or WeWorkRemotely for social media consultant roles.
- Facebook Groups: Join groups where clients post about their need for social media consultants. You can also post your services to attract potential clients.
- Referrals and Word of Mouth: Ask your colleagues or friends to spread the word about your consulting services. You can also ask your current clients for referrals.
- Email marketing: Reach out to startups, small businesses, PR agencies, marketers, and well-known brands via email.
- Workshops, conferences, and events: Attend physical and virtual meetups to connect with potential clients.
5. Strive for Growth
To land more clients and increase your earnings as a social media consultant, you must constantly upskill and expand your expertise.
- Stay up-to-date about the latest online trends, algorithms, and guidelines.
- Learn new and innovative social media management platforms to automate your work and boost efficiency.
- Acquire additional skills such as data analytics, SEO, influencer marketing, and content repurposing.
Succeed as Social Media Consultant with Highperformr
Starting your career as a social media consultant can be daunting, but a top-notch social media marketing platform like Highperformr can give you an edge. Highperformr is a one-stop, unified platform that automates your workflows, from content creation to day-to-day postings.
Supercharge your brand’s online presence and captivate loyal followers with Highperformr today.
