How to Hire a Social Media Manager in 7 Steps

A social media manager is a key stakeholder that creates and manages all social media functions within your company by increasing a company’s overall social media presence. They provide a voice for your brand by posting content and videos to social media channels like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Your social media manager is expected to handle your day-to-day social media posts, replies, and overall social media strategy. This means they will have to be intimately familiar with your brand to ensure consistent messaging and communication.

If you don’t want to waste time searching through unqualified candidate resumes, consider Toptal. It vets and delivers the top social media managers who are already pre-qualified and ready to start work. Choose from hourly, part-time, or full-time paid on a weekly basis. Sign up for your free two-week trial today!

Step 1: Determine the Specialty Area You Need & Salary

To find and hire social media manager candidates for your business, you should first determine the type you should recruit. Aside from marketing, consider what you’ll need your social media manager to focus on. Some of the most common specialty areas include the following:

• Advertising
• Customer service and support
• Content marketing
• Data analysis
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

If your small business is just starting out, then you may need to hire a social media person who can support all areas of your online presence. However, if your business has been around for a while, you may only need to expand and hire more specialized social media managers in each of the above areas.

Part of this process will be determining your budget and how much you can allocate in salary to a social media manager. As of this writing, the average salary of a social media manager in the US (based on ranges in New York) is nearly $75,000 per year. Salaries may vary depending on your location and the experience and skills of the candidate.

Step 2: Determine the Type of Schedule You Need: Full-time or Freelance

When making a hire, consider the types of employees you need. You can hire full-time, part-time, seasonal, or freelance workers.

With a full-time employee, you’ll need to provide benefits, training, performance management, and payroll and tax remittance, plus additional overhead. Part-time workers are typically not eligible for benefits, such as paid time off, healthcare benefits, and bonuses. Seasonal employees are generally temporary employees who work either full- or part-time during the busiest season of your company. The benefit is that you can direct the employee on their daily duties, tell them when to work, and precisely what to do.

If you don’t need a permanent worker, hiring an independent contractor can enable you to get the services of social media experts without the hassle and overhead of recruiting an employee. Additionally, this option may give you access to individuals with broader skills. You cannot direct their daily work, but you don’t have to shoulder the financial burden of the additional overhead and benefit costs. Because you simply pay an independent contractor an agreed-upon rate, it has the potential to save your company money.

Step 3: Write the Job Description

Whether you’re searching for an employee or an independent contractor, you must write a clear job description. Make sure it answers these questions:

• How much experience do you need your social media manager to have?
• Do you need someone who can be a jack of all trades?
• Do you instead need someone who’s specialized in just one or a few areas?
• What social media channels do you have and expect them to use?

You should also list any social media tools your company uses or plans to use along with specifics about the daily tasks. Since not all social media managers will have the same skills and background, it’s important to make it clear what your open role entails for candidates. Consider adding these requirements and tasks to the job description:

• Excellent writing skills
• Organization and time management skills
• Curates, schedules, and manages social media content calendar
• Establishes and maintains the company’s brand identity
• Monitors social media trends and uses those trends to keep the business in the conversation
• Engages with followers and has the ability to talk with not at followers
• Has the ability to answer questions and resolve customer support issues quickly
• Supports promotional efforts and sales campaigns

Step 4: Post Job Ad & Review Applicants

When advertising the job posting, your ad shouldn’t just be the job description you’ve created. It should also sell your company. Give potential employees a sense of your culture, any benefits you offer, and why employees like working at your company. This helps candidates determine if they’re a good fit for your organization. It may reduce the number of applicants—but that’s a good thing, because it means you won’t spend time sorting through unqualified job seekers.

A great way to determine if the candidate has the skills and expertise you require for the position is to look at previous campaigns and projects that they handled during the applicant screening process. Additionally, ask them to complete a test project. This project should fall along the lines of their daily duties, but not be so long that it discourages participation. Additionally, consider compensating the candidate for their efforts—this shows that you value their time.

Step 5: Conduct Interviews

One of the important steps on how to hire a social media manager is conducting the job interview. Getting here requires diligence, ‌eliminating unqualified applicants, and only speaking with the most qualified.

Make sure that your candidate interviews include questions on how they create and manage social media marketing plans for your type of business. You may also want to use what-if scenarios during the interview and ask candidates how they will handle those situations. This will help provide insight into their planning, critical thinking, and marketing skills.

It’s important to ask each candidate the same interview questions, as it will allow you to evaluate them equally. Consider some of the following questions:

• Which social media platforms do you have experience using, and which do you prefer?
• How do you plan and schedule social media posts and campaigns?
• What metrics do you use to monitor performance?
• How do you decide when to post on each platform?
• What has been your most effective social media strategy?
• How would you respond to a user harassing company accounts or to a negative comment?
• How do you make a company’s brand stand out?
• How do you identify your target audience?
• What do you do if a campaign doesn’t perform well or as intended?

Consider asking real-life questions, too. Think of a situation you’ve recently encountered and pose it to each applicant to see how they would have handled that situation. You can also ask them to pitch you a product on the spot. This lets you see if the candidate has done their homework and tried to catch your brand’s voice.

Step 6: Call References & Run a Background Check

After the interviews, you’ll naturally narrow your choices down and may even have one standout candidate. Ask for at least three supervisory references and speak with at least two. Conducting employment reference checks will give you more insight into the candidate’s work ethic and skills, and it will let you better understand what it’s like to work with the person.

Get feedback from previous employers or clients on how the candidates handled the tasks assigned to them and if the marketing materials they used were effective tools to boost brand presence. Also, check out our guide to reference questions to ask.

Running a background check isn’t necessary for every position, but doing that for a social media manager could be important. This person is customer-facing, so you want to make sure they treat your customers with respect and grace. Depending on your industry, you may deal with confidential information as well, making it even more important to run a background check.

To prevent misunderstandings about whether or not background checks are needed for specific roles, you should come up with a policy that outlines all the requirements. If you don’t know what to include, check out our background check policy guide, which has a template you can download for free.

Step 7: Make an Offer

It’s time to decide who to hire and make an official job offer. No applicant will check every box on your wish list, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t get everything you want. The best approach is to choose the candidate who best matches the core duties.

Ultimately, trust your gut. While you won’t have spent a ton of time with each candidate, you’ve had at least an hour with each one. That’s enough time to spot serious red flags or develop rapport with a great candidate. Choosing one who will fit well in your company may be the best choice since skills can be taught—but culture can’t.

When you’ve decided, call the candidate to give them the good news. Besides gauging their level of excitement, you can discuss any final details, such as salary and start date. Once you’ve agreed to all terms, write the formal offer letter—use our employment offer template and fill out the relevant details for an easier time.

You should also include the full job description in the offer letter. When the candidate signs off on their ability to perform the job duties, you can hold them accountable if they don’t meet your expectations. Once the candidate has returned the offer letter to you, begin the onboarding process.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Bottom Line

It’s no secret that today’s job market is tough. While learning how to hire a social media manager is helpful, it’s equally important that you find one that matches your requirements. Hiring a social media manager may present some challenges. By keeping your job ad focused on what you need for the role and what you offer, you can attract and hire social media manager candidates with the skills your business needs.