The 12 Traits of Successful Social Marketers

Social media marketing has become a cornerstone of business success, offering unprecedented opportunities to connect with audiences, build brand awareness, and drive growth. There are more than three billion active monthly users on Facebook alone, and learning how to become a good social media marketer means connecting with a chunk of those people.

However, succeeding in this field requires more than just posting content; it demands a unique blend of creativity, strategy, and resilience.

If you’ve ever wondered how to become a good social media marketer, the answer lies in developing specific characteristics that set successful marketers apart. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or looking to improve your skills; these traits will guide you toward becoming an influential social marketer.

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This article examines 12 essential traits that can help you survive and excel in the competitive world of social media marketing.

Quick Takeaways

• Standing out on social media involves creating engaging, unique content and keeping your posts fresh and relevant.

• Using data analysis to evaluate the success of your campaigns helps track performance metrics, allowing you to refine strategies and achieve better results.

• Prioritizing your customers’ needs and feedback can drive your social strategies, ensuring your marketing efforts resonate with your audience.

• Setting clear business objectives for your social media efforts helps integrate social media into your broader marketing plan, driving meaningful business outcomes.

1. Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is your ticket to standing out in a crowded space. With countless brands vying for attention, those who think outside the box and create fresh, imaginative ideas are the ones who capture the audience’s interest.

This creativity is vital as you learn how to become a good social media marketer because it allows you to craft unique content that appeals to your followers. It also makes your brand memorable and engaging.

Innovation goes hand-in-hand with creativity, as you’ll experiment with new formats, trends, and strategies. You might begin by incorporating the latest viral challenge into your marketing or using cutting-edge tools to create interactive posts.

Regardless of your strategy, an innovative mindset helps you keep your content relevant and exciting. Consistently pushing the boundaries of what’s possible keeps your audience engaged, fosters brand loyalty, and maintains a competitive edge.

2. An Analytical Mindset

Developing an analytical mindset is crucial as you figure out how to become a good social media marketer. Creativity gets the ball rolling, but data analysis ensures your efforts are hitting the mark.

Examining the numbers behind your campaigns helps you determine what’s working and what needs improvement. This task involves tracking metrics like engagement rates, follower growth, and conversion rates to assess the effectiveness of your content and strategies.

Google Analytics and social media analytical tools from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide valuable data. These tools help you see which posts drive the most traffic, what time your audience is most active, and how your campaigns perform overall.

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This information drives informed decision-making and optimizes your strategies to achieve better results. Understanding the data behind your actions is crucial in refining your approach and ensuring long-term success.

3. Customer-First Approach

A customer-first approach is one of the most important aspects of social marketing. Having a customer-centric mindset is more rare than you might imagine. It’s also required to drive meaningful change within the organization and effectively generate marketing results that are important to the business.

Serve the customer, and you serve the business. Without this, effective social strategies are simply impossible.

4. Search Marketing Ability

Search engine optimization is the most important tool in any marketer’s arsenal. It’s a vital skill for understanding how to rank for search terms in Google. It also reflects a desire to know how your customers find you and what information they need.

5. Walk-the-Walk

Marketers who walk the walk might not be experts at using all the tools, but they have found the ones that work for them. They have figured out how to balance the line between their personal and professional brand.

These people read blogs and test the new tools. And you know where to find them.

Blogging is an essential tool for any social marketer to learn how to walk the walk. For others, micro-blogging might be enough to stay connected.

6. Customer-Service Urgency

When someone asks your company’s Twitter account a question, you better have an answer. The customer expectation is that there will be a near real-time response.

Response management is the most significant opportunity in social media today. B2C companies have been forced to figure this out in the last couple of years, and now, many B2B companies are catching up.

7. Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinkers set a business objective for their social efforts and track metrics that matter instead of activities to check a box. However, they also see the importance of social media in the larger business landscape.

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8. Agents of Change

Successful social media marketers often start testing social tools before all the buzz and quickly realize the change they would cause for marketers and companies alike. However, the desire to lead that change makes a difference as you learn how to become a good social media marketer.

9. Marketers Are Publishers

The best social media marketers know that instead of creating 20-page whitepapers and 50-minute webinars, they can look at a content strategy where 140-character tweets, 2-minute YouTube videos, and photos on Facebook will help them achieve their business objectives.

Great marketing serves an audience, not just with brochure-ware, but with valuable content people want and need.

10. Focus on Integrated Marketing

Successful marketers want to create more than just amazing social media strategies; they want to drive social media into the core of the marketing discipline and their business DNA. They realize that all marketing is digital and all their content is connected.

11. The Sociology of Social

Great marketers realize that social tools have enabled collaboration, connections, and networks to transform people and their place in our socio-economic and geo-political world.

They want to transform their companies into social businesses to meet the changing consumer landscape. These people also realize that social changes impact business decision-makers who buy gum, cereal, and cars. They know that social changes everything, not just marketing.

12. A Willingness to Adapt

The brightest marketers realize that they don’t have all the answers. They work to drive consumer-generated content and crowd-sourced innovation at their companies. They know it is all about you and not them or their companies.

Start Getting Social Today

In social media marketing, success comes down to a foundation of traits like creativity, strategic thinking, and an analytical mindset. Mastering these 12 traits helps you create content that appeals to your audience, make data-driven decisions, and make changes on the fly.

You can also ask for help if you aren’t reaching your social media marketing goals. Marketing Insider Group offers a Social Media Content and Management Service where we create content, handle the analytics, and engage with your audience. Contact MIG to learn more or book a free consultation with our team.