11 social media skills for social media managers

Social media skills have evolved dramatically since AI has come into the picture. To keep pace with these changes, social media managers must develop specialized skills that complement AI-driven advancements in content strategy, analytics and audience engagement. Marketing leaders also need social media marketing skills to help social teams do their best work.

In this article, we’ll explore how AI has reshaped the role of social media managers. Plus, we’ll list the social media skills social media managers and marketing leaders must master to stay competitive.

How have social media manager skills evolved?

How to be a good social media manager has changed. A few years ago, social media managers were responding to social network fragmentation and dynamic changes in search engine optimization (SEO). Today, they’re optimizing content creation, managing online communities and providing more personalized customer care—while finding new ways to use AI.

According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, the most important functional skills for social media managers are social listening, data storytelling and creative direction. The most valuable soft skills include project management, brand voice development and strategic partnership building.

AI helps scale these skills, but it doesn’t replace them, especially because social practitioners need many of them to produce original content.

How social media manager skills have changed since AI emerged

Skill specialization is the biggest overall change AI has brought on. A 2024 analysis of 50 social media job descriptions found that social media job responsibilities are becoming more sophisticated and data-driven.

According to Sprout’s Q1 2025 Pulse Survey, here are the top three specialized roles marketers would like to add to their team.

1. Social media analyst OR social media creative director
2. Influencer marketing lead
3. Social media operations/project manager

AI is changing the game, but social media managers are still calling the shots. By leveraging AI-powered tools for tasks like scheduling and writing alt text, they’re streamlining workflows and freeing up time for high-level strategy and creativity. With AI as their assistant, social practitioners can focus on what they do best: creating engaging content that drives results.

Sprout’s integrated AI functionality helps with everything from sentiment analysis to predictive analytics, all in one platform, empowering social media teams to anticipate trends and optimize their strategies in real-time.

If you want to sharpen your skills for 2025 and beyond, watch the video below. We feature our top five skills for the next few years, including AI and data storytelling.

Level up your social media skills with the right social tools

As you master the skills in this article, start leveraging a social media management tool to further your social success.

Test out Sprout social with a free trial, or schedule a demo to learn more.

11 social media manager skills to further your career

If you want to become a social media manager or grow your career as one, these are the key skills you need to advance your career. Instead of considering AI a skill, consider it a tool to help you carry out the skills below more efficiently and effectively. Here are 11 essential skills every social media manager needs to thrive.

1. Communication

Strong communication skills are essential for advancing your social media career. From writing a brief to presenting campaign insights, social media managers must effectively communicate ideas to a wide range of stakeholders.

Communication skills are even more indispensable when you consider the breadth of internal and external audiences social media managers collaborate with regularly, from teams as diverse as the legal and creative departments to followers and even social platform partners.

There are two crucial things to keep in mind when it comes to communication:

• When communicating internally, articulate your ideas and plans to decision-makers and cross-functional partners. This could be about your content distribution plan or the revenue impact you expect from a campaign.
• You also need to communicate consistently with external stakeholders, such as creators or influencers. Clearly define expectations, campaign goals and how you’ll collaborate with them.
• Communication also applies to how you engage in the comments. Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist provides four different tones for customer care, helping you write thoughtful and on-brand replies faster.

Resources to build your communication skills

• Presentation template: Use this social media strategy deck template to effectively communicate your social strategy to the leadership team.
• TED Talks on communication: Hear from some of the world’s most inspiring speakers on improving your social conversations, digital communications and storytelling abilities.

2. Writing

Social media managers have to be excellent copywriters who embody and enhance their brand’s voice on social. From witty, attention-grabbing ad copy to timely commentary, you should know how to write concise copy that speaks to your audience.

The good news is that AI can help you draft post captions faster. Sprout’s AI Assist offers copywriting support directly within the Compose Window, generating captions in your brand’s voice based on your brand’s top-performing posts or a custom topic. Worth noting: Even if you use AI tools to generate content, you still need editing skills to review and adjust the copy to ensure it aligns with your expectations and brand voice.

Effective writers know how to tailor their writing for different audiences and platforms. For example, while you can use up to 2,200 characters in your Instagram captions, data has shown that the most engaging length is between 1-50 characters.

Resources to help with writing

• Grammarly: This free tool checks your grammar and proofreads your content while giving you prompts to make your copy more compelling.
• Hemingway Editor: Use this website and app to make your writing more concise and readable. While it is geared more toward long-form writing, you can also use it to create impactful social media posts.
• Meta Blueprint: Meta offers free courses that teach you best practices for writing engaging posts, ad copy and captions for Instagram and Facebook.

3. Creative direction

In an oversaturated social landscape, differentiation often comes down to creative direction. A strong creative strategy stops you from chasing any trend and ensures your content is engaging and audience-centric while still aligning well with your brand.

It takes creative direction to:

• Plan and produce innovative social media ideas
• Shape a consistent, platform-specific aesthetic that resonates with your audience
• Lead productive brainstorms that bring out teammates’ best ideas
• Develop and expand your brand’s voice and visual identity
• Guide creative decision-making

A great creative strategy also considers how audiences engage with your content across platforms. Using a tool like SproutLink turns your bio link into a clickable landing page, allowing for more creative content presentation and bridging the gap between inspiration and action.

Gymshark’s TikTok is a brilliant example of creative direction done well. The brand has built a massive following by tapping into fitness trends, influencer collaborations and relatable gym culture humor. The content feels native to TikTok while still being on-brand for Gymshark.

Resources to refine your creative direction skills

• Creative Mornings events: Creative Mornings is a global breakfast event series for the creative community. Join a local event or the online community to connect with other curious, creative leaders in marketing, design and social.
• Vidyo: This easy-to-use AI tool helps time and resource-strapped teams create social-ready short-form videos from longer content.
• Illustroke: Use this tool to create quick AI-generated illustrations from text prompts to provide your design teams with more tangible direction.
• Fast Company and Campaign: These two publications offer thoughtful commentary and criticism on the creative ad world. Read for insight into brand and creative strategy, industry-leading campaigns and thought leadership.
• Sprout Insights Blog: Check out curated articles on content ideas for a variety of social platforms on our blog.

4. Efficiency and project management

As a social media manager, not only do you have to conceptualize campaigns and distribution rhythms, but you also have to lead and execute these plans from start to finish. Developing social media management skills like project planning and execution lays the foundation for future leadership roles in the industry.

AI won’t replace the need for project management, but it can make your processes more efficient. Take Sprout’s ViralPost® feature, for example. It analyzes audience engagement patterns and automatically schedules posts in your queue at the best times. Instead of guessing when to post, you can focus on strategy and execution while letting AI handle the timing.

Among the many time and project management tools available, such as Asana or Monday.com, a social media calendar is super helpful for managing your different social tasks. Don’t have time to create your own social media calendar? Social management platforms like Sprout also have an intuitive social media calendar you can use to manage your campaigns more efficiently, keep all your collaborators on the same page, track your progress with different filters and more.

Resources to improve your project management skills

• Asana Project Management: Use this tool to plan and manage your projects from start to finish.
• Pomodoro Technique and time-boxing: Sometimes you’ve got 50 posts to write and schedule all at once. Setting aside a limited block of time to work on a task helps keep things moving.
• Social Media Campaign Brief Template: Use this customizable social campaign brief template to organize campaign details, creative direction and other important directives.

5. Marketing strategy

Social sits at the intersection of marketing, customer experience and sales. It’s also a source of valuable business intelligence.

Even with the integral role of social across an organization, proving social media’s ROI can be a challenge for many social media managers. According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index,™ social teams often struggle to tie their efforts to broader business goals.

That’s where marketing skills come in. Understanding how social intersects with other tactics helps you create social media strategies that drive real business impact and showcase those efforts to marketing leaders. But the success of a strategy isn’t purely based on execution; it’s also about how your audience responds. Sprout’s Listening tools help you gauge audience perception by analyzing social conversations so you can adjust your messaging, optimize campaigns and ensure your strategy resonates.

When combined with social intelligence, strong marketing skills allow you to shape conversations, proving the true value of social to your organization.

More resources

• Sprout’s YouTube channel: Our YouTube channel is an excellent resource for videos on leveling up your social marketing strategy.
• Marketing influencers: Leaders like Joe Pulizzi and Seth Godin have stood the test of time with marketing wisdom all social pros can use.
• Books by Malcolm Gladwell: Read “The Tipping Point” or “Outliers” to strengthen your understanding of human behavior and marketing.
• LinkedIn Learning: Access marketing and strategy courses for free if you have a LinkedIn Premium subscription.

6. Agility

The social landscape moves fast, and even the best-laid plans can become irrelevant overnight. That’s why knowing when to pivot, experiment or double down is one of many must-have social media marketer skills.

Being agile isn’t just about reacting to trends or handling customer feedback in real time. It also means knowing when to adjust your long-term social media strategy.

Social strategies have to be as dynamic as the platforms they are executed on. As a social media manager, it’s important to experiment with different tactics or even shake up your strategy entirely to adapt to new trends or competitive forces.

Learning from your data by listening to customer feedback and keeping a pulse on your competitors in a timely manner makes you a more nimble and hands-on social marketer.

Resources to help you stay agile

• Know Your Meme: This site is the place to go to track the daily development of new memes.
• The X Trends sidebar and the TikTok Explore page: Useful resources to find emerging trends and topics.
• Google Alerts: Keep up with company mentions on the internet, industry news and world news.

7. Social media intelligence

In our 2023 State of Social Media report, 90% of business leaders agreed that their company’s success depended on how effectively they used social media data. This stat shows the value of social media intelligence as a skill for social media managers.

What is social media intelligence? In short, it’s the ability to analyze raw data and spot patterns and insights. AI-powered tools like Sprout’s Analyze by AI Assist, take this skill to the next level by monitoring significant metrics, hashtags, keywords, emojis and categories collected through social media listening and identifying trends and sentiment shifts in social conversations. While this only helps you with your listening data, it still saves you some time sifting through data so you have more time to focus on refining your strategy.

The story of Spotify Wrapped is a prime example of what’s possible when you use social media intelligence to drive strategy. Spotify’s data showed that users were organically sharing their listening habits at the end of each year. The brand turned this insight into a personalized, sharable experience that’s now its most recognizable marketing initiative. By analyzing audience conversations, engagement patterns and sentiment, Spotify transformed raw social data into marketing gold.

This ability to translate data into compelling narratives isn’t just for global brands—it’s a skill every social media manager needs.

To properly communicate the impact of social intelligence to leadership, you have to tell the stories behind the numbers. For example, instead of just presenting the percentages, you might explain that engagement dropped 10% in Q1, but you increased reach by 30% in Q2 by experimenting with posting times.

Here’s how to use data storytelling to bring your social intelligence takeaways to life:

• Tie insights to revenue: Show how engagement, traffic or social sentiment translates into conversions, retention or cost savings. Lead with the metrics leadership cares about most.
• Visualize key trends: The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ found that 45% of marketing leaders agree visual data—like the dashboards and reports you can access through Sprout Social’s My Reports feature—helps secure social media investment.

Resources for building your social intelligence skills

• Social Listening Workbook: This workbook helps you get clear insights into what audiences think about your brand and figure out how to optimize your strategy accordingly.
• Marketer’s Ultimate Data-Powered Toolkit: This powerful toolkit is full of advice on how to use analytics to your advantage from industry leaders including HubSpot, Litmus, Unbounce, Vidyard and ZoomInfo.
• Data storytelling: This article shows you how to build effective data storytelling so you can communicate your data-driven strategy in a way that resonates with members in and around the marketing team.

8. Budget management

As a social media manager, you have to expertly plan and manage funds for various programs, including organic and paid media spending.

This includes managing the budget for content, especially if your project includes influencer marketing or if you need to hire freelance professionals. These costs may vary based on where you are located, the size of the influencer’s following and how freelance writers or editors charge their fees. You may have to decide which creator partnerships to prioritize based on available resources and production costs.

To plan and allocate your spending wisely, you need to first thoroughly understand the goals of the project and conduct a social spend audit to compare the expenses from previous months or quarters. This will give you a better idea of which expenses are a one-time spend and which are ongoing. Sprout’s automated link-tracking feature can also help maximize your budget by automatically adding link tracking to links posted in Sprout. This ensures you can accurately measure the ROI of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions about where to invest your budget.

Resources to enrich your social media skills for budgeting

• Annual Social Media Budget Template: Use this handy template to allocate your finances wisely, measure ROI and justify more investments in the future.
• Organic vs paid media: This article highlights everything you need to keep in mind when planning a hybrid social media strategy.

9. Customer care

Customer care is one of those social media skills that combines customer service, people skills and an eye for uncovering opportunities. That’s why developing a social customer care strategy is an integral part of a social media manager’s job description. Our Index shows that 73% of social users will simply buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.

Your social media response time needs to be dialed in. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers expect a response within 24 hours or sooner, which is consistent with what our Index reported in 2022 and 2023. Not only do you have to listen to and understand your customers’ concerns, but you also need to be proactive in handling emergencies. For example, when a customer reached out to United Airlines inquiring when their website would be functional again, the airline responded immediately with a solution and follow-up question.

As a social media manager, you’re the brand’s biggest champion. Understanding customers and their perspectives allows you to create meaningful interactions that strengthen community trust. If you want help streamlining this, Sprout’s Sentiment for Messages automatically detects the tone of incoming messages, so you can prioritize urgent concerns and respond appropriately.

Personalizing interactions also makes a difference. When you reference conversation history, you turn everyday exchanges into relationship-building opportunities. Summarize by AI Assist simplifies this by summarizing past interactions, so you don’t have to dig through threads to understand the context.

Resources to enhance your customer care skills

• Customer Service Training Guide: Build essential customer care skills with this free guide from Salesforce. It covers everything from communication techniques to AI-driven service strategies.
• Podcasts: Customer care starts with customer understanding. Some of our favorite podcasts on this topic include Hidden Brain, Invisibilia and What It Means. Check out our full list of favorite podcasts here.

10. Brand voice development

Your brand voice is more than what you say—it’s how you say it. A strong, consistent brand voice has to reflect your brand’s values and personality while also helping you stand out, build trust and create a lasting emotional connection with your audience. It’s a tall order.

For inspiration, consider Oatly, a brand known for its irreverent tone and bold and witty voice. The copy feels like it’s coming from a clever person rather than a brand. It often makes self-aware references to the fact that it is for marketing purposes, but it does it in a way that makes the audience feel like they’re in on the joke.

Part of crafting an awesome brand voice is making sure it resonates. If your audience reacts unexpectedly to a campaign or if sentiment shifts overnight, you need to know. This is where social listening comes in. Spike Alerts help you stay ahead of the conversation by flagging sudden changes in engagement and sentiment, so you can adjust your messaging.

Someone at Oatly must’ve read our 2025 Index and seen that 93% of consumers want to see more brands combatting misinformation (or they spotted the same trend we did…this seems more likely). Either way, Oatly is proof that a well-crafted brand voice works.

Resources to help you learn about brand voice

• Brand voice: This article has tips to help you develop your brand’s voice.
• Grammarly’s Tone Detector: A free tool to help lock in brand voice consistency by ensuring your writing matches your intended brand voice.

11. Influencer marketing

When done right, influencer marketing builds credibility, increases engagement and drives long-term brand growth—but only if it feels authentic and strategic. Managing influencer relationships, tracking performance and ensuring content stays on-brand can be complex. An Influencer Marketing campaign management tool, like Sprout’s, streamlines the process by helping you find the right partners, coordinate collaborations and measure impact.

Look at Pvolve’s collaboration with Jennifer Aniston—it’s a masterclass in influencer marketing done right. Aniston organically discovered the brand while recovering from a back injury, making her endorsement feel genuine and aligned with Pvolve’s message: “Break a sweat, not your body.”

Later, Pvolve strategically elevated her role from user to collaborator, turning an authentic brand connection into a powerful marketing asset. By leveraging her influence, the brand skyrocketed its social media awareness and positioned itself as a leader in low-impact fitness. This example illustrates why influencer marketing is an important skill. You risk being left behind if you’re not including it in your strategy.

In our Q1 2025 Pulse Survey, 92% of marketers said that sponsored influencer content outperforms organic content posted on their brand accounts for reach. That number dips to 82% for B2C marketers, but still, the positive impact is proven.

Resources to strengthen your influencer marketing skills

• Influencer management: This article explains how to build successful, mutually beneficial partnerships with content creators.
• Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast: Hosted by Jason Falls, this podcast takes a strategic look at influencer marketing, offering insights to help you drive real business results.

4 social media marketing skills for marketing leaders to build better teams

Even though they oversee the broader marketing strategy, marketing leaders still need specific social media skills. Why? It’s hard to champion something if you don’t understand it, and social teams need to be built by someone who gets it. As the link between leadership and the social media team, marketing leaders need to be able to communicate the value of social media and close knowledge gaps.

Let’s review the social media skills marketers need to build successful teams and trust with leadership.

1. Understanding social media culture

Social media has its own culture, with its own language, behaviors and expectations. If the goal is to be the biggest brand in your industry on social media, you need to understand social media culture, and your team needs to be fluent in it. Per the Index, 93% of consumers agreed it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture.

From a strategy perspective, understanding social media culture minimizes the risk of appearing out of touch. However, you also have to understand your audience, especially considering different generations use social media differently. Listen and take cues from your audience to create content that resonates. AI-powered social media listening tools like Sprout’s help your team do this.

Gritty is a perfect example of what happens when brands truly understand social media culture. When the Philadelphia Flyers introduced their offbeat, googly-eyed mascot, the internet initially rejected him. But instead of resisting the memes, the Flyers embraced them, letting Gritty’s chaotic energy shine. Gritty proves that when brands stop forcing relatability and start speaking the internet’s language, they can build lasting brand affinity.

When hiring and leading your social media team, the more you understand online culture, the better you’ll be able to spot talent that gets it. It’ll also make explaining the value of social media easier.

Tips to help you master this skill

• Use social media daily. Follow brands, meme accounts, creators and trendsetters. Look at comments on popular posts to figure out how people are reacting and why they are performing well.
• Ask your social team to walk you through how they turn social listening insights into content ideas. Understanding this process will allow you to clearly communicate how decisions are made to leadership, building trust in the social team’s strategy.
• Use TikTok, YouTube and Instagram’s search functions. Social media search is replacing Google for younger audiences. Search a topic and see what types of content surface first—this gives you a glimpse into what’s trending.

2. Facilitating faster approvals

When a trend takes hold, a brand only has a day or two to respond. Unfortunately, many opportunities are missed because of lengthy approval processes.

74% of executives surveyed for The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ say they trust their social team, but social marketers still report struggling with resource gaps and slow approvals.

As a marketing leader, you need to create the conditions for your social team to do their best work, and in this case, it means doing your due diligence while still clearing the way for creativity.

Tips to help you master this skill

• Revisit your social media approval process. When was the last time you optimized your social media approval process?
• Consider using a social media management tool. Using a platform like Sprout helps manage workflows and speed up decision-making.
• Reduce excess oversight. Are there people involved in the approval process who don’t need to be? Your social team has a strategy, and they need your help building executive trust and removing bottlenecks so that they can implement it to its fullest potential.

3. Supporting original content creation

The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ found that originality is the second-leading reason consumers follow brands on social media, just behind product quality. Producing original content is necessary for your brand to be memorable.

If you’re wondering what kind of original content to produce, we surveyed our ICYMI community of marketers and creators about the future of social media for 2025, and 47% (the most of any topic) said they were focusing on short-form video (60 seconds or less).

Tips to help you master this skill

• Embrace lo-fi video content. Production value and product-centricity are less important to consumers according to our Index, so take advantage of this by encouraging your team to produce more lo-fi video content.
• Give the social team more freedom to experiment with new types of social media content. Let them experiment with new formats—interactive polls, behind-the-scenes footage or audience-driven content—to discover what truly engages your community.

4. Building a distinct brand voice

A compelling brand voice does wonders to stop the scroll and make your brand recognizable beyond the visuals.

If you want proof that crafting a distinct brand voice is worth it, look at Duolingo’s social media story. In 2021, Zaria Parvez asked if she could revive the brand’s inactive TikTok account. She was a junior marketing team member at the time.

She didn’t have much of a budget, so she got creative, took risks, hopped on trends and gave the brand an unhinged and hilarious voice on social media. Duolingo has grown from 50 thousand followers on TikTok to over 15 million thanks to its quirky brand voice.

Tips and resources to help you master this skill

• Work with the social team to produce a social media style guide. This will help your social team define exactly how your brand appears on social media, including tone and voice.
• Prepare to handle questions and concerns. Experimenting with a bold brand voice often will create some apprehension, but it will be worth it when you strike gold and create superfans. Trust your social team to adapt messaging based on audience engagement.
• Avoid brand voices that are sexually explicit or overly corporate. According to our Index, consumers are tired of these brand voices.

Build your social media skills to transform your career

Social is a career path of lifelong learning. Whether you’re stepping into your first social media manager role or you’re already a pro, you need to continue to hone your social media skills and evolve them alongside AI. That means playing to your strengths while pushing yourself to grow in new areas.

For example, if you’re already highly organized and efficient, you can spend time developing other skills, such as building your personal brand or preparing to move into people management.

Specializing in a specific social media skill will be key to your next career move. If you’re phenomenal at data analysis, perhaps you become an exceptional data storyteller. Or, if content creation is your forte, you might want to upskill at video content creation. Whatever your social media skills are, there’s room to grow.

Check out The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ to learn how to stand out despite social media saturation and build next-generation social teams.

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