SMM specialists in different areas have different experiences. Some are proficient in certain tools, while others know how to do everything – universal soldiers.

There is nothing wrong with working in one area, but often the job requires you to do all the functions of SMM: create content, analyze, manage the project and work with advertising.

So, what should an SMM person be able to do if he works in Instagram?

Develop a strategy.

Strategy is the most important part of working with anything, whether it’s cleaning the house, ice fishing or promoting a blog on Instagram. It’s where all the gears start to turn and work. And of course, what kind of specialist can be considered an SMM-specialist without a promotion strategy?

In general, the strategy looks like this:

• Analyze your competitors – you have to be better than them! Find through Instagram search, hashtags or through
• Recommendations similar pages;
• Target audience analysis – you need a portrait of your customer, who they are;
• promotion plan – a big picture of how the world will know about you;
• promotion methods – methods of advertising the account (through targeting advertising, through bloggers, seeding, etc.)
• content-plan – preparation of photos and videos, texts, schedule of posts, sales and developmental content alternation,
• publication of Stories;
• tone of voice – principles of communication with the audience (words, tone of voice, intonation, visual design of messages, use of terminology);
• promotional tools – services necessary for the work, or facilitating it.

Write good texts

A specialist must be able to write specifically for social networks. Journalistic, literary work – completely other areas (but a good base for further specialization in content marketing).

Text for Instagram has its own characteristics.

For the publication of posts, the following points are especially important.

• Lead – the first paragraph, aka title, which is visible immediately below the picture. It should be short, catchy, so that you want to open the whole text and read it.
• Paragraphs are for ease of reading, for the beauty of the main part of the text, they should always be. The text should not look like a single canvas.
• Conclusion – should be, as in any text, in Instagram this is most often a call to action: “look for new products on our site,” “order now, to have time to get to the holidays,” or appeals to communicate with readers: “and have you had this,” “what do you think about it,” “and what would you choose.
• Lists are a handy technique for beautiful and readable text, and are used in the main body.

Read about how to properly make paragraphs and lists in the text in the article “How to work with text on Instagram” on the SMMplanner blog.

When publishing Stories, remember that there important:

• large font;
• text not at the edges;
• duplicate text when posting videos (not everyone watches Stories with sound).

Taking photos and videos

The SMM person in Instagram should know how to work with the camera. Sometimes you need to beautifully photograph a product, to complement the content, but there is no professional photographer around. Then your ability to take pictures comes to the rescue, even if they will be taken on a smartphone camera and at home.

And sometimes jobs require specific skills in photography and videography. So being able to hold a camera in your hands and process pictures afterwards will be a definite plus for you. Firstly, you will understand better how to work with visual content, and secondly, you do not need to make an extra agreement with a photographer or videographer about shooting.

Also, do not forget about the interesting tricks that can diversify the content. One way to do this is by animating photos.

You can read about how to do this in the article “Live photos: what they are and how to do them” on SMMplanner blog.

Processing the visual in a unified style

A beautiful visual in an account is a success for an SMM person. After all, when a user enters a page for the first time and scrolls through the feed, they look at the content in a general way. That’s why the ideal SMM person must also be, in part, an ideal designer. With well-developed artistic taste: the ability to see which colors go together in a collage or a picture, and which do not, what font is better to pick up, and so on.

In a single style – does not mean that all the photos should be made “exactly the same. This means that.

Ideally, the SMM-user should be able to work with Photoshop. But if you learn it from scratch on the computer, it will take a long time to learn. But you can use other services where everything is as simple, accessible and understandable as possible. For example, when preparing a post using the service SMMplanner, you can immediately process a photo using the service Canva

Use the Stories section effectively

When posting Stories, keep in mind that you don’t need to post just “to be”. Instagram Stories is a full-fledged tool for selling, advertising. The ideal SMM professional can also create layouts for Stories. They are needed for product announcements, discounts, sales and promotions, as well as regular content.

It is convenient to publish Stories with the help of a special designer, more about it in the article “Instagram Stories Designer, how to publish Stories in Instagram from a computer.”

Manage your publications efficiently

A specialist should master delayed posting. First, you can schedule the automatic output of several posts at once at a certain time. Secondly, the service has a lot of useful features that make it easier to work with publications.

For example SMMplanner will help coordinate content with the client through team access, set automatic hashtags, comments, create Stories.

It also has a lot of other useful bells and whistles: editing posts, creating storis, putting links in profile descriptions, connecting multiple accounts, and the ability to put geotags and user tags.

Customize Targeted Ads

To attract subscribers and potential customers to the account, you need to understand targeting advertising. SMM beginners sometimes don’t want to dig in and figure it out. There is nothing difficult about it if you learn how. For example, try the course from SMM.School on targeting advertising – there everything will be unpacked.

The specialist can set up targeting either through Instagram or through a Facebook business manager. The main thing is to clearly analyze your target audience and determine how to search for them on the social network – for example, by interests, behavior, or geo. With a thoroughly segmented audience, targeting ads quickly pays off your budget and brings in new customers.

Once you master targeting, you’ll have a lot more options to work with, and more interesting job offers will open up.

Collaborate with bloggers

Collaboration means many things: be able to find a blogger who can publish a good advertising post; negotiate with him correctly; check bloggers and analyze their work through special services.

The most difficult thing here is to find the right opinion leader. Because because of the wrong analysis of the target audience and the choice of blogger, you can simply waste your budget by choosing, for example, a blogger with a lot of buildup.

How to search? There are some loopholes, such as the Instalogy chat room. It’s a chat room on Telegram where brands and bloggers share feedback about working with opinion leaders on Instagram.There’s also a blacklist of bloggers there that warns against problems in working with them.

You can check bloggers for reach, engagement and audience activity through the service HypeAuditor. The service is paid, but you can’t find more information anywhere else. HypeAuditor is also used to select a site for advertising campaigns.

Responding to comments and messages in Direct

Keeping in touch with your audience is a constant activity, and this requires responding to comments under the post and messages in the Directrix on a regular basis.

• Engage subscribers in communication
• learn how to avoid conflicts and carefully neutralize them
• communicate with your audience in a friendly way and be sincere in your communications.

Specialists in SMM can use the ability to qualitatively conduct live broadcasts, drawing prizes with the help of special services, because the contest is a good way to involve the readers in activities.

Make sure that no one is left in doubt about the honesty of the drawing. To do this, use proven randomizers.

Plus SMM-schiku need to learn how to pick up exactly such contests, which would go for a particular target audience. It is difficult to get into the top ten the first time. But it is also possible to pump up this skill. For example, you can be inspired by our selection of 7 contest ideas for Instagram.

Picking up hashtags.

You also need to learn how to do this. It would seem that what is difficult – to take and write hashtags? But there are difficulties.

First, now Instagram does not like a large number of hashtags, this should be taken into account, and second, the most popular, generalized hashtags will not be of any use.

A specialist should keep these nuances in mind and choose hashtags of medium prevalence, narrow, or even individual, for example by navigating the profile. Of course, if you produce furniture, for example, it makes sense to put along with the navigation and general hashtags such as #furniture, #bednazakaz, and with a designation of the city #kitchens_moscow.

Work with the analytics.

Quite a difficult part of SMM-worker – work with analytics. It is not mastered by everyone. But a generalist needs to learn how to work with this tool.

In order to understand the dynamics of the number of subscribers, activity, engagement, coverage of posts for the maintenance period, statistics collection services – the best helpers. With the help of these tools you can quickly analyze errors in promotion: which posts work and which do not, which post succeeded, and which did not really hit the audience. Also analyze traffic – the increase in unique visitors, both per day and per month.

To begin with, take a close look at Instagram’s built-in statistics – there is a lot of useful stuff in it. It is also good to use special services that help analyze statistical data.

To summarize

When a customer is looking for an SMM-engineer, it often happens that he does not fully understand the essence of the work. And he wants everything at once. Then you have to specify the possibilities and show what the SMM specialist is able to do.

A competent specialist on promotion in Instagram should be able to:

• develop a strategy – analyze competitors, target audience, make a promotion plan with the choice of methods and tools;
• write texts in accordance with the peculiarities of Instagram;
• make a photo, video, a unified concept of the overall appearance of the page;
• make life easier with special services of delayed posting;
• understand the methods of promotion and advertise the account;
• communicate with the audience (through comments, contests);
• to receive and analyze the results of statistical data.

At the SMM market, there is also demand for more narrow specialists. For example, only on the setting up of targeting advertising. Or maintenance of the page, filling content, but without the advertising component. Or even just the creation of Instagram Stories. So if you are not good at something or you are not good at something at all, you can also find customers in this case.

As a rule, SMM-manager who can do everything at once, is required by small companies. Such companies that open their page in Instagram, not a few. But even if the firm has just decided to start its Instagram-path, its head may require you to use cases, portfolios or … the login page in Instagram, or so-called personal brand. The trend is as follows: employers are more willing to choose candidates who have a successful and lively Instagram account.