Do you love spending your day scrolling through TikTok? Are you always covering your screen when your boss walks past to hide the latest Instagram Reel you’re watching? Imagine if you were getting paid to do those things instead! Here are seven jobs that will pay you to be on social media all day!
1. Social Media Manager
The most obvious choice! A social media manager is responsible for all things social for an organisation or brand. You’ll be creating and posting content in line with the brand strategy.
If you are running it solo, you’ll be doing everything from working out strategy to creating and posting to analysing the impact. Alternatively, if you do have a team, then as the social media manager it will be your job to make sure they are all carrying out their tasks and pulling in the same direction.
2. Content Writer
Ever agonised for hours over what to write in the caption of one of your Instagram images? Then you’ll know how tricky it can be to craft the perfect social media text. Content writers spend their day getting the words just right – from the hook to the call to action. As a content writer you’ll be in charge of creating the text to fit each post.
3. Visual Content Creator
Video-heavy channels like TikTok and Instagram Reels and Stories, are all the rage in social media currently. And as a result visual content creators are in demand. If you choose this career you’ll need to be a whizz at cutting together enticing visuals, along with voiceovers or suitable music. And, of course, you might need some persuasion skills for when you need to get the boss to join in the latest TikTok dance trend!
4. Community Manager
Part of social media is attracting new people to your audience and projecting the right image. But the other side is nurturing the community you’ve already got. That’s where a community manager comes in. A community manager engages with users to give them a positive experience and make them feel like the brand likes them as much as they like it. In this role, you’ll likely spend a lot of time in groups or forums, sparking conversations and responding to comments.
5. Paid Ads Manager
Paid ads work alongside organic social media marketing to increase reach. They need special attention when it comes to crafting the hook and determining the target audience. Someone who is a paid ads manager specialises in this work to ensure that ads bring in a good return for the investment in clicks.
6. Analyst
It’s never a good idea to just randomly post on social media without having a strategy. And you can’t have a strategy without having someone who crunches the numbers. An analyst is the person who does that. They get excited about traffic numbers and audience data and help the social media manager make sense of it all.
7. Influencer
Do you love particular brands or products? Are you the person your friends always ask when they need a recommendation? Do you have a knack of persuading other people that they might like that brand or product too? If you do, then use your social media prowess to become an influencer. Most people associated influencers with celebrities, but recently there has been a rise in micro-influencers. They are people who normally post for a niche audience and they have a smaller but very loyal and engaged following
Developing the skills to work in social media
Simply enjoying social media is helpful and running your own channels is a good start. But if you really want a job that pays you to be on social media and make a career out of it, then you need some hard skills too.
At NZIE, we can help you gain those skills and set you up for a real-world job. Enrol in one of our short courses to develop specific skills in just a few short weeks. Or study our Diploma in Social Media Marketing and get all the skills you need to level up your social media career!
Our NZQA-accredited courses are taught online, in the evenings by experienced tutors, and feature a mixture of live classes and easy to follow videos and give you the opportunity to develop your skills working on your own projects!
