Social Media Managers are a weird species. If you take a look at the LinkedIn profile of any real Digital Marketer or Social Media Marketer, you’ll notice that their skills vary from Analytics, to Marketing and Promotions, to Client Relationships to severe alcoholism. And what’s even weirder – they’re actually endorsed for all of those things (especially the alcoholism).

It’s no secret that there are a vast array of skills you need to succeed in social media – and that every social media marketer and community manager is constantly working at enhacing those skills and picking up some more in the process. Makes you think we should really be getting paid more!

Looking at it from a broad perspective, the following skills are what are probably the most important “buckets” as such that community managers need to focus on:

• Interaction & People Skills
• Content Skills
• Project Management Skills
• Analytical Skills
• Crisis Management Skills
• Technical Skills
• Marketing & Promotional Skills
• Ethics

That probably covers all the aspects of community and social media management. An interesting infographic from GetSatisfaction I came across also talks about the various duties a community manager undertakes – pretty nifty I thought. 

But do you as a community manager know how good you are in each of these skills? Can you honestly say that yes, you’re good at Analytics, or no you’re not good at Project Management?

Circus Social has put together a fairly in-depth quiz, a 40 question multiple choice one that asseses you on these very categories. The quiz has a massive question bank out of which you get 40 questions at random that give you real life social media situations with three options that you can choose from. On completing the quiz, you get a breakdown of your score by each category – how well you did in Analytics, how well you did in Project Management, how well you did in Ethics etc. It gives you an interesting insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a social media manager and gives you the major pain points where you need to focus to become a better and well rounded social media and community manager.

On being graded against other social media managers – you can actually see whether you’re really lacking in a field where everyone is excelleing, or whether you’re lacking in a field in which the general expertise level of social media managers is pretty low.

Sure, you can always measure how well your community is doing or how well your Facebook page and Twitter account are doing when you track engagement and re-tweets – but could it be possible that the reason you’re not getting enough retweets or not getting enough engagement be because you’re lacking something in Project Management and need to rethink the way you execute a campaign?

Could it be that you’re lacking in Analytics – and therefore need to get better at tracking results and engagement to amplify certain parts of your content? Or could it just be that you’re lacking in Marketing and Promotions as a social media manager and need to rethink how the marketing works around your brand.

There are plenty of tools out there that let you evaluate your page performance and track mentions for your brand, but maybe it’s time that we take a look inside ourselves as social media managers and tried to find what part of our personality isn’t making our social media campaigns work.

Cross posted by permission Social Media Today