Am I Too Old To Become a Social Media Manager?
When I’m working with my clients, I always tell them, when one of your clients asked question, write it down all of their questions make great blog posts or great video topics. It’s really funny that sometimes we don’t heed our own advice.
Over the past 60 days, I’ve had three individual people asked me, am I too old to be a social media manager? I was very surprised by this question. And I didn’t really think much of it at first. But once I got the question three times in three at first. totally different ways. I thought, Hey, this is a video I need to do.
The first person was a virtual assistant. And her comment was, you know, in my 50s, do you think my clients will be comfortable if I offer social media marketing for them? And I said, why would they not? They’re already happy with the other services. And if you know, you can get results. Why would you not offer that service? And it was the perception that social media is all about younger people, you know, they grew up with it. They’re great with it. So maybe the business Wouldn’t want to hire me to do their social media marketing?
So the next person asked me a very similar question, which was, I’ve been in marketing for years, and I’m thinking about doing social media marketing. Do you think clients would hire someone my age? Again, that question came about a second time. And I was quite surprised.
The third time was just a very simple dismissal of, I’m too old to go into social media marketing. Even though I have the skill set, I have a passion for it. I don’t think anyone’s going to hire me, because I’m almost 60. All I have to say to that is BS. You are not too old to go into social media
marketing, if you can get results for your client. Remember, they don’t care about your age, they just want to know if you can get results.
So that’s the end of the video. No, not really.
We’re going to talk about some of the other things where you have an advantage because of your age when it comes to marketing and working with business owners.
And make sure to stay till the end of this video because I’m going to talk about a branding toolkit that you might find very useful. Hey, if you’re new to this channel, please hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so you get notified each week when we post new videos.
Hi, my name is Kirsten, along with my business partner Jeannie Wilson we own six figure business coaching. We work with virtual assistants, social media marketers and freelancers to help them build their businesses to a six figure income.
So let’s go ahead and jump into this topic of Am I too old to be a social media manager. I’m gonna break this down into four different sections. And the first section is social media.
Now I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mari Smith, but Mari Smith is like the queen of Facebook. Everyone turns to her to find out what changes Facebook is making. They want to find out what’s working and what’s not working with Facebook. She is again like the queen of Facebook.
Mari Smith was born in 1966, which means she’s either 53 or 54. At the time this video is being recorded. So obviously she’s not a 20 or 30 year old and yet she is the most famous person when you think about Facebook and Facebook marketing. So that should tell you right
During that age doesn’t necessarily matter. What’s important with social media is the simple fact that you are competent with the platform. So whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, as long as you’re comfortable with the platform, you understand how to post on it.
You understand how the platform works, you understand how to build a following, you know, the importance of communicating with an audience. If you do those things, it really doesn’t matter how old you are.
Now, obviously, people who are younger than us grew up with social media. So they may be a lot faster, and they may just instinctively know it better than us. But it doesn’t mean you can’t learn it, right. So if you’re really passionate about social media, you can learn how to use a platform. And the bottom line is in order to build a successful business, you do not have to be on every platform.
You can focus on clients that are just using Facebook or Instagram, or just clients that are using YouTube. Yes, you can offer multiple services, but you do not have to in the comments below. Let me know do you feel more powerful But it was social media platforms? Or do you feel more confident with marketing? Which skill Do you feel like you have already mastered?
The second part of being a social media manager is knowing how to market right.
So just because you’re very competent and proficient in a social media platform does not mean you’re an expert at marketing. So if you understand marketing, you understand call to actions, you understand how to build an audience, you understand how to get engagement, you understand how to work with a business owner, to strategically plan their marketing campaigns, through social media, that is one of the most important parts of the job.
So if you have experience in that area, I think that’s almost more important than understand how to use the platform.
Learning to use a platform is easier, and it changes often. So we’re always relearning how to use a platform. But when it comes to marketing, that’s something you really want to understand and build your knowledge in. And again, marketing like social media is always evolving and changing so it is something you’re constantly staying on top of You know, economies go up and economies go down markets change, and marketing changes along with those.
So again, if you love marketing, you’re interested in learning about marketing or you already have a marketing background. That’s the second thing that is really important when it comes to social media management.
The third thing is really important is sales.
The bottom line is it doesn’t matter what service or product you offer, you have to be able to sell that product. And one of the things that I often say to clients is everyone’s a salesperson. If you’re a parent, and you had your kids eat vegetables, you had to sell them on the idea of eating vegetables, you had to sell them on the idea of going to bed at bedtime.
We’re always selling in one way or another. Sales again, like social media and like marketing is a skill that you can learn. There are a lot of amazing books out there on how to sell. I feel like sales is something that is beneficial for everyone to learn, because it’s something that you can use in so many different ways.
Now, if you have experience in sales, and you do not have a lot of experience in social media marketing I think you’re okay. You can learn those other skills and then build your business based on your selling ability. You have to get out and sell your services.
I know some people who are absolutely amazing and social media and marketing, but they’re terrible at sales, they don’t have the confidence to get out and talk to business owners. They feel threatened by the business owners. They feel like maybe they’re not worthy of getting their business because you know, they’re young or they’re old, or they haven’t done this before.
Sales requires competence. Sales requires putting yourself out there, sales requires getting the know and not letting it destroy you. You’re not going to get every client and that is okay.
A couple of things that I feel like are very important to being a good salesperson, first of all, is listening.
If you have great listening skills, and you ask a lot of questions, clients really appreciate that and they really connect with you because they want to make sure that they can communicate with you what their brand does, how they do it, who their ideal client is, and they want to make sure that they can work collaboratively with You to get their brand message out.
So listening is a fantastic skill. And I feel like that’s something we learn over time, right? I feel like the older I get, the better I get at listening.
I think the other thing that comes with age sometimes is again, like I said, confidence, just feeling comfortable selling yourself. Because initially when you start talking to a new business owner, you’re kind of selling yourself, you have to get them to believe you and to trust you and to want to take a chance to do business with you.
I love the same they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that’s all a part of good communication, and sales is all about good communication.
And the fourth part is being a business owner.
It’s so important that you see yourself as a business owner. It makes it so much easier to communicate with other business owners.
When you are running your business like a business. I don’t care if you’re doing this as a side hustle or you’re a full time freelancer, social media marketer or virtual assistant. You need to treat yourself and your business like a business.
Do your bookkeeping, send out proper invoices, use contracts, make sure that you’re doing everything with your social media and your marketing to make your brand look spot on. That’s all part of being a business owner.
And when you see yourself as a business owner, and you’re doing all of the proper things in the background, you’re running your business professionally, it’s going to make it so much easier for you to have the confidence to interact with other business owners. It’s going to make it easier for you to ask for the business. It’s going to make it easier for you to communicate with them the importance of marketing, it’s going to make it easier for you to charge what you’re worth. And this is so important, because we want you to make a profit, a very good profit. And that’s part of being a business owner.
I always joke that profit is not a dirty word. And you want to make sure you are pricing your services so that you’re profitable, and you have the ability to serve more clients.
As you can see with social media management. There’s way more than just social media involved. And I think this is a very important reason why Women of any age can build very successful businesses as social media managers.
So please, please do not let your age get in the way of you helping clients if you have the ability
and the passion and the commitment to bring your skills to learn new skills, and to always focus on helping others grow their business, you to grow your business.
So I hope I’ve answered the question that no, you’re not too old to become a social media manager, no matter what your age.
At the beginning of the video, I talked about an awesome tool that we have, which is our marketing toolkit, and there will be a link for it below in the description. If you want to learn more about how to use Canva to create logos and create branding across all platforms. It is a great little mini course and you should check it out.
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