Below is a social media manager job description you can paste into a job board and edit. Everything in square brackets is meant to be replaced. Under it is the part most templates skip: which of the standard requirements are doing real work, and which are quietly shrinking your applicant pool for no benefit.
The template
Copy from here.
Social Media Manager
Location: [City, or Remote (country/timezone)] Type: [Full-time / Part-time / Contract] Reports to: [Head of Marketing] Salary range: [$X to $Y], depending on experience
About [Company]
[Two or three sentences. What the company does, who it sells to, and how big the team is. Candidates screen out on this paragraph, so be specific rather than aspirational.]
About the role
You will own [Company]‘s presence on [list the channels: for example Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube]. That means the content calendar, the posts themselves, the community, and the monthly reporting on how it is all performing.
This role [does / does not] include paid social budget. [If it does: you will manage a monthly budget of approximately $X.]
What you will do
- Own the content calendar across [N] channels, planned [one month] ahead
- Write and edit copy for every post, adapted per platform rather than duplicated
- Produce or brief creative: [short-form video / static graphics / photography]
- Publish and schedule everything, and keep the queue full
- Manage the community: comments, DMs, mentions and reviews, with a response target of [24 hours on weekdays]
- Report monthly on [reach, engagement rate, follower growth, referral traffic, leads], with commentary on what changed and why
- Work with [design / product / sales / the founders] to turn what is happening in the business into content
- Keep an eye on what competitors and the wider category are doing, and flag what matters
- [If applicable] Plan and run paid social campaigns, and report on spend against [target metric]
What we are looking for
- [2+] years running social channels for a business, in-house or at an agency
- Genuinely strong writing. You will be asked for samples
- Comfortable editing short-form vertical video end to end
- Able to read platform analytics and explain a result, not just export a number
- Organised enough to run a calendar without being chased
- [If applicable] Hands-on experience with [Meta Ads Manager / LinkedIn Campaign Manager]
Nice to have
- Experience in [our industry]
- Basic design skills in [Canva / Figma / Adobe]
- Familiarity with a scheduling platform such as [tool], or a comparable one
- Community or customer-support experience
How we will assess this
[Describe the process honestly. For example: a 30-minute intro call, a paid 90-minute exercise where you plan a week of content for one of our channels, and a final conversation with the team. We will not ask for unpaid speculative campaign work.]
Benefits
- [Salary range, restated]
- [Holiday, pension, health, budget for tools and courses]
Copy to here.
What to change before you post it
Three edits make more difference than the rest of the wording combined.
Name the channels and the number of them. “Manage our social media” attracts everybody and tells nobody what the workload is. “Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, roughly five posts a week” gets you candidates who know whether they can do it.
Say whether paid budget is in scope, in the first paragraph. This is the biggest determinant of both the salary band and the type of candidate. Roles with budget authority sit at the top of every published range: the sources are compared in the social media manager salary guide. Burying it in a bullet halfway down means you will interview the wrong people.
Publish the range. Several US states now require it, and beyond compliance it is the cheapest filter you have. A listing without a number gets more applicants and fewer relevant ones.
Requirements that are usually unnecessary
These appear in most templates. Each one shrinks your pool. Ask whether it is earning that cost.
| Common requirement | Verdict |
|---|---|
| “Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Communications or related field” | Almost always unnecessary. It correlates with nothing in this role and removes strong self-taught candidates. Delete it, or write “or equivalent practical experience” and mean it |
| “5+ years experience” for a mid-level role | Inflated years-of-experience bars are the most common reason a listing sits unfilled. Two to three years of the right scope beats five of the wrong one |
| A long list of named tools | Tools take a week to learn. Naming eight of them filters on coincidence. Name the category, not the vendor |
| “Passionate about social media” | Says nothing, screens nothing, and reads as a warning about the culture |
| “Must be available for occasional evening and weekend posting” | Fair to state if true, but if it is true, say what the compensation for it is. Otherwise it reads as unpaid on-call |
| “Ninja / rockstar / guru” | Reduces applications, particularly from senior candidates |
| Photoshop as a hard requirement | Most social work now happens in Canva, Figma or a phone editor. Requiring Photoshop filters for a skill you probably do not need |
The one requirement worth being strict about is writing. It is the hardest to teach, it is the most visible in the output, and it is the thing that separates two otherwise identical portfolios.
Which titles to use
Get the title right and the salary band, the applicant pool and the expectations all fall into place.
| If the role is | Use |
|---|---|
| Scheduling, community, reporting inputs, no strategy ownership | Social Media Coordinator |
| Owns the calendar and the channels, organic only | Social Media Manager |
| Owns strategy and paid, briefs others, may have reports | Senior Social Media Manager |
| Manages people and owns a business metric | Head of Social |
| Mostly making video and graphics | Social Content Creator |
Advertising a coordinator’s scope as a manager role and then paying coordinator money is the most common own goal in this hiring process. Candidates work it out in the first interview.
An honest note on workload
One person covering more than four channels with meaningful posting volume, plus community management, plus reporting, is over capacity. It is done constantly, and it is why turnover in this role is high. If your listing implies six channels for one person, either budget for tooling and a freelancer, or cut a channel.
If you are the one being asked to absorb that, the social media time cost calculator turns the hours into a number you can take to a manager, which is more persuasive than describing the feeling.
The short version
- Name the channels, the volume, and whether paid budget is included
- Publish the salary range
- Delete the degree requirement and the tool list
- Be strict about writing, relaxed about everything else
- Match the title to the actual scope, or your best candidates will leave in year one
The publishing part of the role
Whoever takes the job will spend a real share of their week on the mechanical part: getting the same idea out to several networks with the right length, format and media for each. That is the part worth tooling, because it is the part that scales badly with headcount.
BulkPublish covers it for 15 platforms from one composer, with per-platform editing before anything publishes and approvals if the post needs a sign-off before it goes live. It is one option among several: the wider category is compared in the social media manager tools roundup.