What is a social media marketer?
A social media marketer is responsible for managing a business’s presence on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and X. The role covers content creation, campaign planning, paid and organic promotions, audience engagement, and performance tracking. They also monitor conversations around the brand and use analytics to see how social media activity contributes to brand awareness, website traffic, enquiries, and sales.
21.0 million active social media identities in October 2025.
In Australia.
Equal to 77.7% of the population, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report.
Other readings of the same data show an average time on social media of 19 hours and 28 minutes a week for Australians.
Who writes those posts and reads the numbers afterwards?
The professional is called a social media marketer or social media manager.
What does the role entail?
What does the job involve day-to-day?
Let’s uncover the duties, strategies, measurement, and other skills of this highly sought-after specialist in Australia.
In This Blog:
- ➤What is a social media marketer (what is a social marketer)?
- ➤What Does a Social Media Marketer Do?
- ➤Social Media is a “Discovery” Channel As Well
- ➤What Are the Responsibilities of a Social Media Manager?
- ➤What Skills Does a Social Media Marketer Need?
- ➤Which Social Media Platforms Do Australians Use?
- ➤What Are Some Social Media Marketing Strategies for Brand Recognition and Engagement?
- ➤How to Measure Social Media ROI
- ➤What Community Management Involves in Social Media
- ➤What Does It Cost to Hire a Social Media Marketer in Australia?
- ➤What to Look For in a Social Media Marketer
- ➤Before You Write the Job Ad
What Does a Social Media Marketer Do?
A social media marketer is a specialist who runs a brand’s activity on platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and X and measures what that activity earns. Their daily, regular list of responsibilities includes covering brand voice, tailoring the content calendar to said brand voice and business goals on socials, paid and organic campaigns, and reports that tie posts to business results.
The 21 million number from earlier? The audience is large; no shocker there. Mostly adult. The count has 18.5 million Australians aged 18 and over as social media users at the end of 2025, equal to 87.0% of adults. 80.0% of Australian internet users were on at least one platform.
Australia’s total advertising spend reached US$20.7 billion in the same year.
Digital accounted for 74%, according to another report.
Social Media is a “Discovery” Channel As Well
Socials aren’t a bottom-of-the-funnel buying channel. Not only. Meltwater Australia data tells us this about SMM – social media marketing:
Did You Know?
31.3% of Australians said they discover brands through social media ads, just a little behind Search at 37.7%.
Sprout Social’s 2025 Index for Australia found that 38.5% of social users make spontaneous purchases from social content a few times a year. 28% do so every month.
The Q3 2026 Pulse Survey, also from Sprout, adds that social media tied with retail stores is the top source for holiday gift ideas at 46%, and 57% of respondents said they would buy inside a social app this season.
38% are repeat buyers. 19% – for the first time.
That’s your market. Or, if we can be less vague about it, your market is right there, and a social media manager can help bring what you offer into the growing fold of brand recognition and, as provocative as it sounds, direct purchases through social platforms.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Social Media Manager?
At the core of what they do are:
- Campaigns: Written for one platform at a time, since an Instagram Reel and a LinkedIn text post follow different conventions.
- Posts: These are strategically scheduled and published through dedicated software, timed to the hours when the audience is online.
- Mentions and comments: Social media marketers keep a constant watch through the day; complaints are answered as quickly as they’re received (the ideal scenario).
- Regular meetings with sales and customer service: So that what the brand says on social matches what customers hear elsewhere.
- Planning and reporting: They write the report at the end of every campaign, and devise a changed plan as numbers direct the next move.
What Skills Does a Social Media Marketer Need?
1. Creating content for each platform
Content creation starts with design and copywriting, and video editing has joined them. A polished infographic that earns shares on LinkedIn can vanish on TikTok, so each platform gets its own version of the idea.
Did You Know?
In the 2025 Sprout Social Index for Australia, consumers ranked originality of content second among the things that make a brand stand out, behind the quality of the product or service, with engagement with followers third.
Technical polish only goes so far without ideas of the marketer’s own. Brand voice development and creative direction, two skills Australian practitioners rated among the most useful in that Index, set how the captions sound and how the feed looks.
2. Reading the analytics
Every post has a job, such as getting seen or sending someone to the website. The dashboard shows whether it managed that, through reach and impressions in one case and click-through rate in the other, and the next round of content gets adjusted to match.
Social listening is the other half of the routine. It means tracking what people say about the brand and its competitors, and 62% of social marketers do it with dedicated tools, according to Hootsuite’s 2025 survey of 3,864 marketers.
Those who listen reported higher confidence in the ROI of every platform.
3. Managing the calendar and approvals
Waiting for design or waiting for the owner’s approval is a cascading waterfall of more waiting on the side of the social media expert. Hence, the importance of project management. By the way, it’s the fourth skill on the Australian practitioners’ list in Sprout Social’s 2025 Index.
4. Working with AI tools
In Sprout Social’s 2025 Index, 97% of marketing leaders said marketers need to know how to use AI in social media, and 93% of social practitioners believed it can ease creative fatigue by taking on monitoring and data analysis.
The same group’s 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report found that 40% of marketers already use AI social tools for performance reporting and analysis.
Automation is making work more efficient. As for voice, timing, and connection? Very much in the palm of the marketer’s hand.
4. Knowing trends
To skip or not to skip. 91% of social media users said social media is how they keep up with trends and cultural moments. The global edition of the same Index found that a third of consumers consider brands jumping on viral trends embarrassing.
So, trend awareness includes the judgement to sit out a meme that does not suit the brand, or to ride the tide of what’s relevant to your brand.
Direct Messaging and Private Networks
Australian practitioners named audiences moving to private networks as their top concern, and Sprout’s Q3 2026 Pulse Survey points the same way, with 55% of respondents naming direct messages as their preferred route for contacting a brand.
Rules change too. Australia’s social media minimum age law took effect on 10 December 2025, and by mid-December the eSafety Commissioner reported that platforms had removed or restricted about 4.7 million accounts held by under-16s. Any social media campaign has to be planned around that.
Which Social Media Platforms Do Australians Use?
The table shows the six that most businesses weigh first regarding social marketing platforms.
Social Media Usage in Australia by Platform and Demographics
Reddit’s advertising audience is listed at 23.3 million and YouTube’s at 21.0 million, both larger than anything in the table, though there are unusually large swings in Reddit’s figure.
Advertising reach is NOT the same as monthly active users.
LinkedIn’s figure counts registered members.
The gender splits differ as well:
Instagram’s adult ad audience in Australia is 54.8% female and TikTok’s is 53.6% male. Pinterest’s Australian audience of 5.68 million is 72.3% female.
Before opening accounts everywhere, a marketer checks the table against where the business’s own customers spend their time.
What Are Some Social Media Marketing Strategies for Brand Recognition and Engagement?
The first encounter, the first look, call it what you will – followers should be able to identify a post before they scroll or click to read the account name. This can be achieved through being consistent with the same voice, colour palette, typeface, and values on every platform.
Authenticity and reliability are among the traits consumers value most in brand content, so the voice also has to sound like a person wrote it.
Even in the age of AI?
Much more so in the age of AI, and we cannot overstate how much genuine human voice separates a brand from sameness.
Now, something interesting from HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing survey says:
Did You Know?
Of more than 1,500 marketers, 48.6% named short-form video as the format with the highest return on investment, ahead of long-form video at 29%.
The opening seconds do the most work on short-form platforms. This has always been the case pre-AI. It seems a lot of what’s deemed today as “traditional” or “old school” marketing is evidence that even with evolving technologies, the fundamentals of good marketing haven’t gone anywhere:
People still respond to a strong hook, a story worth following, and a message that gives them a reason to care. The tools change; human attention remains a much harder thing to earn.
Also, followers reply when there is something easy to reply to:
- Polls that take one tap to answer
- Questions that invite an opinion
- Live Q&A sessions with someone from the business
- Replies to every comment that deserves one
Try building these tactics into the content calendar.
How to Measure Social Media ROI
HubSpot’s State of Marketing research, as cited by Hootsuite, ranked measuring ROI as marketers’ single biggest challenge in 2026. Hootsuite’s Social Trends 2024 report found that 68% of marketers worry about proving it from social.
Hootsuite treats two ideas separately. ROI is the financial return compared with spend. Social media value is the full effect on the business, which includes customer insight as well as revenue.
The calculation is short:
ROI (%) = (revenue from social − cost of social) ÷ cost of social × 100
Cost includes the ad budget and the marketer’s pay. Revenue has to be traceable to count, and two methods handle that:
- UTM tags on each link let analytics software credit a sale or enquiry to the post that started it.
- Promo codes work as a tracker too, since each redemption can be matched to the post or creator that carried the code.
The metrics depend on the goal.
Engagement alone tells a marketer little about results. Kantar’s Creator Game Plan report analysed more than 15,000 branded creator assets across short video platforms and found that only 6% delivered both strong engagement and meaningful brand building.
Analytics tools
Native insights from Meta Business Suite and LinkedIn Analytics cost nothing and cover each platform’s own accounts. Third-party software such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite pulls the platforms into one report and adds competitor comparisons and deeper audience breakdowns.
What Community Management Involves in Social Media
Community management starts with customer service and extends to building a space where followers talk to each other as well as to the brand. The marketer kicks off discussions and settles disputes, and regular defenders of the brand get thanked by name.
Sprout Social’s 2025 Index found that 74% of consumers expect a response within 24 hours. Its Q3 2026 Pulse Survey found that 86% plan to use social media for customer service this holiday season as much as last year or more. The channels they are most likely to use to contact a brand:
- TikTok at 50%
- Facebook at 46%
- Instagram at 44%
- Bluesky at 36%
Moderation covers more than deleting spam, since 93% of Australian consumers in the 2025 Index said brands should do more to combat misinformation online.
Influencer Marketing in Australia
Four figures frame the channel:
- Spend: Australian brands put A 1 billion in 2026, according to Mumbrella’s reporting on the Meltwater and We Are Social Digital 2026 report.
- Discovery: 61% of Australians discover brands through creators, rising to 85% among those under 40, per IAB Australia research released in September 2026.
- Purchase intent: promo codes shared by a brand or an influencer were the biggest driver of holiday purchase intent at 30%, ahead of targeted social ads at 18%, in Sprout’s Q3 2026 Pulse Survey.
- Creator side: half of the 265 Australian creators in Social Soup’s March 2026 survey have walked away from deals that felt inauthentic, and their top frustration was brands underestimating the time and creative skill that good content takes.
The marketer picks creators whose audiences match the customer base and writes a brief that leaves them room to sound like themselves.
Extra Read: Six Things to Look for When Hiring a Social Media Manager.
What Does It Cost to Hire a Social Media Marketer in Australia?
Indeed lists this work under social media manager, the closest published title, and its average rests on 110 reported salaries. The table sets out the main routes:
Perth tops Indeed’s list of highest paying cities at A$92,804, with Melbourne at A$87,202.
Payscale reports mid-career social media managers at an average base of A$72,926, with the bottom earning about A$53,000 and the top tenth A$103,000.
Employers add superannuation at 12% on top of base pay.
Related Read: Compare rates with a full breakdown in Social Media Manager Salary Australia.
What to Look For in a Social Media Marketer
- A portfolio that ties campaigns to enquiries and sales as well as likes, with the figures attached.
- Experience on the platforms where the business’s customers spend their time, which the platform table earlier in this guide helps narrow down.
- A sample monthly report showing how the candidate tracks and explains performance, including what changed after a weak month.
- Writing samples in a voice close to the brand’s, since every caption and reply goes out under the business’s name.
The marketer also needs access to the accounts and a clear approval path from the owner, so a post is never waiting a week for a yes.
Work with managed providers like Remote Staff; our team has been pairing Australian businesses with their ideal social media managers for over 18 years.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Marketers
What does a social media marketer do?
A social media marketer plans campaigns, writes and schedules posts, answers comments and reports on the results. Paid and organic work both fall under the role, and the reports link activity to enquiries and sales.
What is the difference between a social media marketer and a social media manager?
No fixed rule separates them. Employers advertise both titles for overlapping work, and Coursera notes that “marketer” turns up more often for freelance specialists.
How much does a social media marketer earn in Australia?
About A$80,000 a year in base pay, going by Indeed’s Australian figures for social media managers, the closest published title. Senior roles average A$87,601, and Payscale puts mid-career pay at A$72,926. Superannuation at 12% comes on top.
How do you become a social media marketer in Australia?
Two nationally recognised qualifications cover the formal route: the Certificate IV in Marketing and Communication (BSB40820) and the Diploma of Social Media Marketing (10904NAT). Experience carries weight alongside study, and running accounts for a club or a small business builds a portfolio of real figures. Payscale lists early career social media content managers at A$56,708 on average, rising to A$72,208 at mid-career.
Do small businesses need a social media marketer?
Yes, once customers use social media to find or judge the business. DataReportal counts 87.0% of Australian adults as social media users, and Meltwater’s data shows 31.3% of Australians discovering brands through social media ads. An employee or an agency can fill the role, and DNHQ’s June 2026 audit put agency retainers at A$1,219 a month on average.
Extra Read: A quick read on Five Ways Social Media Can Impact Your Business.
Social Media Won’t Wait
Choosing one outcome for the next quarter makes the job ad much easier to write. Budget is the other early decision.
An enquiries goal calls for a candidate who writes well and sets up tracking in the first week. Community instincts and quick replies count for more when the aim is a livelier comment section.
Either way, and regardless of role scope, you need this specialist now. You don’t have to answer “how to do social marketing” yourself.
Whether it’s social media marketing Brisbane, social media marketing Perth, or anywhere else your business is in Australia, work with your ideal social media marketer. Let’s find the right one for your brand – Request a Callback today.
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Vaune Everis Cura has always been a writer in the truest sense, drawn to the art both as a personal creative pursuit and as a profession. Her experience penning content across digital marketing spaces and collaborating with business owners and market shapers has broadened her craft to include strategic direction and SEO insight. Having spent years with the InterContinental Hotels Group before stepping boldly into freelancing, she understands that at the centre of it all are genuine, meaningful brand–customer relationships built on purposeful, human content.
