# An exploratory study of skill requirements for social media positions: A content analysis of job advertisements

**Authors:** Amit Verma, Phillip Frank, Kamal Lamsal  
**arXiv:** [2106.11040](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11040)  
**Date:** 2021-05-30  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2106.11040v1/

## Key points

- Skills required for entry-level marketing positions (SMMgr and SMMkt)
- Data collected from job postings on Indeed.com
- Occupational digital marketing skills most desired for both positions
- Other relevant skill categories: communication, employee attributes, problem-solving, information technology skills
- Implications for designing marketing education curricula
- Classification framework used to quantify required skills
- Similarities and differences between SMMgr and SMMkt positions examined
- Methodology involved web scraping tool using Python and Indeed API
- Statistical analysis conducted on extracted job descriptions
- Valuable insights into skills needed for entry-level social media marketing positions

## Summary

The current study aimed to investigate the skills required for entry-level marketing positions, specifically the roles of Social Media Manager (SMMgr) and Social Media Marketer (SMMkt). To gather data, job postings for SMMgr and SMMkt were extracted from Indeed.com using a web crawler. A total of 766 entry-level jobs for SMMgr and 654 entry-level jobs for SMMkt were collected across the United States. Independent raters analyzed the data by identifying keywords and categorizing them into skill categories. The findings revealed that occupational digital marketing skills were the most desired for both SMMgr and SMMkt positions. Other relevant skill categories included communication, employee attributes, problem-solving, and information technology skills. This study contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the desired skills prevalent in the social media industry. The findings also have implications for designing marketing education curricula, as they identify core skills that can be integrated into marketing courses. The study utilized a classification framework to quantify the required skills for each job posting. This allowed for the creation of aggregate measures to determine the relative importance of each skill category for SMMgr and SMMkt positions. The similarities and differences between these two job titles were also examined. The methodology involved developing a web scraping tool using Python and the Indeed API to collect job postings. The tool extracted important information such as job title, location, company, posting date, and job summary from XML files generated by the API. Additionally, actual job postings were downloaded using URLs provided by the API to access detailed information not available in the job summary field. A parser was developed to extract relevant information from HTML files stored locally. The parser focused on extracting job descriptions since they contained crucial details about position type, salary, academic experience requirements, and required software tools. Stop words like articles and special symbols were removed during this process. Statistical analysis was then conducted on the extracted job descriptions to determine the frequency occurrence of each skill category for SMMgr and SMMkt positions. Keywords associated with each skill category were matched with those present in the job descriptions to identify required skills; these results were aggregated to count how many jobs required each skill category providing insights into their relative importance overall . This study provides valuable insights into what skills are needed for entry-level social media marketing positions which can inform marketing education curricula as well as help professionals understand what key competencies are necessary in order to succeed in this field .