The 5 Fastest Growing Social Media Skills on LinkedIn

If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you might have noticed that you can add keywords that describe your skills and expertise to your profile. It’s a great way to help prospective employers find your name in the search results, especially when your job title doesn’t fully capture your essence. Here are some of the social media-related skills that have taken off in the last year:

1. Social Media Monitoring – 52% growth year-over-year

Primary Industry: Public Relations and Communications
“A media monitoring service provides clients with documentation, analysis, or copies of media content of interest to the clients. Services tend to specialize by media type or content type. For example, some services monitor news and public affairs content while others monitor advertising, sports sponsorships, product placement, video or audio news releases, use of copyrighted video or audio, infomercials, “watermarked” video/audio, and even billboards.”

This is the 25th fastest growing skill on LinkedIn. Of the 11,000 professionals who claim social media monitoring as one of their selling points, 58 percent of them are between the ages of 25 and 34, while 20 percent are between 18 and 24.
2. Social Media – 47% growth year-over-year

Primary Industry: Marketing and Advertising
“Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.”

This general term is the 86th most popular skill on LinkedIn and also the 49th fastest growing.  There are 751,000 people who count social media as an area of expertise. The age ranges are a little more varied for this category, with 20 percent of them being between 35 and 44, which is slightly less than the 23 percent of social media professionals who are between 18 and 25.  The largest group was still the 25 to 34-year-old crowd, at 47 percent.
3. Online Community Management – 44% growth year-over-year

Primary Industry: Computer Games
“The online community manager role is a growing and developing profession. People in this position are working to build, grow and manage communities around a brand or cause. While the term “online community manager” may not have been used at the time, the role has existing since online systems first began offering features and functions that allowed for community creation.”

This is the 63rd fastest growing skill on LinkedIn. There are 3,000 professionals who have added online community management to their lists of skills. The 25 to 34-year-old age range still dominated the group at 59 percent, with 35 to 44-year-olds training behind at 22 percent.
4. Community Management – 44% growth year-over-year

Primary Industry: Computer Games
“Community management is the functional control of systems by communities or their representatives. It can and often does, but does not have to, include elements of community ownership, and involvement in day-to-day operation and maintenance. It is particularly reliant on clarity of ownership of schemes.”

Some skills sound so similar to one another that it’s good to read the description first for before you add it to your profile to see which one is the best fit. This is the 76th fastest growing skill on LinkedIn. There are currently 21,000 professionals who list community management as one of their skills, with 64 percent of them being between the ages of 25 and 34. Some congratulations are in order for the 1 percent who are between 55 and 64.

5. Social Media Marketing – 42% growth year-over-year

Primary Industry: Marketing and Advertising
“Social media marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.”

This is the 71st fastest growing skill on LinkedIn. There are 259,000 professionals who have this skill in their arsenals and once again, half of them are between the ages of 25 and 34.
The “skills and expertise” option is great for social media professionals because they don’t all work at Facebook and Twitter.   And not all 751,000 people who are claim to be experts in social media are going to be right for any one position. there are a number of other keywords, like “social media development,” “social networking,” and “social outreach” that also made the list, but don’t have descriptions yet. Make sure that employers can drill down to what it is that you actually do – and be sure to have evidence to back it up.
Image by Elnur via Shutterstock.