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Social media management has evolved significantly over the past 15 years as brands and businesses become more active across social networks.
Social media was once a place solely for individuals to chat with each other and share stories. These days, it's a social network, with platforms where you can interact with a brand's target audience and expand a brand's influence.
Social media is part of the wider media sphere that includes TV, radio, and online publications. Brands need to be across all forms of media when creating effective marketing strategies.
This guide will take you through the stages of managing social media and offer tips on how to get it right.
See how consistency across all messaging aids social media management and streamlines processes, so you can save time and resources.
We'll also look at social media tools you can use to research and analyze audiences, so you can produce content that actually resonates.
Finally, we'll look at how to outsource social media management duties, and what you should be looking for if you plan to hire a social media manager.
It's important to understand why managing social media has become such an integral part of business communications, and the roles that social media managers oversee.
Effective social media management is essential for the following reasons:
A social media manager's primary responsibility is to plan, implement, and monitor their brand's social media strategy.
This is a lot of work, and many managers have teams of staff or a network of social media professionals to alleviate the workload.
Management tasks typically include:
A big aspect of social media management is overseeing your brand's strategy. You therefore need to set actionable goals and create a route to success.
It all starts with creating a social media strategy in collaboration with identifying your target audience.
Establishing a clear social media strategy involves setting realistic goals, determining the platforms that align with your target audience, and creating a content plan.
Your strategy should ultimately support your business objectives. It's not easy to do, but a tool like Brandwatch can help you create a winning strategy from scratch.
Start by outlining your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.
For example, a taco restaurant in Dallas may want to increase its brand awareness and boost customer engagement on social media, with the ultimate goal of generating more sales.
By using SMART goals, the restaurant can figure out an effective social media strategy.
Once you've nailed your SMART goals, it's time to create a content plan that caters to your audience's preferences and needs. This may include:
Always keep your goals in mind when planning content, and maintain a consistent brand voice across all platforms.
Once you've outlined your goals and have a content plan, it's time to figure out whom to target.
Understanding your target audience is a crucial component of any social media marketing strategy.
To do so, you'll need to use a tool like Brandwatch Audience to research and analyze demographics and psychographics, such as:
Once you've gathered data, you can create customer personas that paint a vivid picture of your ideal audience.
Then consider which platforms are most popular with your target audience and focus your efforts on those channels.
For example, our taco restaurant in Dallas might attract two types of customers: older people via Facebook and teenagers via TikTok.
One of the best social media management tips you'll ever hear is to focus on prioritizing the value of each platform.
There is no point in launching your brand on every social platform if you can't manage each one properly, or if your audience is only found on one social media channel.
For example, a beauty salon in downtown Atlantic City might thrive on social media usage from just one channel, like Instagram.
If this channel is delivering enough clients, then there's no need to waste time and resources on launching an X account.
Here's what to think about when choosing the right platforms for your social media management strategy:
Each social media platform has its advantages and unique audience demographics. To maximize your business's social media presence, you need to leverage different social media platforms effectively.
This can be done in the form of tailoring content, posting frequency, and engaging with users.
By understanding the characteristics of each platform, you can optimize your content and interactions to achieve better results.
Before launching on a social media platform, it's important to conduct audience research to determine where your target clients are most active.
After all, there's no value in launching an X profile if your entire audience is on Facebook.
You can use a tool like Brandwatch to run audience insights and generate the following:
A social media calendar can look empty quickly unless you stay on top of content creation.
As a social media manager, you might not be making the content yourself. However, you still need to understand and be knowledgeable about the content creation process.
Here are some social media content creation tips:
Start by weaving a social media content strategy into your overall strategy.
This will provide guidance on the type of content to create and ensure consistency across your channels.
You've already set your goals, outlined your target audience, and chosen your platforms. Your content strategy also needs to include:
Time is everything when it comes to social media management, and using scheduling and publishing tools is the easiest way to save time.
Some tools, such as Meta Business Suite and X Pro (formerly TweetDeck), are free to use but don't offer enough insights to benefit your strategy.
That's why a tool like Brandwatch Publish can help small to large organizations with scheduling posts on a mass scale.
Social media scheduling tools can greatly improve your efficiency in managing your online presence. Being able to schedule social media posts in advance means you can plan an effective and cohesive content calendar.
By automating the scheduling process, you'll save time and resources.
Of course, any tool still requires you to invest time in learning its features and capabilities. This knowledge will help you streamline your content planning and simplify the publishing process.
The biggest advantage of a social media scheduling tool is its ability to time posts at the perfect time. Tools like Brandwatch and Meta Business Suite use AI to help with this.
Things to consider when scheduling posts include:
It's not enough to simply post on social media and hope to generate an audience. Interaction with the community is just as crucial, which is why you need to manage social media holistically.
Here are some tips to consider:
Fostering audience interactions starts by knowing your audience.
Once you understand their preferences, you can tailor your content accordingly. You can do this by running social media analysis with a tool like Brandwatch.
After that, it's time to build a sense of community by getting your hands dirty and interacting with social media users. Some effective ways to do this include:
Managing your online community and fostering interaction requires a dedicated oversight of your brand mentions and user engagement.
There's no use chatting with users or launching a brand campaign if no one sees it or responds.
It's crucial that you monitor all audience interactions and work on your social media tactics to create meaningful relationships.
Consistently sharing user-generated content, for example, can encourage your followers to create more content for your brand, increasing your presence and reach.
One of the social media management tips that can prove invaluable to your overall strategy is to champion analytics and invest in good reporting tools.
This way, you can see the successes and failures of your work across social channels and show your findings to other stakeholders.
The process involves two key stages: monitoring and evaluating.
It's essential to monitor your social media analytics regularly to optimize your social media management.
These analytics provide valuable insights into your audience's preferences, engagement, and demographics.
Utilize reporting tools and get comprehensive analysis from Brandwatch, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite, and figure out what you're doing right and wrong.
Things to look for include:
You can then dig deeper into your analytics and look at things like:
You can regularly evaluate your brand's social media performance during the monitoring stage.
Use your KPIs as a benchmark and see how metrics are developing over time.
Are you generating leads on one channel but interacting with users more on other social media platforms? Where is the best place to allocate your resources, and what social media campaigns are working better than others?
You can create campaign performance reports in a social media management tool and share your findings with others.
Two quick wins when you're managing social media content are around automating workflows and collaborating with team members.
This's about saving time and staying on top of team workloads, whether that be creating a content calendar or running analysis.
Let's take a look at these two aspects in action:
Social media automation tools are necessary if you are to manage and implement a social strategy correctly. A platform like Brandwatch can help with:
Keep in mind that content personalization and engagement are key aspects of successful social media management. Be careful not to over-automate your accounts as you'll risk losing the human touch.
Collaborating on any social media campaign is a crucial management tip. It keeps everyone in the loop and ensures better communication across an organization.
Here are a few ways how you can manage this collaboration:
Additional collaboration tools such as Asana, Trello, and Slack can help streamline your team's workflow.
Today's social media management involves staying up to date with the advertising industry.
Your strategy might primarily focus on organic content, but paid ads could be the solution to revamping your social media profiles.
To get the most out of your social media ads, it's essential to create targeted advertisements. Use analytics tools like Brandwatch to determine where to focus your ads.
Here are some tips on achieving that:
Social media platforms like to deliver fast content that keeps users scrolling. As a content manager, you'll need to match the pace of each platform and stay on top of the latest trends.
Fail to do this and your brand can swiftly appear obsolete or out of touch.
Here are some tips on social media management to keep you updated with the latest trends:
A social media management tool not only helps you launch a strategy but also guides you through the evaluation process.
This means you can adjust your course as you go and ensure your social media content calendar accurately points towards your end goals.
To do this, you'll need to run a social media audit.
Here are the steps to take when creating an effective, useful social media audit:
These five steps are the starting point of an audit that may take time to fully create.
One additional tip for those tasked with social media management is to use a platform like Brandwatch to help you complete all aspects of said audit.
As a social media manager, you may be responsible for handling multiple social media accounts across various platforms.
This can quickly become overwhelming and confusing, especially if there is little overlap between platforms (such as TikTok and LinkedIn).
To make your job easier, it's essential to have a strategy in place to manage these diverse accounts efficiently. It all begins with pulling everything into one place.
The first step in managing multiple social media accounts is to centralize your activity using social media management tools.
Many of these tools allow you to connect and organize your brand's social media accounts in one place, making it easy to access, track, and engage with your audience across multiple platforms.
Some popular tools include:
The above social media management tools are designed to help centralize your entire social media output. That means you can create and publish posts on one dashboard, connect fellow team members for smoother workflows, and generate reports to share with stakeholders.
Gone are the days when you needed to log into Meta Business Suite to schedule Instagram and Facebook posts, Pro X to plan your X posting schedule, and LinkedIn to time your B2B content for 5pm on a Friday.
Now, you can do it all under one roof.
Building a strong, consistent social media presence is perhaps the No.1 goal of social media marketing.
Consistency not only helps your brand gain visibility but also makes it easier for you to connect with prospective customers.
Get it right, and you'll enjoy higher growth rates and more engagement with your posts.
We suggest you use these simple yet effective tips for optimizing growth and engagement:
Post regularly to keep your audience engaged but stay away from looking overly automated. Avoid, for example, scheduling posts bang on the hour, every hour. Users notice it after a while.
Instead, share valuable, informative, and entertaining content catered to your target audience's interests at various times. Use a variety of content formats, such as images, videos, and articles, to keep things interesting.
Hashtags used to be the No.1 route to attracting attention on social media, but very few users actually click on hashtags these days.
Instead, you can use hashtags to get your message across in a chatty way or jump on viral trends.
Research popular and relevant hashtags and incorporate them into your posts.
Remember, don't overdo it. Even two hashtags in a post can look needy on a platform like X.
Respond promptly to comments and messages from your followers. This can be hard if you are being criticized, but it's still better than remaining silent.
Engage in authentic conversations, address people's concerns, and answer questions.
This can help boost engagement and build trust between you and your audience. After all, you're not a faceless entity.
Keep track of your social media performance through various platform analytics. It might be click-through rates, views per post, or purchase rates.
This will help you understand which content resonates best with your audience.
Adjust your content strategy to focus more on the content that delivers higher engagement and ROI.
Here's a quick summary of the key takeaways to keep in mind:
Implementing the above tips will significantly improve your social media engagement, leading to steady growth and a stronger social presence. Remember, consistency is key – it’s an ongoing effort that will pay off in the long run.
Not everyone has the time, skills, or brain power to dedicate to social media management. Outsourcing is always an option and there are thousands of freelancers and agencies out there that can handle social media management fast.
Whether you're a chief marketing officer for a global corporation or a lone trader seeking to boost a brand's social presence, outsourcing has its benefits and challenges.
It's not an easy decision to trust your social media management to external help. Before you start looking for additional aid, it's important to identify your objectives for entering into this relationship.
Some services focus on content creation, while others excel in engagement or advertising. You might need someone to create a strategy that you then implement. Or perhaps you need a social media manager to conduct an audit and be honest about where you're failing.
So, define what you're looking for, be it:
No matter what you need, the process of contacting and sourcing external help is always the same. Lean on your contacts and see if there's anyone who could immediately fit the role you're looking to fill. If there isn't anyone, then look across the industry and use tools like LinkedIn to spot potential freelancers or agencies.
If you're still falling short, then you could post job ads on platforms like Cision, or use social media itself to advertise for external help.
Once you have a list of possible external contributors, it's time to compare the types of services they offer and find a match. Analyze their skills and prices, ensuring that they fall within your budget. Here's a simple framework you can use:
Consider experience and expertise in your niche. Look for reviews and testimonials to gauge how effectively they have managed campaigns for similar businesses.
Throughout this process, engage in an open dialogue with potential providers, and don't be afraid to ask relevant questions.
Eventually, you'll come to a point where you can accurately compare each candidate based on their skills and suitability for the role, as well as their price.
Aside from comparing service providers, remember to evaluate the return on investment for outsourcing.
Weigh the costs and benefits, looking at:
Consider these aspects, and you'll find the right company, agency, or individual to support your social media efforts and achieve your objectives with a confident and knowledgeable approach.
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