What is social media management?
Social media management is the process of analyzing social media audiences and developing a strategy that’s tailored to them, creating and distributing content for social media profiles, monitoring online conversations, collaborating with influencers, providing community service, and monitoring, measuring, and reporting on social media performance and ROI.
All these tasks, which were once marginalized by businesses, have now stepped into the limelight of companies’ marketing strategies.
Why? Because social media provides great money-making opportunities – on the condition you manage your social channels in an organized, efficient way.
Why is an efficient social media management process important?
The business potential of social networks is immense. Brands can leverage social media platforms to successfully drive their objectives across the marketing funnel, from raising brand awareness to increasing store visits.
But to be able to accomplish this, they need efficient social media teams. The more goals you want to achieve through social media marketing, the more people dedicated to this channel you are going to need. This demand will eventually lead to building complex social media team structures.
If you are a large brand, you might even have multiple teams in different offices and regions of the world, leveraging different strategies to meet different targets.
Now, how do you make sure all these people work together hand-in-hand to deliver maximum value from social media?
The answer is: to build an efficient social media management process.
Managing social media: where do I begin?
If you’re not sure how to begin optimizing the way you manage social – don’t worry. It’s something many marketers are confused about. To be able to start off on the right foot, you need to do three important things:
- Conduct a social media audit
- Decide on the right social media platforms
- Analyze your target audience
Why did we outline these three tasks in particular?
Because completing them will provide you with fundamental information that will steer your social media marketing efforts in the right direction. As a result, you will be able to concentrate your resources on strategies that work and cut down on those that don’t.
Let’s take a closer look at each task:
Conducting a social media audit
A social media audit can always improve how you manage social media:
- It will give you a granular picture of the effectiveness of your strategy
- It will allow you to pinpoint where you’re wasting your resources
- It will show which social channels are bringing in the most results
- It will demonstrate the impact of social media on your web results
So, how do you go about performing your social media health check?
Step 1: List all of your company’s social media profiles, including those from different regions and belonging to your different sub-brands.
Step 2: Use social media analytics to review your key performance metrics, such as follower growth, engagement (including the average engagement rates for particular months), publishing frequency, most engaging content formats, top-performing posts, traffic sources, community sentiment, question response rate, average response time, audience interests, demographics, and behaviors.
Step 3: Put all that information into a neat social media audit template.
Step 4: Analyze the data and identify areas that could use improvement. For example, if you see a dip in your engagement volume, it might be a result of low content quality, inaccurate targeting, or wrong publishing frequency.
That’s exactly the type of information you need to single out shortcomings in your strategy. From there, you can take the first steps towards fixing them and making your social media management activities more efficient.
Decide on the right social media platforms
Another critical element of managing social media more efficiently is picking the right platform.
After you conduct a social media audit, it might turn out that some platforms simply don’t work well for your brand. In that case, you should take the time to understand the effort it will take to get the results you need.
A lot also depends on where your audience is. If during your research, you find out your audience is mostly on Twitter, for example, but your presence on the platform is far from strong, then you should obviously seek to improve.
If your results aren’t that great and your audience is somewhere else, you might consider shifting your resources to a different channel. But before you do, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are my business objectives (improving brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, conversions, etc.)? Will I be able to meet my business objectives on the platform? How much will I have to spend to meet my goals?
- Will I be able to perform efficiently enough to generate positive ROI on the platform? Will the amount be enough to justify the cost of marketing on the platform?
- What are the demographics of the community on the platform and are they matching the demographics of the audience I’d like to reach?
- Is my target audience present and active on the platform? Will I be able to reach them effectively?
- How popular among marketers is the platform? How much content will I have to produce to stand out?
- Is my direct competition present on the platform? How are they doing? Will I be able to outperform them?
Analyze your target audience
Analyzing your social media community is everything when it comes to managing social media efficiently. There are plenty of benefits to analyzing your followers – including building stronger customer relationships, creating more relevant content, and boosting social media conversions.
On the flip side, if you don’t do market research beforehand, you’re at risk of getting on the wrong path, wasting both money and resources.
How do you build a detailed picture of your social media audience?
Start off by segmenting your audience into personas according to their shared characteristics – you can do that using this free customer persona template.
Or, if you want to make your life easier, you can let AI do the job for you. It’s likely that your customer personas will be diverse. For example, you can have a group of teens interested in sports and a group of 30-year-olds following Digiday’s Facebook page and interacting with their content.
Having this information will allow you to make better use of your resources by concentrating on doing what works best with your community. Need help analyzing your target audience on social media? Check out this audience insights report.
Stock up on the right social media management tools
Advanced social media management tools are essential to building, executing, and measuring your social media marketing strategy effectively.
Here’s what you’re going to need:
Top-to-middle-of-the-funnel tools
Analyzing your top- to mid-funnel audience is especially important. That’s because people at these stages, sometimes called an unknown audience, are your potential customers.
The better you know these users, the more effectively you’ll be able to nurture them towards conversion with tailored marketing campaigns.
So, which tools are going to come in handy at this point?
Native social media analytics. The audience data you can get from social media platforms is quite detailed and includes:
- Facebook audience insights: demographics, page likes, locations, activity
- Instagram insights: top locations, times, and days when your followers are most active
- Twitter analytics: demographics, lifestyle, consumer behavior, mobile footprint
- LinkedIn analytics: demographics, job function, seniority, industry, company size, employment status
Audience Analytics: These enable you to see your Facebook audience grouped into personas based on their demographics, interest, and behaviors. As a result, you can save the time you’d have to spend on manual audience research.
You’ll also be able to immediately turn the result of your audience analysis into action.
Bottom-of-the-funnel tools
Analyze the bottom of the funnel users, which are sometimes called a known audience, and use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to focus on every part of the customer experience (CX).
These will give you a better understanding of the people who purchased your products, including their demographics, the touchpoints on their customer journey, and content that eventually made them hit the buy button.
Content management tools
Content creation is an important part of the social media management process – but also a really challenging one. To make your content workflow faster and more organized, try these tools:
Content ideas tools
- Social media monitoring – discover trending topics online that you can tap into
- Social media analytics – see what your competitors are posting and get inspired by some of their most successful ideas
- Audience analysis – understand the content your audience responds to positively
- Content curation tools – find trending articles online that you can repost
- Content inspiration – discover thousands of top social media posts that will resonate with each of your audience personas
Our dedicated team is working around the clock to manage all your social media accounts and respond to your clients or find new customers for your business and brand.
We are not only managing your brand or business accounts we provide great customer service to your clients.