Social Media Management For Business
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of creating, scheduling, analysing, listening, and managing content across multiple social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It goes beyond posting content to social media platforms, it includes things such as engaging with your audience, generating leads, and looking for new ways to increase a company’s reach and visibility.
Why is social media marketing so important for businesses?
Digital marketing plays an important role in the business world as we know it today. With an estimated 3.2 billion people active across multiple platforms around the world, and with 11 new users each second, it’s safe to say that social media marketing is now just as important as traditional marketing methods for increasing your brand awareness and attracting new clients. To be able to accomplish this, many businesses need an effective social media strategy. Before you can begin assembling your social media strategy, you will need to conduct a social media audit, consider which social media channels are best for your business and analyse your target audience.
Conduct a social media audit
A social media audit is a great way to evaluate and optimise how your brand shows up across social media networks as it will help to give you a picture of the effectiveness of your current strategy and show which social networks are performing the best (and worst). To conduct an audit of your social channels you should follow these steps below:
- Collate all your businesses social media accounts, including any from different regions or sub-brands
- Use tools such as google analytics to review your performance metrics across your platforms including follower growth, engagement, most engaging social media posts, top-performing posts, audience demographics and behaviours
- Display your findings in an easy-to-read presentation or template so that you can analyse the results
- Analyse the data and identify areas where you can improve your social media efforts and set up a plan to fix them
Decide on the right social media platforms
An important element of implementing a successful social media strategy is choosing the right platform to engage with your consumers. After conducting your audit, you may find that some platforms don’t work as well as others, and in that instance, you should look to identify the steps needed for your business to take to improve it. Each social media platform serves a different purpose, and people who log in to these platforms all use them in different ways. By choosing the right social media platform for your brand, and tailoring your content creation for each, you’ll better be able to reach your target audience and generate positive ROI.
Instagram is a great social media platform if your brand likes to upload various content formats. With over 1 billion monthly active users on the platform, businesses have begun to understand the value of this platform. Between sharing photos, videos, stories, and now reels, your business can reach users in a variety of ways – and it works. According to statistics, over 50% of Instagram users have gone on to visit websites and make purchases after seeing a product marketed on Instagram. If that wasn’t enough, the consumer demographic for Instagram is typically younger than other platforms – 25–34-year-olds represent the largest advertising audience on Instagram, closely followed by the 18-24 age group – meaning that if you’re looking to target this age group then Instagram provides the perfect opportunity for you.
With approximately 3 billion users worldwide every month, Facebook is still considered the number one social media platform. It’s an incredible social networking tool for promoting your business and is one of the best ways to connect with customers. The great thing about Facebook is that it can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website or blog. Anything that is on your Facebook page will give your SEO a boost as it’s indexed by search engines, so ensuring your page is filled with engaging content that is relevant to your business will really help. While Facebook has a reputation for being for the older generation, the reality is that its demographic remains as users between the ages of 18-34.
Twitter can be an incredibly powerful platform for helping you to increase your business online presence. With approximately 321 million active users worldwide, statistics have shown that the average Twitter user follows five businesses, and 80% of all Twitter users have mentioned a brand in their tweets. Twitter isn’t just a place to attract new customers to your brand, it’s a great place to connect with your consumers and get to know them. In fact, research has shown that 60% of a brand or businesses followers are more likely to purchase or recommend products after following a brand on Twitter.
YouTube
YouTube can be an effective platform for your digital marketing strategy. With more than 2 billion users worldwide, the platform drives more than 30 million daily visits making it a great platform for any business looking to engage with consumers with video content.
You might not think of LinkedIn when it comes to digital marketing, but the reality is that it’s actually a very powerful social network that can help to increase your brand awareness. With approximately 750 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is no longer just a place to search for and hire new talent. Many brands are using it as part of their social media strategy too.
Who is your target audience?
Understanding your target audience is everything when it comes to an effective social media marketing strategy. There are plenty of benefits to understanding your target audience, including building stronger consumer relationships, creating more relevant content, utilising relevant social media influencers, and boosting social media conversions. Failing to understand your target audience from the start can mean your social media campaigns don’t perform as expected, and your social media channels fail to appeal to those you want to attract the most. Understanding your audience isn’t just as simple as bucketing users into demographics, you now need to focus on what your audience values in order to get the most out of your strategy.
A great place to start is by creating social media personas for each type of buyer you have. Social media personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help you to paint a picture of the consumers you’re trying to target with your business or products. In other words, it’s how you see your ideal consumer. Perhaps you’re launching a new product that you want to target parents, or perhaps you want to reach gen-z with an innovative new product, creating a social media persona can help decide on a more focused digital marketing strategy.
Social media personas
From posting relevant content to helping your brand define itself, social media personas are powerful tools in giving you a detailed understanding of what your audience wants. The more detailed you can be about your personas, the better as it will enable your business to create relative content that sparks engagement, increases brand awareness and nurtures your community down the marketing funnel. Be sure to check your audience personas regularly so that your brand can remain current with the wants and needs of your followers.
What are the best social media management tools?
From content creation right through to analytics and reporting, social media marketing can be a minefield at times. Thankfully, there is an abundance of social media management tools out there that can make your life easier – but what are the best ones and how can they help you implement a successful social media marketing strategy?
Content research and planning tools
Deciding on content ideas and inspiration can be incredibly difficult. Creating content without a solid plan makes it much harder to focus your efforts and drive engagement and clickthroughs, but there are plenty of tools out there to help you plan your content effectively.
Google Trends
Google trend is a great free tool that helps you understand the popularity of a search term or topic amongst google searchers. You simply enter a keyword and see how searches have increased or decreased over time. You can use this insight to create content around topics that are gaining traction, or gain a competitive advantage by hopping on a trend first. Similarly, it’s a great way to understand if anything you plan to post is also losing momentum.
SparkToro
SparkToro is an “Audience Intelligence” platform that has been designed to give marketers a deeper understanding of their audience – from the websites they read, to what they watch on YouTube and who they follow on Twitter, SparkToro can help you to really understand your consumer and in-turn create content that is geared towards them.
SEMrush Topic Research Tool
Researching topics is one of the easiest, and most effective ways to quickly draft-up ideas for content. The SEMrush topic research tool makes this a quick and convenient way for those looking for inspiration, giving businesses a variety of ideas around a core topic in a matter of minutes.
Posting and scheduling tools
If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to be posting and scheduling content at the right time. Unfortunately, if you have a variety of social accounts across a range of social media networks it can be a difficult task. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there to make posting and scheduling more manageable allowing you to create content ahead of time and schedule your posts to land at the appropriate times. feedalpha allows you to schedule your content to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn Personal Profile and LinkedIn Business Profile.
Influencer marketing tools
Influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity with more brands turning to influencers to validate their products and help out with marketing campaigns, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. As far as the statistics on social media influencers go, it’s certainly promising with influencer generated content delivering 11x greater return on investment than many other forms of marketing strategies. Influencer marketing can be difficult and time-consuming if you don’t have the right tools, but thankfully there are a wealth of tools available to make your job as a social media manager that little bit easier. Apps like Activate, AspireIQ and Find Your Influence (FYI) all top the league when it comes to influencer marketing, allowing brands to connect with content creators. The benefit of using these marketing tools is that it takes a lot of the manual time out of finding and vetting potential influencers. These platforms do it for you based on your criteria.
Social media analytics tools
Understanding your social media performance is critical to understanding how a campaign performed, which is why social media analytics tools are so important. They help your brand to gain a detailed understanding of your performance across social media platforms including engagement, most engaging post types, number of interactions, most engaging posts, share of promoted posts, and rate of engagement. Some tools also allow you to check how you’ve done vs. your competitors to find out who is leading the way when it comes to social media marketing. Google Analytics is one of the most well-known and best industry-standard tools for understanding your social media performance.
How to implement an effective social media strategy
Now that you know what social media management is, you’re probably wondering how you can implement an effective digital marketing strategy. The great news is that it doesn’t need to be painful or complicated, in fact, it’s easy once you know-how.
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a document that details your social media goals, the plan you will use to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress. Your strategy should list each of your existing and planned social media accounts, along with goals specific to each of the social media networks you’re active on. These goals often form part of your businesses overall digital marketing strategy.
How to create and implement your social media marketing strategy
There are some simple steps you can follow to implement an effective and coherent social media strategy – we take a look below.
Choose S.M.A.R.T goals that align with the wider business objectives
The first step to creating an effective strategy is to decide on your objectives and goals, without them, you have no way of measuring the success of your campaign. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound in order to gain the best from your promotions and campaigns.
Learn and understand your target audience
Knowing who your audience is and understanding what they want to see across your social platforms is key. Through the creation of social personas, you can successfully create engaging content that your audience will like, comment on, and even share. When it comes to your target customer, you should know things like:
- Age
- Location eg. do they live in a city or the suburbs
- Average disposable income
- Hobbies and interests
Competitor analysis
As with every part of business, doing some analysis about competitor activity is always a good idea. Not only does it allow you to understand what they’re doing, but it allows you to analyse what they do well, what they don’t do so well, and what your business can do to improve and capitalise on opportunities that your competitor may not be cashing-in on.
Social Media audit of your accounts
As we’ve already outlined above, conducting an audit of your social media profiles is a great way to get the full picture of what’s working well for your brand’s digital strategy and how you can improve. It should give you a clear picture of how you show up across your various social media profiles and understand how your audience is engaging with you.
Decide whether paid or organic content are for you
Paid and organic social are completely different and are best utilised for different goals.
Organic social
Organic social media refers to the free content that all users share with each other on their feeds. As a brand, when you post organically to your social networks, you can expect that the people who will see it are either your followers (also known as organic reach), your followers’ followers (if people share your post) and people following the hashtags you use. Many brands use organic social to establish their own personality and voice and build relationships with their consumers. Advantages – helps your brand to convert new customers by showing them what you’re about and is a cost-effective solution to growing your social media presence. Disadvantages – can sometimes be slower to reach your business goals and it can take a lot of time to get right.
Paid social
Paid social media is pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s another word for advertising. Simply put, it’s when brands pay money to any of the social networks in order to have their content shared with a specific audience. Advantages – allows you to reach a large number of social media users and target your ideal consumer-type more easily. Disadvantages – requires a budget and someone with the expertise to manage the campaign to get the most out of it.
Improve your social media profiles and activities
Ensuring that each of your profiles and social media activities are up-to-date with relevant information and contain high-quality content is paramount to achieving your goals.
- Ensure all profile fields are up-to-date and filled in correctly
- Use keywords in your profiles to enable your account to show-up
- Use consistent branding across all profiles
- Use high-quality images that follow the recommended dimensions for each network
Create engaging content
Ideally, you want to create content that is authentic to your brand, but that keeps your consumer engaged across each platform. For example, you don’t want to waste time filming reels and boomerangs for LinkedIn if you’re planning to use this in a professional capacity. It might take some trial and error to understand what works best across each platform, but by analysing each piece of content with powerful social media tools, you will be on your way to a successful strategy in no time.
Track performance and adjust your strategy when needed
As we outlined above, it’s important to set yourself metrics that can be measured so that you can tweak your strategy accordingly when needed. It’s likely that your social strategy will change multiple times throughout the year as you find that some strategies simply don’t work as well as you’d anticipated. It’s important that you analyse your performance metrics multiple times through any campaign on each platform so that you can successfully see which posts are having the most direct impact on your business. Once you have the data available, use it to re-assess your strategy – are there areas where you can improve? Could you try doing something differently to increase engagement and generate leads?
Conclusion
Social media is constantly evolving and changing. As new networks come to light, others go through significant changes. This is the same for your business too. All this means is that the way you manage social media should be flexible and fluid, allowing you to change your strategy as and when needed. You should always refer back to your goals, but don’t be afraid to make changes to your plans to better achieve them or set new goals based on what’s happening in the world. Managing social media might seem daunting – but if you have the right processes and tools in place, you can effectively set up a social strategy that works for you and your brand.
Gary is the Founder of Feedalpha. He has a background in AI, Data Analytics, SEO, Digital Strategy and Web Design.