What is Social Media Management?
Social media management concerns the creation, engagement, and analysis of quality content across a variety of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube. Companies use social media to interact and engage with their target audience, with a range of goals in mind by doing so, such as improving the brand’s reputation, providing better customer service as well as generating leads and making more sales. Social media management usually begins with the development of a social media strategy. A social media strategy is formed by creating realistic goals that can be achieved through the use of a variety of social media platforms. The most important thing a social media manager must consider is whether a business’ social media accounts are helping to achieve the company’s goals.
Why is Social Media Management Important?
In 2020, more than half the world’s population uses social media! That’s 4.57 billion people using social media (Smart Insights, 2020). Why does this make social media management important? Social media has revolutionized the way people interact, shop and entertain themselves which is why it is so important to have an online presence for your brand. The best thing about social media management is that creating content and engaging with customers is completely free which makes it a hugely cost-effective source of marketing to add to your traditional marketing. Utilizing social media effectively for your company, whether it is small or large, is where you should invest your time and money.
There are two main reasons why social media management is so important in the current day.
The first is that it can connect you with your current customer base instantly. This means that through social media management, you can improve and maintain your reputation with existing customers so that they are more likely to come back to you in the future.
Social media management allows you to provide a platform online for customers to interact with you, leave reviews, post photos and find your new content. This is an extremely effective way for your business and brand to stay in your customer’s mind even when they may not be thinking of you.
A person may simply be browsing the timeline on a social media site and come across your post which will hopefully remind them of the great service or product they received from you. Social media management allows you to engage existing clients with your team on social media and to use them to help with marketing to new customers. Another great way to improve the performance of your company through social media management is being able to provide a quick and simple source of customer service for both new and existing customers.
A social media manager or another member from the marketing and sales team can speak to and reply to customers instantly via a range of social media channels which can help your customers feel they can reach you at any time and that you truly value their experience with your company. Creating more channels for people to speak to your team can also help with increasing leads and performance.
The second reason that social media management is so important for your company is that you can use it to expand your business and reach brand new clients. Social media management allows you to advertise to a huge number of people that may never have heard of your brand before! This can be done across a range of digital marketing practices, which should be established when creating a social media management strategy. Social media management will be sure to help with creating leads and give your company true results when it comes to digital marketing.
What are the Most Popular Social Media Platforms?
The social media platforms you or your social media manager decide on using should depend on your target audience; every platform has a different demographic of users.
Facebook is the most popular and long-lasting social media platform to ever have been created! Facebook currently has 2.7 billion active monthly users (Statista, 2020). Facebook has a social media management platform purely dedicated to helping each industry reach customers; it allows you to build a Facebook page specifically for your company, as well as giving you the ability to produce paid ads.
There are many features that Facebook provides for effectively managing your page, such as publishing informative updates, uploading new photos and viewing the page insights to find out how people are visiting your page and engaging with your posts.
Facebook is a free site that digital marketers are encouraged to use no matter what the demographic of the industry is. This is because Facebook has such a wide variety of users that any audience can be reached through the site. There is a balanced range of genders as well as ages on Facebook, with the most popular age group being 25 to 34-year-olds (Statista, 2020).
Setting up a Facebook page for your business is incredibly easy and allows people to view your business information instantly. Facebook is also an extremely popular channel for PPC (pay-per-click ads), which is an important aspect of social media management that can help with improving performance and getting results. If you are going to invest money into advertising your content to a wider audience, Facebook is a great place to start to help with your digital marketing.
Twitter is a platform that has been around since 2006, and provides a place for people to interact with each other, either publicly or privately. Many large brands use Twitter for publishing marketing such as announcements, competitions, photos and interacting with customers publicly.
A Twitter account can be created for your business and easily used to post content, links and to interact with customers. Twitter has 330 million monthly active users, with the majority of these being 18 to 29 years old.
Twitter may not be the best place for a company whose target audience is 65+ but it is perfect for companies and industries that aim to market their product or services at those in the younger age bracket. Many businesses are able to create viral tweets on Twitter by interacting with news, memes and posting comical tweets to provide humour to followers. The way that Twitter is used for your company should depend on your audience.
Compared to Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is a relatively new social media platform that has taken the world by storm. Instagram was launched in 2010 and bought by Facebook in 2012 after its extreme success.
Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users (Statista, 2020), with the majority of these people in the age range of 18 to 35. Instagram is primarily a photo and video sharing app, so it is harder to interact with a business than Facebook and Twitter but allows businesses to be extremely creative and find ways through graphics to engage consumers.
Instagram now has 3 options for users; they can create a personal account, a business account or a creator account. The best option for a social media manager is to create a business account so that is it possible to display contact details and view insights about the reach, engagement and demographic of your followers.
Due to Instagram’s audience being a mainly young demographic, Instagram is best used to target a younger audience, and is known for being used as a place for people to get inspiration and see what is happening around the world.
This means that Instagram is better for a business that wants to engage with private customers rather than other businesses. As Instagram is owned by Facebook, it also offers a paid ads feature to help with social media marketing.
LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for businesses and a corporate target audience rather than private customers. LinkedIn is the best place to build relationships with other businesses in your industry, and publish content such as news and updates. LinkedIn allows you to present the professional side of your business; content and advertising need to be aimed at other brands and corporate users. LinkedIn is used by 660 million + users, and 30 million of these are companies! (Business of Apps, 2019). If you are a B2B business then you should definitely have a business page on LinkedIn which can be created and monitored, just like other sites for insights on post reach, engagement, followers and profile visits.
Pinterest is a popular social media platform that is perfect for social media managers aiming to be creative and upload high-quality photos and graphics for a brand. Users tend to open Pinterest for inspiration and motivation which is why it is so different from other social media platforms in terms of the way you should market on there. Rather than posting updates and communicating with customers, Pinterest is a great place for social media managers to post content that will get attention from people purely from looking at photos and graphics. The demographic of Pinterest is a lot more specific than other social media platforms. Pinterest currently has more than 400 million active users, however, over 78% of these users are female! (Statista, 2020). Pinterest is a huge channel that social media managers can use to produce leads from creative female users which is why so many fashion, home décor and beauty brands use Pinterest for marketing.
YouTube
YouTube is different from other social media platforms in the fact that it was purely created as a free video platform. YouTube is the second most popular social media platform of all time; it allows people to connect with others through the creation of videos, long or short. YouTube currently has over 2 billion active users (Business of Apps, 2019)! YouTube is not used for content such as text posts and photos, it is a place that social media managers can upload and feature videos about the brand. If you are able to share engaging videos that will connect with your target audience, YouTube is an effective place to do so. Social media managers can utilise YouTube to get ahead of competitors as videos can be the most engaging content if created effectively. Like Facebook, the demographic of YouTube users is spread quite evenly among the different age groups. While 15 – 25-year-olds use YouTube the most, it is also used frequently in the 56+ age group. This makes YouTube a great place for any company that wants to reach a wider audience via social media. YouTube also allows marketing through video ads so even if you do not have your own YouTube channel, you can create ads to display on other videos aimed at a specific audience. There are many more social media channels that businesses can use, so social media managers should explore what is popular and find out about other social platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok.
What Does the Social Media Manager do?
A social media manager’s main role is to look after your social accounts; they should plan and share content to engage new and existing customers, analyse the content they put out to find out whether it is effective at creating leads and conversions, and be a point of contact for customers trying to reach your company through social media. The content that a business advertises on social media is completely dependent on the demographic, which is why it is vital for a social media manager to know the background of your business, industry and who your target audience is. A social media manager should have knowledge about the social platforms you intend to use to connect with clients; they should know how to use the sites so that they can utilize them to create a business. A social media manager should be able to align marketing and content with your brand, through uploading good quality photos, graphics, videos, blog posts, updates and posts. They should also be able to effectively analyse each of these posts and the insights of your business page. The most common business insights that a social media manager should know about are the followers, reach, impressions, engagements, profile visits, website visits and the social media conversion rate. These insights will allow you to find out whether social media and how you are using it for marketing is really working for your business.
Followers
The number of followers your business has on a social media platform refers to people that have chosen to subscribe to your content and have consented to be shown what you post on their feed, whenever you post it! Building up followers is extremely important for social media management, it will ensure your content is seen by more people and reaches a wider audience.
Reach
The reach is the number of people that have seen your content. This number should be as high as possible so that your content is reaching a larger number of people. This can be done by posting at the right times, as well as posting content that people are likely to share with others.
Impressions
The impressions of a post are the number of times your content was shown. This is different from the reach as the same post could show up multiple times to the same user but they would have only counted as 1 person for the reach.
Engagement
Engagement is the number of times people engaged with your content. This depends on the social media platform but is usually indicated by likes, comments and shares. For social media management, engagement is the most important part of successfully managing social media accounts and producing results. If your customer base is engaging with your posts it means that you are definitely doing the right thing! Ideally, the more followers you have, the more people that should be engaging with your content, however, the engagement rate is usually quite small; the average engagement rate can be anywhere from 0.09% to 20%.
Profile Visits
Profile visits refer to the number of times that someone has clicked on your profile. This is an extremely good sign in social media management as it means that people are interested in what you are marketing and want to find out more about the company.
Website Visits
Once people have seen your content or social media profile, they may be so interested that they want to convert or find out even more about your company! Most social media channels allow you to place a link to your website as part of your business information. There are a number of ways to find out how many times this link was clicked and to follow your customers on their journey from viewing your social media pages to buying something or contacting you through your website.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of your social media pages can be difficult to track. If you are an eCommerce business and allow transactions online, you can track which customers came from your social media page, however, if you do not allow transactions online then you may find it difficult to know which customers came from social media and which didn’t. Overall you are usually able to tell if social media marketing is having a positive effect on your company as your overall sales should increase.
How Do I Start with Social Media Management?
The most important thing to start with when looking at social media management is defining your target audience. Who are your products/services aimed at? Once you have established the correct target audience for your brand, you can decide on which social media platforms you would like to create or improve your profiles on. After you have established the target audience and know which social media platforms you intend to use for marketing, a social media strategy should be created. You can produce a social media strategy by first deciding on your goals; you may want to use social media to build a better relationship with your existing customers, provide a better source of customer support or use it to reach a new customer base. You can use S.M.A.R.T goals as a good framework for a social media management strategy. Digital marketers should create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely in order to improve business performance.
Specific
Your social media management goals should be extremely specific. Rather than stating that you want to use your social media marketing to reach new clients you need to create a specific aim that will help you to achieve that goal. For example, if you have an eCommerce site and want to make sales from new customers, your social media goal could be to try and sell online to 20 new customers from your social media platform.
Measurable
Your goals need to be measurable in order to effectively track and analyse your social media performance. For an eCommerce site, you can put in UTM campaign tracking links that allow you to find out which of your customers came from social media to make a purchase. However, if you provide a service rather than a product then you should create a measurable goal such as to ‘Get 50 new customers signed up to a newsletter within 3 months’.
Achievable
For successful social media management, you need to create goals that you actually think can be achieved and that will improve company performance. Start small and your company will grow, make sure your goals aren’t impossible to reach.
Realistic
With social media management, it is extremely important to create goals that are realistic. If you are a small business then creating the goal to have 10,000 people view your website in a month isn’t realistic. Although your social media platforms may have a lot of followers, the engagement rate is usually around to 5% which means it is still much more difficult to reach a large number of people.
Timely
You should produce a timeline for your goals so that you can keep track and make sure you are on the right path for achieving the goal you set. Many social media managers have social planners that remind them when to post, analyse and stay on track for targets. A social media manager must be organised to keep to the strategy and have a greater chance of achieving business goals. Once you have created your goals, you can get to work at establishing how you can reach your target. This may be through analysing what has and hasn’t worked in the past, and performing competitor analysis to find out what your top competitors are doing on social media. Figure out a plan and form a content calendar to start posting and engaging with customers on social media. If you find that your social media strategy is not working and you are not on track to achieve the results you wanted, do not worry! This is exactly what analysis and insights are there to help with. A huge part of social media management is ensuring you track your social media insights weekly, which will allow you to find out whether your current social media strategy is having any impact and if it’s not, allows you to try new things and change up your content.
Which Social Media Management Tool is Best?
There are a number of paid social media management tools and services that allow you to plan, schedule, as well as analyse posts for multiple social media channels in one website. These tools are great value for money and ideal for social media managers that manage a large number of platforms, which can get chaotic and confusing.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite is another large platform that allows you to pay monthly to schedule content and blog posts, manage your social media with a calendar and track your analytics in one place for a number of social media accounts. Later: Later can not only schedule your content by paying monthly but also provides you with services for publishing photos, videos and stories quickly on Instagram. It is a great tool to use if you are primarily using Instagram for social media marketing.
Social media management is an important role that every business should consider, it provides businesses with a cost-effective way to market their products and services to their target audience. There are continuously new social media platforms created that can provide businesses with a range of ways to connect your team with customers which is why you should stay up to date with the social media trends and find out what your customers really want to see from you online. Find out more about how feedalpha can help feed your followers with awesome content.