What does social media management mean?
Social media management is the process of managing your online presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter by creating, publishing and analyzing the content you post. Social media management also includes interaction with social media users.
You can use tools, services and social media managers to oversee your social media management.
A social media manager, whether working as a consultant, in-house employee or team member at a social media agency, is a skilled professional in social media marketing, advertising and management. They help you achieve your social media goals, such as increasing your followers or social media revenue.
What is a social media marketing plan?
A social media plan helps an organization determine its target audience, which social networks to join, and the type of content to develop and share. It is a vital part of the overall marketing strategy. Once you’ve mapped out a plan, you can get to work refining your content and cadence, analyzing follower engagement, and building deeper relationships with your audience.
What actions does social media management involve?
1. Monitoring the competition
Taking a quick look at your competitors’ social media profiles can help your strategy a lot. Comparing your strategies to theirs is helpful because your social media campaign can likely benefit from the same strategy. Notice how often they post on each platform.
Also note what type of content they post. Do they get tons of shares on their videos? Do they have tons of retweets on their photos?
Of course, you don’t want to post the exact same content as your competitors, and you certainly don’t want to retweet or share their information. However, paying attention to what you post and how often can be huge in helping your social accounts grow.
2. Auditing the existing social media strategy
– Reviewing your social media goals
– Ensuring branding fit on social media
– Compilation of social media metrics such as followers, engagement rate and more
– Analyzing social media metrics to find trends such as content preferences
And other
3. Research your target audience
Researching your audience is an essential part of social media management. If your company doesn’t know who your audience is, developing a social media strategy is difficult.
Know who your audience is and you’ll know where to find them online.
This is essential as you want to maximize your investment in social media management. By targeting your audience to their preferred platform, you can achieve a higher return on investment (ROI).
For example, imagine social media marketing for dentists. While one dentist offers pediatric care, another offers implant services. Each operates in the health and medical sector, but they have completely different audiences.
When their social media management services include audience research, these practices ensure they invest their marketing budget and ad spend creating content and ads that target the right users, versus anyone who needs dental care.
Invest in social media management services and you can expect your account manager to ask you about your target audience right from the start. In some cases, an agency may take the initiative to ask about their target audience when you call to discuss their services.
4. Choice of social media platforms
Next, you will decide which social media platforms to use. Time is one of the most valuable resources when it comes to social media management for businesses, so it’s essential to focus your efforts on the networks that matter most to your audience.
While you should have a profile on top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you shouldn’t divide your time between them equally. Instead, prioritize social media platforms based on how much your audience uses them.
You can learn which networks matter most to your target market by examining demographics. If you’ve done a social media audit, you can also refer to engagement rates to see which networks performed the best. Also check the activity of competitors.
If you use social media management services, don’t worry. Your account manager will provide you with platform recommendations based on their research about your industry, audience and goals.
5. Creating the social media strategy
Before your account manager can launch your social media campaign, they need to develop a strategy. In most cases, they will focus on building a strategy for each platform due to the different roles and uses of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media platforms.
In addition to considering your audience, they will also look at the following factors:
Your Goals: What does your business want to achieve with social media? Do you want to build more brand awareness among consumers or establish brand loyalty among existing customers? Or, is there another goal you want to achieve?
Your Industry: What do audiences want to know about your industry? Are there content gaps that your company can fill, such as with blog posts or guides that you can then share on social media? Or, are there industry leaders you can connect with across platforms?
Your Brand: What is your brand voice? Do you have a set of standards or processes when interacting with customers in a public forum?
Some of these questions, such as your branding standards and goals, will require your direct input. We’re always curious to learn about your company—that curiosity allows us to create powerful, personalized social media strategies.
6. Designing social media profiles
When creating or updating social media profiles, it’s critical to make sure they match your brand.
That’s why social media management services can also include social media design. This service focuses on creating professional images that capture your brand and make a great first impression on users.
In most cases, your social media design will focus on static images of your account, such as the following:
Your Twitter header and background
Facebook header, icon and profile picture
Your Instagram profile picture
Once we designed your social media accounts—and you’ve approved the designs—your social media specialist can start working on your marketing goals, such as increasing post engagement or generating conversions.
7. Build your social media content calendar
Another product included in most social media management services is a content calendar for each of your social media accounts. This calendar serves as a reference point for you and your professional social media management team.
In your content calendar, which will include the current month, you can view scheduled posts for your social media accounts. These posts can include company announcements and holiday news, as well as shared content such as a blog post from your website or a picture from a customer.
Before publishing these posts, your social media manager will likely ask you to review and approve all content. While this requires some effort on your part, it guarantees that the only content being served is the content you want.
8. Creating platform-specific social media content
A social media specialist does more than build a content calendar for your company—they also create the content within it. In some cases, they may oversee every aspect of content creation, from topic development to copywriting to media selection.
To create the best possible content, however, many social media specialists will work with graphic designers and copywriters. The result is content that resonates with users and achieves your company’s goals.
If your calendar includes content from a third party—perhaps you’re sharing an influencer’s blog post that mentions your product—your social media manager will make sure they have the appropriate link and caption to share on your accounts of social networks.
9. Responding to your social media followers
A day-to-day responsibility included in many social media management services is interacting with your followers and commenters. For many businesses, this service is invaluable because it has a direct impact on brand awareness and brand loyalty.
As part of this service, your social media manager will adhere to your brand and company standards when interacting with your followers. They will also respond to users who leave negative comments, such as about a bad experience.
For social media users, your company’s interaction with them shows that you care. In many industries, this will set your business apart from your competitors. It can even become a selling point for consumers, especially since more than 65% of people use social media for customer service.
10. Increasing social coverage
Ads aren’t the only way your social media specialist will grow your following and social media presence. As part of your social media management services, your provider can reach out to trusted influencers and organizations in your industry.
This can lead to your business being covered by those people, who can connect you with their followers. The result is more exposure for your brand, as well as the chance to gain more followers and customers.
If you sell kitchen cabinets, for example, an influencer might highlight your product as a purchase for their kitchen renovation. They’ll create a post highlighting the experience on their social media account, which you can then share with yours.
It’s a chance for you, as well as another organization, to get coverage.
11. Monitoring social media performance
A critical part of social media management is monitoring the performance of your efforts. That’s why your team of social media specialists will track the performance of your ads and creative content and share those results with you.
We make sure you can see your performance as well as your ROI.
When investing in social media management services – or any digital marketing service – it’s essential to partner with an agency that not only monitors the performance of your social media accounts, but also reacts when performance drops.
You also want a partner who develops an action plan to improve poor performance, not someone who makes excuses for it. Adopt this mindset and you will find the best agency for your business. This type of partnership leads to better results and better ROI.
12. Forget sales
I’ve already touched on this point, but since this post is about building relationships, I think it’s worth mentioning again. People know when they’re being sold to, and social media doesn’t particularly like it. Resist the temptation to treat your Facebook page or Twitter account like a billboard and avoid any sales and persuasive language.
One company that does a great job of this is General Electric. They often post purely informational content, like this graphic about energy saved by wind turbines: of course, they don’t expect their followers to contact them hoping to buy a wind turbine. Instead, they use these posts as an opportunity to educate them: this kind of casual interaction is great for building a loyal and engaged following.
Commenters appreciate brands that take the time to respond and even those that don’t yet like to know that the company cares about its customers. Keep this in mind when running your own social accounts. When your followers are ready to make a purchase, they will.
And if you’ve already taken the steps to build positive associations with your company, they’ll know exactly who to contact.
