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’re going to need. This demand will eventually lead to building complex social media team structures.
If you’re 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?
Conducting a social media audit
A social media audit can largely 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 first steps towards fixing them and making your social media management activities more efficient.
Decide on the right social media platforms
Another important 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 flipside, if you don’t do market research beforehand, you’re at risk of getting on a wrong path, wasting both money and resources.
How do you build a detailed picture of your social media audience? https://socialboosted.net/contact-us/