Social media platforms have continued to grow in their user numbers. Facebook, which is the biggest social media platform in the world, has about 2 billion users and even newer applications like TikTok are pushing towards that number of downloads.
Of course, we can’t ignore how powerful and important social media has become for many people and businesses alike. Businesses with social media handles have adopted social media management as an important element of their structure. With strong advancements in science and technology, the owners of these platforms are bound to receive an increased number of users.
But the whole social media might probably puzzle you, and you don’t yet see the importance of social media talk less of a social media company handling your accounts. Well, this article will give you a full insight into this concept and you’ll see a significant reason to get serious on social media.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is simply ensuring your visibility on social media platforms is excellent. To be precise, it deals with the creation, analysis, and posting of content on the platforms.
Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn have garnered high user numbers over the years. Their overall user number amounts to over 4 billion. To increase the efficiency of their platforms, they introduced prominent features that enable social media management to be easy. Furthermore, there are additional tools that have made it easier.
A social media manager must handle social media pages, and the manager has to ensure these pages are optimized to get the best results for the business. Getting into the position of a social media manager demands a strong understanding of social media trends, data analysis, and so much more. However, let’s consider the importance of getting involved in social media before we expand this conversation.
Why Get Involved In Social Media Management?
It’s usually strange whenever I have a conversation with a business professional and they tell me they have no social media presence because they have a strong offline network. Well, I only see people who are cutting themselves short because they’re probably naïve or scared of “NOTHING”.
Getting involved in social media will offer you a lot of benefits as a business professional, and I will list some of them. They include:
#1. Wider Reach
A wider reach is important if you want to scale your business. And quality social media management can ensure you get access to more individuals that can patronize your brand.
#2. Less Advertising Cost
Advertising costs keep rising on every platform. So, if you can get organic traffic, that would be profitable to you both long term and short term.
Good social media management can guarantee you spend less money on advertising as you will create channels that can help you market your products without running advertisements.
#3. Virality
Most of the huge internet sensations today became big with just one post that went viral. Virality remains one of the fastest ways to hit a bigger customer base, as your market does the advertising for you.
Creating viral content isn’t usually easy, as the least things you expect can grow viral. Turkish Chef Salt Bae became an immediate internet sensation after people saw the way he butchered and sprinkled salt on meat. That’s just the whole truth about virality; you never know what works. However, if you keep making constant efforts, something you do will give your brand and business that big break on social media.
What Are The Top Social Media Platforms?
A good social media management team understands there are so many social media platforms, however, there are certain platforms that fit certain types of content. So, in this section, I will list some top social media platforms and what quality of conversations or promotions you should use there.
#1. Facebook
When you start a conversation about social media platforms and you don’t start with Facebook, then you probably didn’t complete your research at all. Facebook remains the “King” of all social media channels commanding over 2 billion users. And maybe we can attribute it to the fact they’re older than the other, apart from YouTube.
On Facebook, you can run any type of advertising and you will get great conversions. Whether text, video, audio, etc, Facebook has an audience large enough to be interested in your content. And considering the efforts they have made by introducing applications like Business Suite and Ads manager, I will go with Facebook any day for my advertisements.
#2. Instagram
Instagram started as its channel before Facebook acquired the company. The company started with a model different from Facebook as they put a higher level of emphasis on the image and less emphasis on the text that followed. With this model, business people and marketers who love graphics found an untapped market.
If you want to run any form of advertising on Instagram, use high-quality images or designs. Your designs or images must be able to communicate your brand, as people will pay less attention to your text. Another great idea would be to adopt a carousel which is text inputted into an image.
#3. YouTube
YouTube is a company owned by Google. And till today, they remain the standard choice for individuals who are interested in video creation, editing, etc. YouTube has over 3 billion visitors much more than Facebook as they are the second most visited webpage only behind Google.com.
Although YouTube has a large visitor number, you cannot run all forms of an advertising campaign on YouTube; you can only run campaigns that have videos. Smart Insights shows that video marketing is considered an important part of advertising.
#4. Twitter
Twitter is a great social media platform with user numbers in hundreds of millions. This platform is recognized as the most used platform for organizations and people in politics and government. On this platform, you send out brief messages to your followers called “Tweets” and people can either reply or re-broadcast your message using their unique user name.
Because of the huge user numbers, advertisers found their way to Twitter, and this has made the platform a great place for running promotion campaigns. However, Twitter doesn’t promote long-form text content as they concentrate on videos and short-form content.
#5. LinkedIn
Business conversations couldn’t have found a better shelter than in LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook and Twitter which connect people of all demographics and interests, LinkedIn focuses on business professionals. And the platform is tailored to host those conversations easily.
Although LinkedIn possesses these features, its high advertising rates don’t encourage advertisers to use the platform. And even if it encourages all forms of content, it doesn’t give the versatility you might need. LinkedIn is great for business professionals, but not for all businesses.
#6. Pinterest
Pinterest is unlike any other social media channel. They boast to be a visual discovery platform responsible for helping users get the best suggestions on recipes, furniture, business structure, and a lot of everyday problems we encounter.
If you’re in a business where you need to constantly communicate and teach (in detail) then Pinterest is perfect for you. However, Pinterest doesn’t have high user numbers compared to Facebook and YouTube as it surpasses Twitter by about 50-70 million users.
What Are The Best Social Media Management Tools?
To effectively manage your social media accounts, you need an excellent knowledge of data analysis, however, that isn’t enough. Having the right tools would ensure you perform a thorough job on your social media account, and I will show you some amazing tools you can use to get analysis for your page.
Some of these tools include:
#1. Hootsuite:
This is another tool that makes social media page management easy. Hootsuite helps you manage all your social media platforms, reply to user questions and comments across channels, and monitor your social media strategy’s performance through analytics.
#2. CoSchedule:
CoSchedule shifts its attention to more than managing your social media. With this tool, you can schedule your social media posts, build content calendars, publish blog posts, and more.
#3. Buffer:
A buffer is a great tool that can help you manage social accounts, establish a posting schedule, schedule social media posts, and more. Furthermore, it’s available as a mobile app to make social media management easy.
What Does Social Media Management Include?
A person or a team can do social media management. However, the choice will depend on your budget and the reach you desire to gain. But let me quickly counsel you that hiring the right social media team for your business will get you more results, increase your options, and build your brand faster than just a single social media manager.
Social media management is a tough decision job description. However, at Socialander we enjoy doing tough things. Book a Free Marketing Consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” so we can eliminate your burden of unprofessional social media management.
Social media management has a lot of moving parts, however, we will highlight some key parts and how they can affect everything in your business. They include:
#1. Researching Audience
Before you can efficiently handle a page, you must research the audience you have. Every type of content doesn’t work when you run a business that has a strong niche. For example, when you run a management consulting firm, you don’t create contents that discuss entertainment. It’s truly bad for business, and you can lose a good number of probable clients.
I know you might believe that your outstanding content calendar has everything you need, but have you asked whether it truly answers some questions your audience has? And if it has improved their knowledge of your business and strengthened their buying decision. Researching your audience remains a vital aspect of social media management.
#2. Creating Strategy
A strategy is important if you want to get the best results, especially in social media management. You have competitors online, and if you follow their generic pattern of handling their social media pages, you might just do as good as them or even less.
In creating an excellent strategy for your social media accounts, you must command expert knowledge of your audience. When you have this data, you tailor your content and campaigns to suit their perceptions and help their buying decisions. It’s important to note that you can’t use the same strategy for all your accounts, especially when you’re involved in different businesses.
#3. Structuring Accounts
If you want to get the best results from your social media accounts – getting more leads and increasing your customer base – you will need to put in a lot of effort. However, it’s totally a waste of time and resources to put effort into something you don’t even understand its workings when you can easily receive help from professionals.
Structuring your account(s) is an integral part of social media management. If you introduce an impressive structure to your account, you will increase the visibility of your page and it puts you in a unique position different from your competition. And this part of social media management requires someone with a tremendous level of experience.
Structuring your social media accounts is a communication of your professionalism. However, if you fail to do it right, it sends an entirely different message. Book a Free Marketing Consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” so we can give you a great structure for your social media accounts.
#4. Creating Ads
Advertising is an important part of any business. It’s one of the fastest ways to create awareness about your brand, service, product, or industry. A long time ago, advertising didn’t come cheap as you had to be a top gun to subscribe to any of the advertising channels with your budget.
This chart shows that a lot of advertising campaigns spread over the internet have not won the trust of different generations yet (Source: Marketing Sher/pa). So, you can see that when you run social media ads, you expand the trust you have built to an audience online that can make a purchase decision immediately.
#5. Producing Content Calendar
A good element of expert social media management is a content calendar. With a good content calendar, you don’t have to hassle your brain each time to come up with content for your brand. A content calendar makes automation easy for you too as you can schedule social media posts ahead, buying you time to focus on other things.
Even Social Pilot agrees with this definition as they believe; that a content calendar is important to keep your content marketing well-organized and on track. It helps you with prior brainstorming which not only saves you from last-minute disastrous planning but also helps you produce content consistently.
#6. Promoting Content
Crafting exceptional content is only one step. Promoting the content to reach a wider audience is another important aspect of social media management many people ignore.
Content promotion is important, especially in an era where you search for a service and thousands of results show up. Funnily enough, these results could be within a geographical space.
A good promotion technique would be to boost certain posts so they draw users to your page. This way, you can write a post that you feel has a level of virality and promote it so it can move the traffic to other posts on the page.
#7. Analyzing Data From Campaigns
A good or a bad campaign will give you data. So, you always have something to work with when your campaign goes wrong. A proper analysis of the data received from any campaign can help you understand your audience and tweak your marketing campaigns.
In analyzing your data, you must trace where your highest conversions are coming from, the demographics of the individuals involved, and the quality of digital marketing trends that were in vogue.
If you want to be sure you’re getting the right data, running a marketing campaign more than once is a good idea. You would compare the data between the two campaigns and you’ll be sure of your decision.
You can choose to spend all day moving from page to page drawing interpretations from your data, but that hard work. Simply Book a Free Marketing Consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” so we help you make brilliant decisions for your campaigns.
#8. Following Up On Audience Conversations
Engagement is an important overlooked aspect of the social media management work description. Marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences (Monetate). So you can’t ignore the importance of creating personalized experiences for your visitors and following up on your conversations is a key role.
The chart reveals that interests play a key role in the engagement rate of social media accounts, but you need to ensure you follow up on conversations so you build your following organically.
#9. Monitoring Page Performance
The performance of a page over time contains a lot of data that can help you make informed decisions. By monitoring page performance, you can understand where the interests of your audience lie. And when you pay the required attention to that arm of your business, you increase your chances of converting leads to customers.
Monitoring page performance is not a big deal, as social media platforms give you automated analysis results. These results comprise all your campaign performances. For example, articles that gave the highest engagement and interaction, suggestions on the next line of action, etc. If you’re dissatisfied with these reports, you can use any of the social media tools we discussed in the earlier section.
Why Invest in Social Media Management Services?
An investment in growing your social media presence is beneficial to your business now and in the future. Considering the challenges that a lot of businesses face in building an online presence, you would stay ahead of your competitors and strengthen your place in a crowded market when you use social media.
With a huge social media presence, you can give your brand a voice that will echo it to parts where it has never been heard. Additionally, you can sell more products, get more customers, and even get ideas that will help your next product development journey.
On this journey, you don’t need a contractor, nor do you need an inexperienced team, you need to hire a digital marketing agency. With a quality digital marketing agency, you will have less supervision to do while they help you build your strength in the social media world.
Socialander can help you achieve all these goals and we can get started when you book a free marketing consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session”.
FAQs On What is Social Media Management
Social media management is crucial for businesses as it helps build brand awareness, engage with the target audience, drive website traffic, generate leads, and foster customer relationships. It provides a platform for businesses to share their story, products, and values with a global audience.
Commonly included social media platforms in social media management are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. The choice of platforms depends on the business’s target audience, industry, and marketing objectives.
Social media management is beneficial for businesses of all sizes, including small businesses. It offers cost-effective marketing opportunities, enables targeted advertising, and provides a platform for small businesses to compete with larger counterparts. Small businesses can build brand awareness and connect with their audience through effective social media management.
Challenges in social media management may include maintaining consistency, handling negative feedback, staying updated with platform algorithms, and managing time effectively. Businesses need to adapt to changes, address issues promptly, and continuously refine their social media strategies.
