How to manage your social media

The importance of social media

The summary of the importance of social media is displayed on the graph below that shows consumer’s preferred channel for reaching out with businesses.

With a proper social media strategy, you can monitor the online presence of your business and shape its reputation. There are many benefits of having social media, such as:

– Low costs: having a social media presence is a cost-effective way to interact with your customers and reach new ones. Most platforms are free and your potential customers are already there.

– High reach: there is a global reach with social media which may not be the case with other marketing mediums.

– Building your brand: social media presence aids in establishing a company brand with interactions with a targeted audience and clear messaging.

– Useful marketing tool: due to their high and inexpensive reach, social media platforms can represent a valuable marketing tool. With social media, you can generate leads and sales at proven rates. Moreover, many platforms offer both analytics and advertising tools.

The following eight steps show how to manage social media for your business:

1. Understand your brand

We can define brand as the identity of your company. This includes the following:

– Your mission

– Core values

– Logo

– Name

– Customer experience

A key to the successful management of social media is to understand how your public perceives you and what your company stands for.

You can use various boards to get you better understanding, such as one shown below.

2. Understanding who your target audience is

Understanding your audience means that you know who the company is trying to reach with a product or service. The targeted audience should be always considered when creating posts to make sure that they will be able to engage and relate to your content.

There are the following factors that should be considered when determining your target audience:

– Demographics: includes age, gender, race, employment, education, marital status, etc.

– Interest: includes topics and entertainment that users enjoy, as well as hobbies.

– Challenges: includes the struggles of your targeted customer and, generally speaking, the company provides a product or service that will solve a given challenge.

3. Set SMART goals

With rights goals, you can guide your approach to managing social media and you also have a metric to measure success, which will hold you accountable and help maintain your budget. For setting better goals, you can use the SMART method:

– Specific: a goal must be clearly defined.

– Measurable: you must be able to use metrics to track your goal.

– Achievable: you must have resources to achieve the goal.

– Realistic: a goal must be possible to be achieved by your business.

– Time-sensitive: a goal should always be time-bounded.

4. Use multiple platforms

If you use more platforms, your reach will be extended, simple as that! At the current moment, the most popular platforms include Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

Using multiple platforms ensures diversification of the content which provides better chances to connect with both potential and existing clients.

 Pros and cons of managing multiple social media platforms are summarized in the table below.

5. Engage your audience

To build a relationship with your customers on social media, you need to engage them which will provide for a better customer experience, therefore, revenue will be increased. Some of the ways for engaging your audience on social media are:

– Ask questions to get opinions from your audience

– Organize various contests and give prizes

– Answer questions of your audience

– Create a game that your audience can play

– Allow your audience to generate content

– Be human in both posts and interactions

– Offer promotions and discounts

6. The quality of the content is everything

If the content is relatable, creative, informative, and entertaining, the chance for engagement increases. Content should be made specifically for each platform. For instance, on YouTube videos may perform best, while on Instagram, photos are best suited.

You can ensure that your content meets the quality standards by having members that are responsible for the following roles:

– Someone who will develop a strategy for content creation and publishing, this person is a content manager

– Someone who will produce video, graphics, text, and other media for your business, this is a content creator

– Someone who will evaluate content for quality and accuracy, this person is called a content editor

7. Develop your advertisements strategy

With a good advertisement strategy, you will be able to:

– Reach more people

– Engage your audience

– Increase the return of the investment

Social media platforms generally have built-in features to create and track ads which makes it easier to run them.

8. Understand important social media metrics and analyze them

With analysis, you can see how successful (or unsuccessful) your social media usage is. The most important metrics to include in the analysis are:

– Impressions: the number of times that people see your content

– Engagement: the number of interactions received from people

– Conversions: tells you how many times people purchased your product/service after interacting with your content

– Response rate: the time it takes from social media account to answer messages from users

Here are some extra tips for managing your social media accounts:

– Use tools for scheduling to better organize and strategize your content

– Be consistent and follow trends

– It is okay to recycle your content if the content is still relevant

– Post on daily basis since a reliable flow of the content keep users interested and entertained

– Tell stories about your company

There you have it! All the basics you need to successfully manage your company’s social media accounts. 

Using social media as a part of a marketing strategy is useful for any type of business and provides many benefits. 

Remember, the main goal of managing social media accounts is to engage as much of your audience as it is possible to provide a better return on the investment.