As a business owner it’s important to understand what is involved in managing your social media accounts to ensure you are maximising its potential and seeing a return on your investment.
Whether you have an employee, a team or an agency managing your brand’s social media, it’s important to have a process in place that will ensure things run smoothly, and that (more importantly) it gets done!
Here we briefly explain the concept and the process of social media management.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is a process of planning, content creation, posting, reporting and engaging across social media accounts. You can manage each channel separately or use free or paid social media management tools to streamline the process. Some of the most common social media channels brands utilise are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter.
How does it work?
Social media management is a process broken down into the following steps, explained in more detail.
1. Planning & Strategy
The first and arguably the most important step involves social media strategy development. The strategy will document key components such as goals, audience, content pillars, budget and resources. Refer to our blog on 4 Key Elements of a Social Media Strategy to understand what’s involved in strategy development to set your brand up for success.
2. Content Creation
To ensure you are utilising your time efficiently we recommend creating and scheduling the social media content at least 1-2 weeks in advance. When creating content follow the strategy closely to ensure it aligns with your goals, target audience and content pillars. This process of content creation can be broken down into the following steps:
1 / Define your target audience for each post.
2 / Identify the content pillar and the topic for each post then create original content or curate content (find and collect online content and present it in a way that adds value to your audience).
3 / Decide on content format to post it in i.e. video, story or post with text and/or image.
4 / Identify hashtags to use per post.
5 / Identify time and day of the week to post content.
6 / Specify a location (geotag) for the post if relevant.
3. Posting
Once the content is created and approved, you can schedule posts to be published in advance across all accounts via the social media management tool. This streamlines the process, saving you time and money in the long run!
Some of the most popular social media management tools are online platforms such as Sprout Social, Later and Hootsuite which require a paid subscription to utilise most of the features such as reporting, hashtag trends, management of comments and messages just to name a few. If your brand is only present across Facebook and Instagram then Facebook Business Suite is ideal as you can utilise their scheduling tool for free.
4. Reporting
The most productive way to generate your social media reports is through the social media management tool you’re using. By specifying the reporting period you can extract the data across all the accounts in one report.
Generally the data is tracked on a weekly and monthly basis for impressions, reach, engagement (likes, comments and shares, clicks), new followers and likes, and most popular or engaged posts. From this you can analyse the data to ensure your efforts are producing the results you’ve set out to achieve in your strategy.
5. Engagement
Engaging with your followers and other accounts is just as important for follower growth as creating good content. Engagement actions should be done at least 4-5 times per week to ensure your social media accounts maximise results. They involve actions such as liking and responding to all comments and messages; following and engaging business accounts or personal/influencer accounts you’re likely to engage or do business with; unfollow any irrelevant or unengaged accounts once a month.
We understand that social media management is a process that involves effort, skill and time as we do it every day for our clients! If you are in a position where you need to outsource this service, consider partnering with us.
Get in touch to find out more about how we can help – hello@victorandflo.com