Looking to boost brand visibility, traffic, and engagement on social media? Or want to establish your personal brand by boosting likes, shares, and upvotes for your posts.
Social media is increasingly becoming an important communications tool for businesses and individuals. Businesses looking to develop and sustain a robust social media strategy partner with top-notch social media management services providers.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the demands of managing multiple social media accounts, here is a quick guide to owning social media.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management (SMM) is the process of managing and executing a marketing plan through social media channels. It involves creating and sharing content, engaging with customers, and measuring the results of social media campaigns.
The overall goal of social media management is to create a strong online presence for a business or organization. When done right, SMM helps you in:
- building brand awareness
- generating leads and sales
- developing relationships with customers and
- improving customer service
Here are some steps to social media management that you can use to achieve your branding goals:
Steps to Social Media Management
The journey to social media success starts with goal-setting. Once you know what your goals are, it becomes easier to design a strategy to achieve them.
Set Goals
The first step in formulating a successful strategy is to determine your objectives and goals. Without such a benchmark, you cannot hope to measure success or calculate your return on investment (ROI). To get stellar results, you will need S.M.A.R.T goals, an acronym for goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
For instance, if the goal is to ‘increase brand awareness,’ it tells you nothing about how you will increase brand awareness. It also does not tell you what metrics you will use to track results and the timeframe for achieving them.
Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal: “increase likes and clicks on Facebook and Twitter by 25 percent within a week.”
The S.M.A.R.T. framework guides your actions and ensures they lead to real business results.
Owning social media is also about understanding that it’s a two-way street. You have to give as much as you want to receive. The best way to do this is by liking, upvoting, retweeting, and sharing content from your followers. When you do this, you show that you’re paying attention to them and that you appreciate their contributions.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience on social media is key for creating content that they will enjoy and share. Focusing on what your audience wants to see will also help turn social media followers into customers. Some important things to consider about your target customer include:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
- social media channels preferred.
Determine The Metrics
Choose the right metrics based on your social media goals. Here are some examples:
- Build awareness – Shares and followers
- Engagement – Likes, mentions, and comments
- Leads and sales – clicks, website traffic, e-commerce sales
- Customer retention -average response time, testimonials
Create a Content Calendar
Social media consultants prefer to use a social media calendar to organize upcoming social media posts. It can be in the form of a spreadsheet, Google calendar, or an interactive dashboard.
Every social media post includes:
- The time and date the post is made live
- The social network website and publishing account
- The post’s copy and creative assets (photos or videos)
- Links and tags included in the post
- Other similar information
Use The Right Tools
One of the areas social media management services providers specialize in is in using the right tools to keep track of likes, shares, comments, followers, and clicks. These tools help you know who’s talking about your brand and what they’re saying. This way, you can quickly like, retweet, and share content from your social media accounts to your blogs and website. These tools also make it easy to monitor all of your social media accounts in one place. What’s more, they help you schedule your posts.
The best social media management tools offer a variety of features, including the ability to:
- Manage all of your social media accounts in one place
- Monitor who is talking about your brand and what they are saying
- Schedule posts – Schedule posts for any time of the day or week. You can even schedule posts in advance.
- Track your results by seeing how many likes, upvotes, comments, and shares your posts get. You can also track clicks on links in your scheduled posts.
Track and Adjust Results
Social media metrics can help you analyze what type of content your followers engage with the most and when they engage with it. For example, if you post at 10 am on a Monday and get the most engagement, you know that is the best time to post. You can then adjust your posting schedule accordingly. Monitoring the number of followers you have can also help you figure out what type of content your audience enjoys. You can use this information to tailor your future posts and stay on brand.
Social media metrics are also helpful in figuring out what type of content is not working for you. If a post has a low number of likes, comments, or shares, it may be time to rethink the strategy behind that particular post.
Why Do You Need Social Media Management Services?
Social media managers play a critical role in shaping your personal brand or your company’s image on social media. They create blog posts and promote content on various social media channels while monitoring metrics and customer feedback. A social media expert will:
- Create, implement and manage your social media strategy.
- Schedule, publish and promote engaging content (images, news, text, videos,) on a regular basis.
- Stay current with the latest tools, trends, and best practices for social media
- Communicate with your followers, and respond to comments and queries
- Determine the key social media KPIs
- Strengthen your relationship with influencers, industry professionals, and followers
Conclusion
To sum up, you can use social media management services to help boost brand visibility, traffic, and engagement on social media. These services can also help you establish your personal brand by boosting likes, shares, and upvotes for your posts. Social media consultants can help you with all the steps right from creating a content calendar, using publishing and scheduling posts, measuring performance, and reporting results.