What Is Social Media Management?

In the technologically dominated world that we work and live in, social media has become a vital tool for consumers of all ages – what began as a way of catching up with old school friends has rapidly grown into a game-changing opportunity for brands and businesses of all sizes. Social media allows you to communicate both with your existing and a brand-new client base simultaneously. This has many benefits, and they include:

• The uncovering of valuable insights about your customer base and how they view your products, services, and brand.
• Handling complaints expediently.
• Developing a stronger value proposition by putting your brand out there and showing prospects and customers you care.

An accumulation of these benefits can be invaluable to the future of your organization.

Social media management needs to be an important part of a well-structured digital marketing strategy. In the remainder of this article, we will cover some of the core components of social media management. We will be the bridge between your social media strategy and management – whilst also teaching you the most crucial factors of running social media correctly, and how to choose which is the right platform for your particular brand. Lastly, we will cover just how important it is to plan and schedule content effectively in an attempt to reap all of the benefits that social media has to offer.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first answer the most important question:

What is Social Media Management?

Simply put, social media management is the process of deciding on, writing up, and implementing a complete social media strategy. You probably already use social media to your advantage in one way or another, but real social media management involves more than just replying to tweets and comments.

Social media management is linked to many other parts of your digital marketing strategy – as we know the only way to create an effective digital marketing strategy is by building a log of strong factual information. To create a successful business, you must know the specifics – knowing the market and how your product or service will solve the problem that market is having is essential to ensure success.

The quality of your digital marketing strategy is directly responsible for how your organization is perceived by your customer base and, arguably even more importantly, your potential customer base.

Social media management uses social media platforms to build awareness, generate leads and ultimately sales. It is an important part of running an effective social media strategy because it explains how your brand will participate on social media platforms to generate results. It can, however, be hard to ensure your approach is the right one for your organization.

Ensuring your strategy is right

A successful digital marketing strategy has a capable marketing team at its core – all with a clear and detailed understanding of their customer base. They know how their customers think. As you know, unless you know your buyers you won’t understand how to appeal to them. Knowing your customers isn’t what it used to be demographics, age, and gender are important but not key any more. It is time to move beyond them and think about what value you can offer your customers. What challenge can you solve? You need to know how they feel about the challenges they face and how they expect your solution to deliver when they commit to it.

Start by creating personas for all your different types of buyers. Doing so will help you to establish the most important challenges, needs, and desires that your buyers have – this information will allow you to produce a good social media content strategy that appeals to your customer base along their journey when on social media.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Brand

Social media platforms – as much as they look the same, really aren’t. Different platforms are designed to appeal to demographics of different age and interests. Take TikTok, for example, where 41% of its customer base is aged between 16 and 24 that is a huge portion of their customer base funnelled into such a small parameter of age.

Let’s say, for example, you are the manager of a bespoke door company, or perhaps you offer beginner IT competency lessons, TikTok would not be the platform for you. Choosing the right platform is a matter of understanding what kind of users each platform attracts, and then position your business into one (or more) of these platforms.

The easiest way to do this is by using the information you have gathered on your customers, create an account on each platform and begin your searching. Search for users, hashtags, questions, and any content that is related to the industry in which your organization resides – the more ‘hype’ and ‘chatter’ about your industry on a platform the more likely you are to attract customers there.

Collect your findings! You are deciding whether to use your valuable time on a platform or not, and ensure you make the right decision – If you find that there aren’t many users and there’s little content then move onto the next platform.

Create Your Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy is the blueprint for your brand’s presence on social media – it will determine:

• What type of content you will produce.

The content you’ll produce for social media will be determined by who your audience is and what they are interested in – this is the only way you can be sure that the engagement you will get is positive. You must appeal to individual challenges it’s no good being too broad.

Putting this in perspective, according to ‘StickyBranding’ only 3% of your market are active buyers. The remaining 97% is spread out by 7% that need your product or service but haven’t searched their options yet, 30% who don’t want to purchase right now, 30% who aren’t the perfect customer because their challenges don’t align with what your brand offers them, and 30% who don’t need what you offer and aren’t interested in your marketing.

Having the above in mind when choosing a social media strategy along with the way you manage your presence on social media will allow you to adapt in such a way that allows you to appeal to each of the above types of buyer – basically the aim is to attract the 30% who aren’t interested into adding to the 3% part of the ones that already are.

Social media management and your organization

We don’t just build websites — We develop innovative concepts and experiences for our clients. We can assist you in creating and managing a successful social media strategy. Contact our team today to see how we can help you.

¹ https://stickybranding.com/3-rule-engage-customers-before-they-need-your-services/