If you want to take your business to the next level, market it on social media. One of the critical aspects of this form of marketing is social media management. An excellent social media management strategy will provide the blueprint for managing your online presence. From content creation and scheduling to analyzing social media content and monitoring of campaign results, social media management will help you streamline your task.

What is Social Media Management?

Social media management involves managing different social media channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. It begins by creating content for your larger audience and then analyzing the results. You can choose to either do the social media management yourself or outsource it to a consultant or agency. Social media management may include but is not limited to:

• Creating social media content strategy.
• Management of an online reputation.
• Community programming and management.
• Execution of a paid social media strategy.
• Team management and development.

Social media management involves more than increasing brand awareness and understanding the latest trends. It also helps in creating personal connections with the target audience.

Who is a Social Media Manager?

It is usually the role of a social media manager to oversee a business's social media presence across different channels. The professional must also develop and implement the right strategies for enhancing audience engagement, growing followers, and increasing brand awareness. Some of the tasks that a social media manager engages in include:

• Creating, publishing, and managing social media platforms.
• Launching ad campaigns on social media.
• Monitoring and responding to their brand comments, mentions, and direct messages.
• Checking social media analytics such as engagement on TikTok.
• Reporting the results/analytics to the company decision-makers and stakeholders.

How Social Media Management Has Evolved

One of social media's key features is that it is constantly evolving. Since new platforms and trends keep arising, the responsibility of managing social media accounts also keeps changing. For instance, the creator economy has transformed how we post on social media in the last few years.

With the rise of social media messaging, the conversation has moved from public to private. This has ensured a closer connection between individuals and their favorite brands. Social commerce has also revolutionized how business leaders perceive channels, taking them from being awareness-focused to a full-funnel experience. 

Technology has also greatly impacted social media management. With the rise of AI tools, there are changes in certain areas of social media management, such as content creation, data analytics, and customer personalization. These changes are a testament that social media impacts how consumers interact with businesses, adding to the critical role of social media.

Why You Need an Effective Social Media Management

If you are wondering why social media management is essential, here are some key benefits:

Cost-effective

The cost of getting visibility on social media is meager, making social media a cost-effective advertising option. You don't need to pay anything to join social media channels, create content, or respond to user comments. The cost is minimal even when you choose to advertise on social media. 

Increasing Brand Visibility

If you have a business aiming to reach a global audience, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok offer you an unmatched opportunity. If you desire to reach a niche audience, a platform like Pinterest will enable you to do so. On the other hand, traditional advertising and marketing can’t have the same reach and cost as social media. That's why businesses need to engage in social media management.

Reach Users in Certain Stages of the Buying Journey

There are different kinds of social media marketing strategies, providing users with a wide range of strategies to reach their audience. When social media becomes part of your marketing strategy, you can easily align your marketing strategies with the user behavior. For instance, studies indicate that 74% of people use social media to guide buying decisions.

Increase Revenue

According to 80% of industry professionals, social media has impacted their brand visibility. Increased exposure on social media can help businesses get great leads.

How to Manage Social Media Accounts

Social media management is both a science and an art. You can easily understand how you spend your money and effort by checking your data. However, the fact that you are getting good results doesn't mean you will still get them tomorrow. To ensure that you are well covered, you must diversify your results. If you maintain your presence across different platforms, you will not have to worry about the latest algorithm update.

Determine Your Target Audience

You need to determine your target audience before creating social media content and tracking its performance. When you understand the people who might be interested in your products and services, you can easily focus on creating more effective messaging across different social media channels.

You can ask yourself several questions to appeal to your brand’s target audience. These are:

• Who are your current customers?
• What information do they need?
• What are their sources of this information?
• What topics are they interested in?
• What brands do they seem to trust, and what can you replicate from those brands?

Once you answer these questions, you can figure out your social media strategy. This will provide a snapshot of your platforms, the trends that appeal to your audience, and how to connect with customers. However, you should remember that understanding your audience isn't a one-day affair. You must regularly ask yourself and your team these questions to have a customer’s first approach.

Content Creation and Planning

A vital aspect of an excellent social media management strategy is content creation. According to one study, people use social media to connect with their family and friends, find new brands, get great deals, and be entertained. 68% of consumers say they only follow certain brands to remain informed of their latest products. That’s why you need a good Instagram content marketing strategy.

You can easily build a lasting connection with your audience using an excellent social media management strategy. However, the competition on social media can be fierce, as many creators are vying for your attention. As a social media manager, you must consider competition from other content creators, such as creators, media outlets, and publications. On top of the competition from your competitors, you will be competing for eyeballs with posts from your audience, friends, and relatives. After all, they will likely be more interested in watching their friends' vacation images than your ad.

You need to understand the content your audience wants to stand out from the competition. According to one study, social media users search for genuine and non-promotional content. They also need transparency on business practices, educational videos, and brand customer testimonials. While this can provide significant insights into the kind of content to create, you must also pay attention to what your audience wants.

Therefore, consider whether your audience is searching for educational or funny content. Do they want commentary on a particular topic or tips and tricks? Once you understand the kind of content your audience wants, content planning becomes easier. For instance, when you find out that your audience is more interested in short video content, you can create space for this kind of content in your content calendar.

Remember that a video is an excellent tool for capturing your audience’s attention. On the other hand, it helps to have a diversified social media marketing strategy with different kinds of content. While this may initially look overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be because you can also repurpose and reuse your content to promote your brand further. For instance, if you have a video live stream, you can use it to create dozens of text posts, GIFs, short-form video clips, and much more.

Management of Team Members

Most teams nowadays are organized according to their networks. This means that each member is usually responsible for a particular platform. If one member manages Facebook, the other oversees TikTok. While this structure has been famous for some time, it is changing due to changes in customer preferences and the emergence of new platforms. This requires teams to develop and improve social media skills to prepare for a changing landscape. There are four essential skills in social media team management:

• Reporting & analytics. As you move toward people management, you will need to focus more on your team's efforts and know how to get and analyze data.
• Time management. If you are working with a remote or hybrid team, time management can be one of the most critical skills. Project kick-offs, one-on-ones, and other tasks can affect your calendar. Therefore, you must conduct regular meeting audits and schedule designated focus hours.
• Empathy. Social media managers should stay online if there is a brand crisis, uncertain times, or world tragedies. Protect your team from social media burnout. Ensure that mental health remains at the core of your conversations.
• Feedback. If you want to improve the performance of your workplace culture, you need to receive regular feedback. According to a Gallup poll, employees are 3.6 times more likely to agree that they are motivated to perform excellent work when they get daily feedback than annual feedback.

Reputation Management

You may have probably decided to buy from a company but were put off by its poor online reputation. When that happens, most customers never follow up with buying from the same company. According to one study, 91% of customers make a purchasing decision based on a brand review. They also use social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to research a business.

Online reputation management should be essential to social media management. While it is among the core functions of social media managers, this is a skill they need to have for the success of their marketing efforts. When doing reputation management, there are three rules to guide you. These are:

Be tactical in asking for a review

You don't have to wait for reviews to come on their own. You need to reach out to happy customers to leave them. Ensure that you make it super easy for them to drop their review. Add a particular template or prompt to increase the customer's interest.

Be responsive to all customer reviews

Some reviews will be positive, while others will be negative. You don't have to ignore any of them. Customers are more likely to purchase from a company that responds to positive and negative reviews than from another that doesn't. While it's not always easy to respond to negative reviews, it can be a great way of showing customers that you have their feedback.

Be proactive

Feedback doesn’t always appear on direct channels. People often discuss your business on their social media profiles without necessarily mentioning or tagging your brand name. To stay informed of the conversations around the industry or business, you must actively have a social listening strategy. You can use social listening tools to control your brand reputation and leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Customer Care

Good customer care on social media is crucial to reputation management. Additionally, it can help increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. According to one study, most customers take note and love it when companies show concern about their issues. They also suggest that they prefer companies that provide them with personalized responses to their queries.

To address their customers’ needs, social management teams should be proactive in handling customer issues. They can do that by:

• Having a self-service center.
• Creating educational content on products and services.
• Interacting with customers throughout their buyer’s journey.
• Responding to complaints, questions, and concerns by customers.

Your social team can provide good customer service and minimize potential issues by staying responsive and giving enough resources.

Influencer Marketing

In the last few years, we have seen a large transformation in how influencer marketing is done. Many brands are now collaborating with influencers with a sizable following in different niches and sizes, helping them build trust and appeal to a bigger audience.

A crucial part of social media marketing involves understanding how to find and choose the right influencer. Additionally, social media managers must understand how to track influencers' performance. They also need to understand the influencer marketing trends highly relevant to their industries and target audience.

The Role of Social Media Management Tools 

Social media management with essential tools can be challenging, as there is much to do, including sharing content, replying to customer messages, and managing paid ads. That is why businesses need to invest in the best social media management tools. Some of the benefits of social media management tools include:

• Enhanced brand awareness as a result of optimized posts that improve performances.
• Having your messages in one consolidated place can result in greater engagement. When inbound messages are received in a centralized location, they result in a faster response time.
• Better analytics offer a holistic view of your social media strategy’s performance.
• Automation results in better time saving, and different capabilities, such as post-scheduling, allow you to manage several social media accounts from a single dashboard. This also means you don't need to log into multiple platforms separately.
• Better collaboration in assigning tasks, approval workflows, and editorial calendars can improve content creation and posting schedules.

Therefore, you can improve your whole social media management process by using the latest social media management tools.

Best Social Media Management Tools

Now that you understand the importance of using the best social media management tools, here are the top ones to consider.

Buffer 

While it started as a social media scheduling tool, Buffer has undergone several upgrades, taking your social media management to the next level. The tool supports social media accounts like Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, and Mastodon. It integrates well with Shopify, enabling you to see the effect of your social media posts on your store.

Buffer will enable you to complete several social media management tasks, such as:

• Creating a posting schedule.
• Scheduling your social media posts.
• Managing different social media accounts.

The tool is also a mobile app to ensure hassle-free social media management. It integrates with many tools to take social sharing to the next level. While it's a paid tool, it also offers a free version for beginners. If you are a free user, you can only connect a maximum of three accounts.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a complete solution for all your social media management needs. It can be an excellent choice for performing a wide range of tasks, such as:

• Monitoring your inboxes.
• Boosting your post-advertising campaigns.
• Monitoring DM messages from different accounts.

One of HootSuite's benefits over other apps is that it offers full support of X. It will enable you to reply to your tweets from one place, track your mentions, and see what your competitors post about. In addition to X, the tool supports other social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

While the tool doesn't come cheap, its analytics tools will provide a good view of how your accounts perform. It will show you the key statistics from other industries to enable you to understand your performance against the competition. It also has an AI content creation feature to enable you to repurpose your top posts, get inspired, and even write posts. 

SocialPilot

One of the downsides of many social media management tools is that they don't come cheap. For instance, if you go with Hootsuite, you can expect to pay at least $3,000 annually for a team of three, which means the tool may be out of reach if you are on a budget. Fortunately, you don't have to give up because SocialPilot is well suited for small businesses on a budget as it comes with plans starting from $50 a month. Despite that, you can add up to two team members to manage up to 20 accounts.

While it has a more straightforward user interface, SocialPilot has everything you need to manage a wide range of social media accounts, such as Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Tumblr, and Google My Business. The tool has a sidebar where you can manage your account and posts. You can also see your analytics from one place and line up RSS feed content. Finally, it lets you configure your team and set up your client.

SocialPilot enables you to assign different team members' roles depending on your goal. For instance, you can set things up to help content creators to submit their post approvals while allowing managers to schedule and edit posts. At the same time, you can maintain your final approval. You can also delegate responsibilities to those you are working with while controlling their work.

Conclusion

If you want to simplify your social media management task, use the best social media management tools. These tools allow you to manage all your social media accounts from one place, ensuring you never miss an important update. However, different tools have different features. Therefore, if you want to find the best tool, choose one that is best suited to your needs. If you are unsure of which one, you can pick one of the options above. We recommend you read our guide on Instagram marketing tips.