The task of managing social networking sites has become one of the main and indispensable tasks within any business, whatever its size. Today, there are about 3.78 billion social media users around the world and this number is rising annually. Thus, it is imperative that you learn how to manage social networks in an effective way to reach the largest number of your potential customers.
What is social media management?
The management of social networking sites is a strategy consisting of a set of steps, including, for example: creating, publishing, and analyzing content on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms. In addition to interacting with users and responding to them in order to strengthen relations with them. Some free and paid tools can be used in this process to save time and effort and improve productivity.
The importance of managing social media
Here are the most important advantages of being on social media sites that benefit your company and your business:
Here are the most important advantages of being on social media sites that benefit your company and your business:
- Increase brand awareness
Brand Awareness Indicator refers to an increase in the number of audiences and potential customers that learn about your brand by hearing its name. For example: as soon as you see the yellow letter M for McDonald’s, you automatically recognize it because of a previous McDonald’s brand awareness. Increasing brand awareness contributes to reaching a new segment of customers who are present on different social media. - Keeping the brand in mind
Managing social media accounts helps you connect with your potential customers and audience every time they access their accounts, making them happy to see new useful and informative content. Thus, over time, it becomes an essential part of their interests on social networks, which enhances the stay of your brand in their minds for a long time. - Strengthening human relationships between your customers and your brand
There is a certain negative stereotype among some people on social media regarding companies, as some of them believe that these companies are just using them to raise money. But if your company is present on social media, this creates a kind of human connection between the brand and the audience, which humanizes this relationship and leads to an increase in mutual trust, which leads to an increase in sales and customer conversion rates.
What are the most important tools used in managing social media accounts?
There are many tools that enable you to manage all your accounts on social media platforms from one place. It allows automation of tasks to be performed faster and more efficiently, such as scheduling and organizing posts. Most notable of these tools are:
- Hootsuite Tool
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media account management tools, especially in the analysis process. The tool supports more than 35 different social media platforms, and includes several features, the most important of which are ROI measurement, running ads on the platforms, the ability to extract keywords suitable for targeting, and other advantages. - Buffer Tool
Buffer is simple and easy to use tool, suitable for individuals and small businesses to reach their goals through social media platforms. The tool provides strong technical support to its clients, allows creation and management of advertising campaigns, and the creation of landing pages. In addition to preparing analyzes and reports to improve performance and increase followers. - Sprout Social
Sprout Social is among the few social media management tools that offer CRM features, which make it easier for businesses to have complete profiles of their customers, helping them serve better, and build stronger relationships with them. It is characterized by its ability to prepare detailed reports for presentation to clients or social media account managers without the need to edit them. - Social pilot
Social Pilot is one of the best tools for small teams and offers the ability to manage at least 10 social media accounts with any plan. In addition, you can easily find relevant trending content on social media in various fields by keyword search. - Sendible Tool
Sendible is the most popular social media account management tool for large agencies. It provides many features, the most important of which are integration options with a large number of different tools and platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Canva, Google Drive, Google Analytics, in addition to WordPress, and others.
What are social media account management services?
There are some basic services that companies need to effectively manage their social media accounts, to ensure that they achieve the desired results. Notable among them are:
- Create company and brand accounts
The company account creation service takes care of creating its commercial identity on various social media accounts. It involves creating and developing a brand personality, which includes what the company is and values, the promises it makes to the public, its story and mission, and so on. Such information makes it clear to the public what kind of products or services the brand is offering to the public as well. - Advertising campaign management
An advertising campaign is a marketing effort focused on a specific message and goal. You may have more than one ad campaign running simultaneously on social media, for example one to build brand awareness, and another to sell a new product or service. Advertising campaign management includes some miscellaneous tasks, such as planning, execution and tracking, as well as campaign analysis to improve performance and measure results. - Content management
Digital content plays an essential role in achieving corporate goals on social media. It helps in engaging the audience, introducing them to the brand, conveying the marketing message to them, generating leads, as well as building long-term relationships with customers. Content management includes several services, such as preparing a content strategy, publishing and scheduling social media posts, designing posts and videos, and others. - Community Management Service
Communities are made up of existing and potential customers, and all the people who interact with your brand online. Examples include Facebook groups, YouTube forums, and others.
Community managers do not speak on behalf of the brand, but as individuals with their own personal accounts. Their activities include many tasks, the most important of which are adding or removing members, supervising community content, interacting with users and answering their inquiries, understanding customer problems and collecting their opinions. In addition to organizing brand related events for community members.
- Customer service and technical support
Customers expect corporate and brand accounts to interact with them when they ask about a specific product or service, or if there is a problem after completing a purchase. Therefore, any company, whatever its size, must have a team of customer service and technical support to respond and answer customers and solve their problems, this may be through comments or incoming messages. - Managing social media accounts
The social media account manager is responsible for managing and supervising the mentioned services, for example, following up with the content administrator on what he publishes, supervising the performance of advertising campaigns, etc. It has some other tasks, such as:
- Preparing the company’s social media marketing strategy, depending on the brand’s goals.
- Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for social media campaigns and make recommendations for improving performance.
- Constantly follow social media trends to keep pace with market changes and customer requirements.
- If you do not have the time or sufficient experience to manage your company’s accounts, you can hire a social media manager through Freelance, the largest freelance platform in the Arab world, to help your brand appear in front of potential customers in the best way. During this, make sure to follow up regularly to ensure that the workflow is in line with the company’s goals.
5 steps to create a social media management plan for your company
Here are the most important basic steps that will enable you to prepare a social media management plan for your company or business:
First, setting goals
Setting goals is one of the most important steps of the social media account management plan, as all next steps will be based on it, in addition to its importance in following up on its progress and measuring the return on investment (ROI).
The SMART goal setting strategy (SMART) can be used to set goals, which is one of the most popular and effective ways to set SMART goals, especially in the business world. According to the Smart Goals strategy, your goals should meet 5 basic conditions. Each letter is an abbreviation of one of the conditions as follows:
Specific goals: The goals should not be vague or general in general, but they should be specific goals that cannot be interpreted.
Measurable: Objectives must have the criteria to be measured so that you can track progress, determine your progress, and measure your return on investment at the end of the plan.
Achievable: Your goals must be realistic and achievable. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to have your company become the best company in its field within its first year.
Relevant: Objectives should be meaningful to you and relevant to the company’s vision and goals.
Time-bound: Objectives must have deadlines.
The idea of the smart goals strategy can be illustrated through a practical example. For example, your goal could be to raise the conversion rate in your store to 5% within 6 months by relying on influencer marketing on the Instagram platform as part of the plan to increase sales for your online store.
Second, use metrics that reflect the real value
Some beginners make a common mistake while implementing a social media management plan, as they rely on metrics that are not based on real and reliable value to measure achievement. For example it is not reliable to use the numbers of followers and likes only. But you should rely on other effective tools such as: click-through rate, conversion rate, number of shares, hashtag performance…etc.
Furthermore, you should take care to use the appropriate metric for the social media platform you are using in your marketing plan. Case in point: If you use Facebook, the CPC indicator is a common success indicator for this platform, and if you use Instagram to increase your brand awareness, for example, you will need to track your Instagram Stories view count and so on with other platforms.
Third: Determine the type of your target audience
The step of choosing social media platforms is one of the most important steps of the social media account management strategy, as some marketers make a common mistake in this step, which is to create social media accounts randomly without specifying and knowing the target audience and what kind of content they want to see?
You should first define a buyer persona, which is a profile that includes the most important characteristics of the ideal customer for your company or business that you should target. You should know about your customer, for example, some of the following characteristics such as age, gender, geographic location, educational level, financial status (average monthly income), job title, interests, and other characteristics.
Defining your target audience helps you understand their goals, buying patterns, behavioral traits, pain points, and other characteristics, which help you a lot during the process of marketing your products and services to them, facilitate the sales process, and increase conversion rates and return on investment.
For example: If you sell women’s body care products to well-known brands, it makes sense that your target audience would be women, the upper middle class, and wealthy people who are interested in beauty and body care. Specific and good targeting helps you reduce marketing expenses, which ultimately increases your rate of return on investment.
Fourth: Choosing the right social media platforms
After you have determined the type of your target audience based on your business in the previous step, start identifying the appropriate social media platforms for you according to the type of your audience. For example: If you own a small business to sell products suitable for teenagers and young adults, you can rely on the Instagram and Tik Tok platforms, as these two categories are abundant on both platforms, which results in a high conversion rate and high sales.
Another example: if your business requires you to shoot short videos while preparing products to interest and interact with your potential customers such as accessories. You can rely on the Tik Tok platform if you do not have a sufficient marketing budget because the videos on it spread quickly for free, or you can rely on Instagram and Facebook stories.
Additionally, you can use your competitors to analyze their social media management plans. Thus, you have a comprehensive view of the most popular social media platforms for your target audience. Your competitors may be using an effective platform while you are not focused enough on this platform, therefore you should always take advantage of competitors to develop your social media management strategy.
Fifth: Social media content management
Creating the right content for your audience on social media is one of the most important steps that contribute to the success of your company’s social media account management plan, and here are some tips to do it better:
- Be sure to diversify your posts
Your potential customers have different tastes in the type of posts they expect to see on your company’s social media accounts. Thus, you should provide them with what they want by diversifying the content published on your accounts. You can also analyze and follow up on competitors in the market to know the quality of their popular content that interacts with the strength of the target customer segment.
For example: share with them stories and posts that are trending at the moment, as this method helps to reach a new segment of potential customers if the content goes viral on social media platforms. You can also share short videos on Instagram and Tik Tok due to the high demand of the public in the recent period and a large number of its participation. And don’t forget to take into account the image dimensions of different social media platforms if you post content that includes images.
In addition, you can use contests and challenges with followers, if this type of post will appeal to a large segment of potential customers, especially if you are marketing products or services that target the economy and middle class. In addition, use posts with a human side that represent your brand, as a large segment of customers appreciate this type of post in social networks.
- Use a tone of voice consistent with your brand
Brand tone of voice is the way you speak to your potential customers and audience, and it includes certain terms and words that differentiate your brand and company from competitors. For example, your brand’s tone of voice could be a certain hashtag, frequent use of emojis in a post, or public speaking in a humorous, comical, or formal tone, among other distinguishing features.
Your brand’s tone of voice helps you influence your audience and potential customers, making them feel that the relationship between you and them is human and not just based on commercial benefit. In addition, it contributes to the consolidation of trust between you and your audience to make your brand distinctive and unique among competitors, and this makes it easier for your company to reach new customers in the market.
- Scheduling publications and responding to clients
Publishing posts randomly is one of the most important mistakes to be aware of and avoid while implementing your company’s social media account management plan, as it helps to reach the largest possible audience and customers since they are aware of when to post.
Thus, their interaction on publications is greater. Moreover, do not neglect to respond to and interact with your customers especially the negative comments of customers on your company’s social media accounts.
- Do not neglect the CTA
You will not benefit the customer if they see your post and then continue browsing online without taking any particular action, don’t expect them to. The call to action varies depending on each company’s goals and what it wants its customers to do. Do you want the customer to share the post? Do you want him to click on a link? Or do you want him to message you to get the offer?
In order to be successful in managing the content of social media accounts, you must create useful and high-quality content for your audience in order to successfully communicate the message and vision of your brand to your customers. In order to save time and effort, you can hire a professional content writer through an independent platform, the largest freelance platform in the Arab world, to prepare content for social media accounts consistent with your brand.