Social media is a large and open lake with streams of transactions and opinions flowing in all directions.
As social networks continue to attract more and more people, they deserve dedicated attention to effectively move with the waves on the platform.
Social media was expected to usher in a golden age of branding with zero reputational stains. But things turned out differently
Marketers originally thought that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social platforms would be hands-off platforms where they could place content and go on a journey without plans to return to the content.
But remember, things turned out differently. It turned out that social media would need caregiving for it to grow a brand successfully.
I can think of several reasons why the platform demands that much attention: Among other reasons, a brand needs social media management to engage its target market effectively, and to respond when positive–and negative–content appears out there concerning the brand.
Should I put it more clearly? Yes, I will. Brands use SMM to keep a finger on the pulse of their digital marketing activities –to encourage sales conversion and to also mitigate potential marketing disasters.
As a central feature of their digital marketing strategy, brands invest billions into Social media management.
Do you like to know the outcome of the investments? It allowed these companies to leapfrog hurdles and forge beneficial relationships directly with their target audience.
This article underpins the meaning of SMM, social media management tools; examples of SMM, and more.
What is Social Media Management?
SMM is the process of analyzing social media audiences and coming up with a strategy that’s tailored to them, developing and distributing content for social media timelines, monitoring online conversations, joining forces with influencers, monitoring, measuring, and giving feedback on social media performance and ROI.
All these tasks that were once trivialized by businesses have now stepped into the limelight of a brand’s marketing strategies.
Why? Because social media offers great money-making opportunities on the condition you manage your social platform in an organized, and efficient way.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Marketers
1.Top-to-middle-of-the-funnel SMM tools
Analyzing your top to the mid-funnel audience is very important. That’s because people at these stages, sometimes termed an unknown audience, are your potential buyers.
The better you know these people, the more effectively you will be able to nurture them toward conversion with tailored marketing messages.
So, which tools are available for you to wield to pull these users into the middle of your sales funnel?
Native social media analytics: The audience data you can get from social media platforms is quite comprehensive and includes:
#1. Facebook audience insights: demographics, locations, page likes, and activity.
#2. Instagram insights: top locations, days, and times when your followers are most active.
#3.Twitter analytics: demographics, consumer behavior, lifestyle, mobile footprint.
#4. LinkedIn analytics: demographics, job function, industry, seniority, company size, employment status.
#Audience Analytics: These allow you to see your Facebook audience assemble into personas based on their demographics, behaviors, and interest. As a result, you can save the time you would have to spend on manual audience research.
#2. Bottom-of-the-funnel Social Media Management tools
Analyze the users at the bottom of the funnel, which are sometimes called known audiences, and leverage customer relationship management (CRM) tools to focus on every part of the customer experience.
These will give you a better insight into the people who purchased your products, including their demographics, the touchpoints on their customer journey, and the content that eventually made them hit the purchase button.
#3. Social Media Content management tools
Content creation is a critical part of the social media management process but also a really challenging area. To make your content workflow faster, easier, and more organized, use these tools:
#1. Social media monitoring: These tools enable you to discover trending topics online that can help you track and manage conversations online about your brand.
Tools such as Hootsuite, Nexalogy, Mentionlytics, Reputology, Tweepsmap, Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro, and Talkwalker.
#2. Social media analytics: Find out what your competitors are putting out there and get inspired by some of their most successful strategies by Leveraging tools such as Sprout Social, HubSpot, TapInfluence, BuzzSumo, Snaplytics, Curalate, Keyhole, Google Analytics, ShortStack, SHIELDApp.
#3. Audience analysis: See the content your audience responds to positively by using the following audience analysis tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager, and Twitter Audience Insights.
#4. Content curation tools: find trending content online that you can repost by using Social media management tools such as Flipboard, Pocket, Elink.io; Newsletters, Twitter Lists, and Scoop.it, Feedly, Sniply, Quuu, and UpContent.
Content inspiration tools: discover dozens of top social media articles that will resonate with each of your audience personas by leveraging these tools SEMrush Marketing Calendar, Google Trends, AlsoAsked.com, Answer the Public, SparkToro, and more
Why is a Structured Social Media Management Process Important?
The business potential of social networks is massive. Brands can use social media platforms to successfully drive their goals across the marketing funnel, from raising brand awareness to enhancing store visits.
But to accomplish this, they need well-organized social media teams.
The more goals you wish to achieve through social media marketing, the more people dedicated to this platform you are going to need.
This demand will in time lead to the building of complex social media team structures.
If you are a sizeable brand, you might even have multiple teams in various offices and regions of the world, leveraging various strategies to meet different targets.
Now, how do you ensure that all these people work together holding hands to deliver maximum value from social media?
The answer is to build a structured social media management process.
Social Media Management, where do I Begin?
If you are not sure how to begin optimizing the way you manage social media – don’t worry, it’s something many marketers are confused about but I have the answers right below this line.
#1. Conducting a social media audit
A social media audit can always enhance how you manage social media in the following ways:
#1. It will offer you a granular picture of the effectiveness of your strategy
#2. It will enable you to pinpoint where you are wasting your resources
#3. It will show which social platforms are bringing in the most results
#4. It will demonstrate the influence of social media on your web results
So, how do you perform your social media health check?
#1. List all of your brand`s social media profiles, along with those from different regions and belonging to your different sub-brands.
#2. Leverage social media analytics to review your core performance metrics, such as engagement (including the average engagement rates for specific months), follower growth, publishing frequency, top-performing posts, most engaging content formats, traffic sources, community sentiment, question response rate, average response time, demographics, audience interests, and behaviors.
#3. compile all that information into a clean social media audit template.
#4. Analyze the collected data and identify areas that need improvement. For instance, if you see a decline in your engagement volume, it might be a result of poor content quality, incorrect targeting, or inaccurate publishing frequency.
That’s exactly the type of information you need to pick out shortcomings in your marketing strategy.
From there, you can take big steps towards fixing them and making your social media management activities more successful.
#2. Decide on the right social media channels
Another strategic element of managing social media more efficiently is picking the right channel.
After you are done with conducting a social media audit, it might turn out that some channels simply don’t work well for your brand.
In that case, you should invest time into understanding the effort it will take to get the desired results.
A lot also depends on where your target audience is. If during your research, you figure out your audience is mostly on Twitter, for instance, but your presence on the platform is far from good enough, then you should seek to improve.
If your results aren’t that good and your target audience is somewhere else, you might consider shifting your resources to a different platform. However, before you do, ask and answer the following questions:
#1. What are my marketing objectives (improving brand awareness, lead generation, website visits, conversions, etc.)?
Will I be able to score my marketing goals on the platform? How much will I have to spend to score my goals?
#2. Can I perform efficiently enough to generate positive returns on the platform? Will the amount be sufficient to justify the cost of advertising on the platform?
#3. What are the demographics of the users on the platform and are they matching the demographics of the audience I would like to reach?
#4. Is my audience present and active on the platform?
#5. How popular is the platform among marketers? How much content will I have to create to stand out from my competitors?
#6. Is my direct competitor present on the platform? How are they coping? Will I be able to outrank them in performance?
#3. Analyze your audience
Analyzing your social media users is everything when it comes to managing social media successfully.
There are plenty of benefits to analyzing your social media community – including building stronger customer bonds, creating more useful content, and improving social media ad conversions.
On the flip side, if you don’t do market research beforehand, you are at risk of walking on the wrong foot, wasting both time and resources.
How do you build a comprehensive picture of your social media community?
Begin by segmenting your target audience into personas according to their shared characteristics. If you want to make life easier for you, you can let AI carry out the job for you.
It’s likely that your customer personas will be scattered and diverse. For instance, you can have a group of teenagers interested in sports and a group of 32-year-olds following Digiday’s Facebook page and interact with their content.
Having this information will enable you to make better use of your resources by focusing on doing what works best for your social media community.
Conclusion
One of the most destructive mistakes a business can make is to open all possible social media accounts and then forsake maintaining an active presence on the accounts.
Without enough engagement on social media, users are likely to become bored and turned off by the business, moving on to a more engaging competitor.
When managed correctly, social media is a powerful and great marketing tool that should be a critical part of any business strategy.
Just as you would with your other marketing strategies, social media requires the same care and attention to pull in great results.
This article has underpinned so much about Social media management, you should be on your way to successful social media marketing already. Hey! remember to take along the tools suggested in the guide.
