Social media wears many faces, and there’s a lot to keep track of, especially when you are using social media to market your business. Managing social media channels can be time consuming, complex, and downright confusing, which is why the SocialNicole team are sharing our tried and true tips for managing social media. With tips ranging from staying present, to producing quality content and mastering engagement, down to the nitty gritty details of analytics, read on for our top tips to help you master social media management.
1. Social Media Management: Be Present
This may be the simplest (but not necessarily the easiest) tip we can offer. In order to get the most out of your business’s social media channels, you need to be active and present on them. To get the responses and engagement you want on your platforms means putting in time and effort on your end. Luckily, we have some methods and tricks to make it a little easier for you.
a. Social Media Management: Stay Relevant
First you need to ensure that your pages stay relevant. Pay attention to what’s trending or time-sensitive, but also to the types of evergreen content that can be shared again and again. Post content that your audience will find relevant to themselves and their lives. When you do this you become more relatable, which means your audience is more likely to engage. Remember that your followers don’t want to feel like they’re interacting with a robot, so don’t be afraid to show the humanness of your brand, whether that means cracking jokes, taking advantage of emojis, or just talking like you would to your actual friends.
b. Social Media Management: Remain Consistent
You may have heard it before, but consistency is key. You shouldn’t blast twelve tweets one day then going radio silent the next. Ideally you should be posting every day, and you should spread out your posts so that you have content being shared regularly throughout the day, not all at once. You also want to achieve a balance with your content. Make sure you aren’t posting too much of one kind of content and not enough of another. We like to use content calendars to map out our monthly content so that we can see exactly what’s being shared on each day and stagger out our messages appropriately. An especially helpful tip for doing so is to schedule messages in advance, using a scheduling tool.
c. Social Media Management: Use Scheduling Tools
Scheduling tools are great for letting you appear present all the time, even when you’re not. Use these tools to schedule posts throughout the day or even the whole month, timing your posts so that they get the maximum amount of engagement. You can even schedule retweets or comments to go out when you’d like them to. This way, you can put more thought and strategy into your posts and publish them when they can be most effective. There are tons of scheduling tools out there for social media, but we love platforms like Buffer and Sprout Social, especially for social media on a budget. You can also draft and schedule posts directly in Facebook for no extra cost. You can do this under the “Publishing Tools” tab on your Facebook page. But before you get scheduling, let’s talk a little more about content.
*NOTE: It’s essential you check in on your social media channels EVERY SINGLE day. Do not schedule and forget. It’s important to be present and answering questions.
2. Social Media Management: Produce Quality Content
You can’t run your company’s social media without content, and the kind of content you share may be what makes or breaks your social media presence. You should be posting the kind of content that your followers want to like and comment on, share with their friends, and see more of in the future. Those are the reactions that will increase your brand recognition, drive more traffic to your website, and create a more loyal community of customers. How does one generate such content? We’re glad you asked…
a. Social Media Management: Quality over Quantity
Though it’s important to be present like we talked about above, hurling a constant stream of content at your followers won’t help anything if it’s not quality content. People are hit with content all day long, whether it’s through news outlets, text and emails, or their multiple social media feeds, and the only reason anyone will care enough to engage with your content is if you know how to make it valuable and meaningful to them.
You can do this by pin-pointing which specific audience you’re trying to reach. If you’re so vague that you’re aiming for everybody, you might not hit anybody. Know your target audience well enough to know what is valuable and worthwhile for them. Tailor your content to their interests and needs, their language and aesthetic. Pay attention to what they respond to and what they don’t, and let your social media pages be an extension of what you can provide to your customers as a business.
b. Social Media Management: Curated Content and Created Content
To publish the best content on your channels, you should understand the different types of content and know how to take advantage of both. Created content is your business’s original content. It’s your photos, your messages, your blog posts and web pages. These are great for really individually crafting your content for your followers and letting them see who you are as a business. The majority of the content you share will probably be your own, but it would be ignorant to think that your own content is the only kind worth sharing. That’s where curated content comes in.
Curated content is content you share from others, whether it’s in the form of blog posts and articles, or posts and retweets. Sharing content can make your account more diverse and interesting, allow you to share relevant topics you may not be an expert on, and can create beneficial relationships with other content creators. Plus, sharing is a great way to get people to engage with and share your content in return. You can find shareable content by following relevant accounts and pages. At SocialNicole, we have tools for finding shareable content that we like to use as well.
c. Social Media Management: Helpful Tools
Tools like Feedly are a great way to find and organize feeds of blogs, articles, and podcasts from reputable sources, all of which make prime curated content. See the latest posts and articles from a huge range of bloggers, websites, and news sources and schedule them right to your social media feed. Feedly allows you to create your own custom feeds of the publications you are interested in and want to follow, and Feedly will even suggest publications, which may help you discover a valuable new source. This is a great way to increase your presence and provide valuable content to your followers, but remember to review the content you are sharing and the sources you are sharing from, to remain a trusted source for your own followers.
3. Social Media Management: Mastering Engagement
Engagement is a leading goal when it comes to social media, and the amount and quality of engagement your business receives has a lot to do with how you manage. What goes around comes around, so the more you’re engaging with others, the more likely they are to engage with you. If you’re curious what your exact role is on this two-way street, read on.
a. Social Media Management: Responding to Comments
One of the easiest, but often overlooked, steps of engagement is to interact with others who are already engaging with you. This means liking and responding to comments, favorite-ing and replying to tweets, and simply letting your followers know that someone is there and listening. Be active by responding to mentions and thanking people for sharing. Interact by “liking” other people’s pages and inviting them to like yours. When it comes to social media, you get out of it what you put into it. Whether it means answering questions or just replying with a smiley face, practice the kind of engagement you want to receive.
However, you do get to be a little choosy about what kinds of comments you want to respond to and how you choose to respond. It’s ok to hide, or even block, users who you feel are misrepresenting the values of your brand on your channels, or anyone who makes you or your other followers uncomfortable. You may want to remove any profane, discriminatory, or otherwise offensive material that could damage your brand and give people a bad impression of your channels.
b. Social Media Management: Experimenting
Another great way to foster engagement is to experiment. Play around with your content and see what leads to the most responses. Whether it’s photo or video, inspirational or humorous, see what makes your audience react or gets their attention. There are endless possibilities for content out there, so play around to find out what gets people talking and what gets crickets. Another important note: social media is perpetually evolving, so never stop doing this. You will need to continually test strategies and make adjustments. Don’t let yourself become stagnant, because if you do your audience engagement will certainly follow your lead.
c. Social Media Management: Ask Your Followers to Engage
Perhaps the most obvious, but sometimes not so obvious, way to get your followers to engage is to simply ask them. That’s right–post content that garners a response. Ask questions and encourage your followers to answer in the comments, create polls for them to participate in, or offer giveaways which ask them to post or share in order to win. By creating scenarios that get your followers active and involved, you foster loyalty to your brand and generate additional exposure for your business. Get creative and see how many different ways you can ask your community to respond, and then don’t forget to reply and engage with the answers you receive. Keeping the conversation going just gives you more opportunities to connect and invest in your followers.
4. Social Media Management: Analytics
In order to really know what’s working and what’s not, you need to be looking at the numbers. This is where social media analytics come in. This is data tracked by most social media platforms to indicate your engagement levels. Yes, we know that it can be intimidating and confusing, but you don’t have to be an expert to learn from what the analytics are telling you, and the confidence will come the more you work with analytics. Being informed means that you can manage your social media channels based on hard data rather than hunches, which can in turn lead to serious growth for your company!
a. Social Media Management: How Analytics Can Help You
With social media analytics, you can measure the growth as well as the effectiveness of your social media channels. With this information in hand, you can move forward to improve brand awareness, drive profits, and receive a higher ROI (return on investment). Not only do analytics let you know what’s working and what’s not, but they also help you track your progress and know how to better allocate your time.
The basics you should familiarize yourself with and start using are Twitter analytics, Facebook Analytics, and some basic data offered by LinkedIn, and we at SocialNicole also use Google Analytics to gather our metrics, but there are many other options for providing analytics and even helping you interpret the data you’re looking at.
b. Social Media Management: Analyzing Your Numbers
With these tools you can discover information like number of page views, page likes, post engagements, page followers, and reach. You can also learn more about your followers by tracking them over time, seeing when they’re most active, and seeing when they’re not engaging. You can assess what content was effective and what was ignored. Analyzing the numbers ensures that you’re not just taking a shot in the dark, but looking at and learning from actual results. By taking the time to analyze how your content performs, you can take steps to guarantee your content is successful in the future.
From analyzing the data, to producing quality content, to actively and consistently engaging with your followers, we know that managing social media is a lot to juggle. That’s why it’s important that you remember to take a breath and try to have fun with it when you can. The more authentic and human you can be to those on the other side of the screen, the better. You’re trying to connect with people, after all. So trust your gut, listen to what your followers are saying, and we’re confident that you’ll see results.
For those who still have concerns or lack the time to really care for your business’s social media, did you know that SocialNicole is a full-scale social media marketing agency? And that we manage social media channels with many of the same strategies we’ve been sharing above? We have years of expertise and experience behind us, and we would love to hear from you about partnering with your business to take your social media presence to the next level. Don’t hesitate to contact us today!