For businesses planning to expand their brand online, specifically on social networking sites, it’s important that you learn about social media management. After all, it’s an essential part of engaging with your existing consumer base and potential consumers.
Learning how to manage your social media profile/s will help you develop your online community and further expand your business’s reach, influence, and awareness, helping you sell more products and services as well as strengthen your online reputation.
Before we dive deeper into what you need to do to effectively manage your own social media account, let’s first define what it is and some of the benefits your company will get from it.
What is Social Media Management?
Social Media Management is the process of managing a brand’s online presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. It involves the analysis of audiences and the development of a social media marketing strategy based on their preferences and interests.
Apart from that, it also entails the creation and distribution of content, community monitoring, partnering with influencers, providing assistance to consumers, and the reporting, analysis, and measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs) and return of investment (ROI).
Benefits of Social Media Management
If done properly, here are some of the benefits that you’ll get from incorporating social media management in your overall strategy for digital marketing in the Philippines:
- Extended Reach – The social media platform allows you to connect to an almost-infinite global audience, which you can turn into your consumers with the right social media management strategy.
- Cost-Effectiveness – Unlike traditional forms of marketing, social media marketing offers cheaper rates when it comes to ad campaigns. It also provides you access to millions (if not billions) of potential consumers.
- Helps You Get Established – Because social media offers a more convenient way to communicate with customers and potential clients—without the constraints of time and distance—brands can quickly respond and interact with users, which helps them establish their online presence as a brand.
- A Great Marketing Tool – The vast reach and relatively inexpensive services that social media offers when it comes to marketing make it one of the ideal tools for businesses who want to expand their brand and promote their products to a global audience.
Managing a Social Media Account: 8 Steps You Need to Follow
According to top social media management agencies in the Philippines, these are the steps you need to follow to successfully manage your brand’s social media account or page:
Step 1: Know Who You Are
The first step to an effective social management strategy is getting to know yourself as a brand. Before anyone else, you should spend time trying to learn the ins and outs of your business—your mission, core values, your goals, intention, and more.
Through exploring what you are, you get an idea of how the public perceives you. What this allows is a chance for you to shape people’s opinions of your brand, which you can accomplish through effective social media management.
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
Before managing a social media page, you need to recognize the people you want to appeal to—your audience. After all, they’re the ones who’ll be on the receiving end of your social media management efforts—from content, marketing campaigns, engagement techniques, and more.
If you don’t know who you want to impress or target on social media, your efforts will be in vain and everything you’ll do will fall on deaf ears.
Here are the factors you need to consider when narrowing down your target audience:
- Demographics – This includes age, gender, race, and socioeconomic information like education, employment, and more.
- Likes – Take time trying to understand your audience, specifically the things they like to do, their hobbies, and the topics they want to discuss.
- Problem – This is where you come in. The service or product that you provide should offer an answer to the challenges currently being faced by your chosen audience.
Step 3: List Your Goals
When it comes to social media management, setting goals is a must. After all, it serves as both a guide and a metric for success when managing social media accounts or pages.
The more goals you achieve and cross off your list, the closer you are to your target outcome. We recommend you use the SMART method when creating your management goals, which is a great way of narrowing down what you want to do. It stands for:
- Specific – List down the things you want to accomplish.
- Measurable – Make sure that your goals are measurable so you can track their progress.
- Achievable – Don’t aim for something too far-fetched. Make your goals realistic and attainable.
- Relevant – Ensure that the goals you’re setting matter to you, specifically your brand.
- Time-Bound – Your goals need to have a target date or period of completion. This makes sure that you stay motivated and have something to work toward.
Step 4: Pick the Right Platforms
Not every social networking site will mesh well with your brand and the business that you have. So, make sure that you determine which platform/s are frequented by your target audience.
Step 5: Interact with Your Community
To be effective in social media management, you need to always engage with your consumers. And that not only involves publishing regular content or ads, but it also requires you to provide a customer experience unlike any other.
Here’s a list of the things that you need to do to effectively engage with your audience on social media:
- Answer questions and respond to comments (about your product or service)
- Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
- Create discussions (that your audience will find interesting)
- Organize online events (contests, meetings, and others)
Step 6: Deliver Compelling Content
To get the attention of your target audience and community, you need to constantly churn out content. After all, online, content is considered king.
However, you can’t just release content without care. You have to make sure that it’s up to standard, truthful, and offers value to your consumers.
Also, don’t be a one-trick pony. Diversify your content. Use infographics, pictures, reels, videos, vlogs, and more to deliver your message. Doing it this way will preserve your audience’s interest and make them come asking for more.
Step 7: Employ Ads
While you certainly can opt to do things for free on social media, it won’t give you the results you want fast. If you want to penetrate the social media scene and embed yourself in the long-term memory of your customers and potential clients, you have to employ advertisements, specifically targeted ads.
Targeted ads will help you reach people that matter most to your brand without having to go through everyone else. It also costs less compared to general ads.
Social media platforms come equipped with ad tools that you can use to create advertisements or campaigns for your brand.
Step 8: Keep Tabs on Your Metrics
Of course, to make sure that your social media management efforts are making a difference and are working, you should always keep an eye out for metrics, specifically the ones that matter. It should include:
- Conversions
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Response rate
However, don’t overdo it. Results don’t just magically come to you, after all. Allow your social media management strategy to do its thing and come back periodically to check in.
Rinse and Repeat!
As we’ve mentioned earlier, success on social media does not come quickly—even if you have an effective social media management strategy. You also need to put in the effort and time to reach your goals.
Also, you need to be consistent with everything and slowly, but surely, develop your community! Be patient and you’ll surely get the results that you want!
(P.S. Besides social media management, you should also put focus on search engine optimization (SEO), which is the best way to rank up on Google’s Search Results. If you don’t know where to start, you can get in touch with SEO services in the Philippines, who’ll help you set up and get started!