Learn the basics of social media management for your business or product.
How to Effectively Manage Your Social Media
Social Media Management (SMM) is the process of managing online interactions and content across media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. It’s not only about posting news to the company’s social profiles, but more about establishing a connection with your target audience using the right channels and strategies.
Social Media is a powerful tool that could significantly increase your business and brand recognition. Promoting your product on social media provides a way to get to know your target audience better and to reach new audiences. Effective social media management strategy will help building your brand, promoting products and services, connecting with your customers and converting visitors to customers.
Choose the right Social Media channel for your business
Depending on the type of your business, your target audience and goals, you should choose
the right social media platform.
Let’s go through the features of the most popular social media channels.
1/ Facebook has nearly 2.7 billion monthly active users from diverse backgrounds and regions. It could be a suitable social platform for the businesses, that target a wider audience.
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2/ Instagram focuses on visual content, which is great for small and medium businesses, especially if their products are related to fashion, lifestyle or art. It’s a perfect platform if you are targeting younger or female audiences, as the number of these users is much bigger than males on this platform.
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3/ Twitter, a microblogging social network, with 321 million of active users, could be a useful platform for those businesses that would like to follow trendy topics and news on their industry. If you want to go into discussions with your customers and partners—then it is for you.
4/ YouTube is one of the biggest media platforms in the world. It allows you to upload unlimited video content and share it via other channels. You can either create your channel or utilize YouTube’s advertising.
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5/ Pinterest is based on images, so if you want to promote a product or service which is image-oriented, it’s the right platform for it. The target audience is the consumers who are interested in DIY, home improvement, fitness, nutrition or fashion.
We suggest conducting a research to shape your SMM strategy — find some latest trends and stats on social media to help you. But be careful, these indicators change very fast.
Create the right content
Content is the most important part of every marketing strategy, it is a driving force towards the customer’s sympathy. Strong pieces of content will make you more visible online, both on search engines and social media and will increase the traffic to your website. Share the entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking or educational content with your audience — to demonstrate your business values.
The right words have the power to direct your audience to the right purchase decision. Brainstorm with your team to create unique content — write impressive stories, catchy images, and promo videos. Distribute the tasks among your team based on individual strengths and set the deadlines for each of them.
Make a content schedule —
organize it in a calendar
A content calendar is the key to a streamlined and organized workflow — plan and schedule content across all of your platforms in advance (preferably a week before). You’ll know what content needs to be published, where and when, and this will save you time. The more posts you can schedule in advance, the better! Remember to include the local, national and international dates in your calendar, to mention them in your posts. This is a perfect way to engage with your followers and build a trustful relationship.
Decide how frequently
you are going to post
It is recommended to make at least one update per day for each social media (maintaining an active Twitter account, for instance, requires 3-5 tweets per day). Keep in mind the rule of 20/80: 20 percent of your updates can be self-promotional and the other 80 percent should provide some valuable information to your followers.
Research hashtags
and keywords
It is crucial to know which words you should include in your posts, to become more visible to your potential followers. Research regularly what’s trending on the different networks to incorporate the most popular hashtags into your posts (see Hashtagify or other similar tools).
Monitor your follower’s
activities
The essential element of social media is interaction with your followers and subscribers. Be it a question, comment or a private message — don’t leave it hanging. Besides, know your audience better and research what they like and follow — this will help you with further content development.
Analyze your social media
strategy
It is important to know whether your account contributes to your business or not. Some of your accounts might be doing better, but some might be lagging. To stay up-to-date, monitor your account analytics regularly. Thus, you will see if your social media strategy needs adjustments and what type of content resonates with your target audiences.
Stay positive — through good strategy, qualitative content, organized workflow, proper tools, and enthusiasm of your social media team, the opportunity
to succeed is always within your grasp.
Plan and schedule your social media content in advance
Try our Social Media Management template.
It provides a good baseline for your workflow so you don't have to start from scratch.
How to use this template?
Create a new project and choose the Social Media Management template as the starting point. All Infolio templates include some demo content. Feel free to remove it once you've familiarized yourself with the concept.
The monthly tasks are organized by weeks: "Week 1", "Week 2", "Week 3", and "Week 4". Example tasks provide general guidance, but you don't have to be too strict about it.
Group tasks by Status to see your post pipeline from idea to publishing ("Idea", "Images Needed", "Copy & Hashtags Needed", "Final Proofread Needed", "Ready for Publishing and "Published"). In this view you can easily add new statuses to your workflow or rearrange existing ones. Change the status of any task by dragging and dropping it to the corresponding column.
To see how tasks are distributed within your team, group the project by Assignee. In this view you can reassign tasks quickly by dragging and dropping them between columns.
If you need any further help or if you have suggestions about how to improve
this template, don't hesitate to let us know!
