What exactly is Social Media Management? Social Media Management, although the process is complicated in practice, it does not have to be as complicated in theory. Let’s get a gist of Social Media Management in a simpler manner through this article.
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What is Social Media Management?
If we think about it, a social media account of your business is sort of a personification of your business, isn’t it? An entity that is looking forward to expanding its brand image and values, acquiring more customers, streamlining customer services, and more. With an efficient social media management strategy, you can achieve the desired results.
Social Media Management is what the term says itself: managing your social media accounts. Managing a social media front effectively has a positive effect such as gaining more recognition and traction. Furthermore, it also forms an impression of the business caring for its own image and values along with its customers.
Social Media platforms are very effective in direct communication with your customers. So much that it has made a lot of companies consider the option since the beginning of this trend. It has changed the way we behave, communicate, and do business online. In 2022, taking your business to multiple social media platforms is a common norm. In fact, it is so effective that you will actually lag behind the competition if you do not have a social media channel for your business.
Even if you are a small business, do consider taking your business on social media platforms. There are many effective platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Here’s a fun insight! The majority of us South Africans love to communicate with businesses through WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. So, if you are considering, you can begin from there.
Related: Social Media Management in South Africa
To understand the ‘why’ behind social media management, let’s take a look at some important goals.
What are the Goals of Social Media Management?
You can consider the following as some generally important goals of Social Media Management:
- Keeping your customers satisfied and happy.
- Providing your products or services through your social media channels. (Yes, you can integrate your shops on various social media platforms.)
- Expand the reach of your business; let more and more people know about your business through social media.
- Improve your Return on Investment through Conversion Rate Optimisation.
- Resolve queries by your customers and help them in any way possible.
The main priority of your business is to sell your products and/or services. And even on a social media platform, it stays the same, right? True, but the way of doing so definitely changes. Social media platforms allow you to add a personal touch to your business that instantly makes your business approachable. And your customers can actually communicate with you or avail your services within the comforts of their homes.
The second top priority of your social media channels is to tend to your customers. That includes answering their questions, providing customer services in all stages of the funnel, or tending to their requests. A good customer service team means better, constant growth in your business. Most of your customers understand that no business is perfect. However, positive customer service will definitely help your business save such situations.
And lastly, to grow businesses on social media platforms, you will have to advertise. This costs money, of course. So, the return on investment here can be in the form of getting more followers, getting business, and so on. More on social media ROI can be found in this article by Emplifi.
What Tools can you use for Managing your Social Media Platforms?
Content Calendar
A content calendar is a tool that allows you to strategise, schedule, and keep a track of your posts and posting frequency. With a content calendar, you can plan your social media posts for a week or a month in advance. This frees up your time to move on to other important tasks such as conducting the actual business.
You can either make your own content calendar or get a third party content calendar tool like Canva or Zoho Social.
Personally, we use Google Sheets and Canva to queue and keep track of our social media posts. You can take a look at our Content Planner for South Africa here.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great social media tool that has a variety of functions, such as a content calendar, a content library, all-in-one social media communication, and posts and ad campaign trackers. If your business completely depends on social media interactions or if you really want to spread your brand globally, Hootsuite is the best tool out there that can help you.
With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple social media channels in one place, which includes post scheduling, communications and interactions, ad tracking, and your posts’ performance insights. Of course, all this comes with a price tag. Visit Hootsuite’s site for more information.
Sprout
Just like Hootsuite, Sprout is also an all-in-one social media management tool, exhibiting similar features. Manage your social media channels, answer your query from any social media platform in one place, schedule and manage your posts, and more; all in one place.
Sprout is relatively cheaper in price. In our opinion, Sprout is especially best for medium-sized businesses or businesses that are just entering the global market. To get an idea of their differences, we encourage you to read the following links:
- Sprout Social vs Hootsuite – Which is Best? (Source: Tech Co.)
- Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: Best Social Media Management 2022 (Source: Technology Advice)
Conclusion
Social media management is simple to understand yet a harder to master, arduous task. However, technological development has brought us an abundance of great social media tools to our doorstep. You can utilize them to develop a social media marketing and management strategy the way you want it. The purpose of this idea was just to scratch the surface and give you, a reader, some brief insight into what social media management is. There are way too many social media management tools that are used for different purposes (Source: Buffer).
Alternately, you can also hire a third-party agency to do this for your business. And Digital Lime Green is a third-party social media marketing agency in Cape Town, South Africa. We have been operating in South Africa for more than 4 years now. So, we can confidently say that we have a general idea of how the South African market is generally is. If you are interested, please feel free to take a look at our social media management service page or consider contacting us today!
