How to handle social media like a pro: A comprehensive guide

As someone in charge of social media, you have an extremely busy life. Between building effective strategies and overseeing multiple social media accounts, you need to stay on top of finding new ways to grow your business, and be able to report on your progress and all while under the stress of time. If this weren't difficult enough your social media team are growing via Inflact. That means you'll need solid management know-how to build efficient workflows that produce outcomes. It's easy to get too much. So, we've developed this step-by-step guide explaining how to handle social media with more efficiency - from persona analysis and content creation to listening.

 

What is the term "social media management?

Social media management is the act of analyzing the social media audience and establishing a strategy specific to their needs, creating and distributing content for social media profiles, keeping track of online conversations, collaborating with influencers and providing community service, and monitoring, measuring and monitoring the social media performance and ROI.

All these tasks, that were previously viewed as unimportant by companies are now in the spotlight of companies' marketing strategies.

Why? Because social media offers great earning opportunities - under the conditions that you manage your social channels efficiently and organized way.

 

What is the reason why an efficient social media management process important?

The business potential of social networks is vast. Brands can utilize the social platforms in order to drive their objectives across the marketing funnel, from raising awareness of their brand to increasing visits to stores.

However, in order to accomplish this, they need skilled team members for social media. The more goals you want to achieve with marketing via social media, the more people dedicated to this channel you are going to require. This will eventually cause the development of complicated social media team structures.

If you're a major company, it is possible that you have multiple teams across various locations and offices around the world, using various strategies to meet different targets.

Now, how do you ensure all these players work closely to get the most benefit from social media?

The answer is: build an efficient management of social media process.

 

Social media management How do I begin?

If you're unsure of how you can begin to optimize your social media management - don't worry. Many marketers are unsure about. To be able to start off on the right foot, you need to do three important things:

Conduct an audit of social media

Select the appropriate social media platform

Analyze your target audience

What is the reason we have outlined these three tasks in particular?

Since they will give you the essential information which will direct your social media marketing efforts in the proper direction. Therefore, you'll have the ability to focus your efforts on strategies that work and eliminate the ones that don't.

Let's look more closely at each job:

Conducting a social media audit

A social media audit will help you improve your management of social media:

It will give you a granular picture of the effectiveness of your strategy

It will help you determine where you're spending your resources

It will highlight which social networks are bringing the greatest outcomes

It will demonstrate the impact the social networks have on web outcomes

How do you go about performing your social media health check?

The first step is to list all your company's social media profiles, including those from different areas and belonging to various sub-brands.

Step 2: Use social media analytics for a review of the key performance indicators you have including the growth of followers and engagement (including the average rate of engagement for specific months) and publishing frequency. most engaging formats for content Top-performing posts, traffic sources, community sentiment, response rate the average response time, demographics, audience interest, and behaviors.

Step 3: Collect all of the data into an organized and tidy social media audit templates.

 

Step 4: Evaluate the data to identify areas where you could benefit from improvement. For instance, if, for example, you see a dip in your engagement It could be the result of poor content quality or a misguided targeting or wrong publishing frequency.

This is precisely the type data that will help you point out shortcomings in your strategy. From there, you'll be able begin to take the first steps in solving them and making your social media management processes more efficient.

Select the appropriate social media platforms

Another vital aspect of managing social media effectively is picking the right platform.

When you conduct a social media audit, it could transpire that certain platforms aren't working for your company. In that situation you must be aware of the work required to achieve the results you want.

A lot also depends on where your audience is. If, during your investigation, you find out your audience is predominantly on Twitter for instance, but your presence on Twitter isn't as strong It is advisable to strive to improve your presence.

If your results aren't that good and your target audience is somewhere else, you might think about shifting your efforts to a new channel. But before you do, ask yourself the following questions:

What are my business objectives (improving brand recognition as well as lead generation, site traffic, conversions and so on.)? Can I reach my goals through the platform? What amount will I need to spend to meet my objectives?

Will I be able to achieve a high level of efficiency to create positive ROI from the platform? Does the amount I earn be sufficient to justify the cost of marketing through the platform?

What are the demographics of the users on the platform and are they in line with the demographics of my target audience? be able to

Is the target audience of my campaign active and present on the platform? Will I be able to successfully reach them?

How popular with marketers is the platform? How much content will I need to make to stand out?

Is my direct competition present there? What are their performance? Are I able to surpass them?

If you're looking for help choosing the best platform for your business Here's a quick guide from Socialbakers (now an affiliate of Emplifi):

 

Analyze your target audience

Monitoring your social media audience is everything when managing your social media effectively. There are numerous advantages to analyzing your followers - such as building stronger customer relationships, creating better content that is relevant, as well as boosting social media conversions.

On the other hand, if you do not conduct the market research in advance, you're at risk of getting on the wrong path, wasting both resources and money.

How can you construct an accurate picture of your social media users?

Start by segmenting your target audience into personas based upon their characteristics that they share - you can do that using this free template for creating customer personas.

Or, if you want to ease your burden then let AI perform the work for you. Your customer personas will vary. For example, you can have a group of teenagers keen on sports, or a group of 30-year-olds following Digiday's Facebook page . They will interact with their posts.

The information you have will allow you to make the most of your resources and focus on what is most effective for your audience. Need help analyzing your target audience via social networking? Look into this audience insight study from Socialbakers (now an integral segment of Emplifi).

 

Buy the right social media management tools

Modern social media management tools are necessary for establishing, executing, and evaluating your social media marketing strategy effectively.

Here's the information you'll need:

Top-to-middle-of-the-funnel tools

Analyzing your top to mid-funnel audience is especially important. That's because people at these points, which is sometimes referred to as an unidentified audience, could be your future clients.

The more you know about these individuals more you'll be able to nurture users to make them convert using targeted marketing campaigns.

So, what tools will come in handy at this point?

Native Social Media Analytics. The data about the audience you find on social media platforms can be quite thorough and includes:

Facebook audience insight: demographics, pages, likes, and locations activity

Instagram insights: top locations time, dates, and hours when your followers are most active

Twitter analytics are about lifestyle, demographics and consumer behavior and mobile footprint

LinkedIn analytics: demographics, job function (seniority, age, industry), size of the business, employment status

Audience Analytics: They allow users to see their Facebook users grouped into personas according to their demographics, behavior, and interests. As a result, you can save the time and effort you'd spend on manual audience research.

Additionally, you'll be able to immediately put the outcome from your audience analysis into actions.

Bottom-of-the-funnel equipment

Find the bottom of funnel to determine the most frequent users, who are sometimes referred to as a "known" audience, and use CRM (CRM) devices to concentrate on every part of the customer experience (CX).

These will give you more insight into the people who purchased your products, including their demographics, the touchpoints along their journey as a customer, and content that eventually led them to click the purchase button.

 

Tools for managing content

Content creation is a crucial aspect of the management process - but also extremely difficult. To help make your workflow of content easier and more efficient, check out these tools:

Content ideas and tools

Social media monitoring - discover the latest topics on social media that you can use to your advantage

Social media analytics: see what your competitors are posting and learn from some of their best concepts

Audience analysis - understand what content your audience reacts to positively

Content curation tools can help you find interesting articles online that you can share

Content inspiration - explore thousands of top social media posts that be a hit with your audiences

 

Content creation tools

Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay - visit these sites for free high-quality stock images

Canva, Makeagif, Awesome Screenshots - Design amazing visuals for your blog posts

Biteable, Lumen5, and Shakr - create fun social videos your followers will want to share

Google Docs, Grammarly, Nuclino Work with your team members to develop social media marketing copy

Social media editorial calendars

Google Calendar - use Google's visual calendar to easily slot your posts

Google Spreadsheet - create an editorial calendar tailored to your needs

Calendar templates free - Save time by using pre-made social media calendar templates

Content calendar scheduler – access visual representations of your social media posts as well as schedule and review your posts (also on mobile! ) And let your team work on all content-related activities directly from the calendar

Toolkits for Social Media Publishing

Social media publisher - handle social media publishing better by publishing on several platforms with just one click. Furthermore, you'll receive exact recommendations regarding the best publishing times so that you can increase your visibility and interactions. Below is a look into the best times to post using the data of Socialbakers (now a portion of Emplifi).

 

Social media listening devices

Monitoring online conversations regarding your brand is vital to understanding the real impact of your marketing campaigns, which go beyond mere likes and comments.

Social listening: monitor social media for topics and questions, discover the conversations about your brand and look at the tone of voice around them

Google alerts - create alerts for keywords and topics appearing online and receive regular email reports to ensure that you don't be absent of a mention of your brand

Influencer collaboration tools

Controlling influencer relations is an incredibly new aspect to social media managers' work. However, it's now one of the most crucial tasks on their to-do lists.

Here's how to effectively handle influencer marketing and related activities:

Find influencers tools using AI Find those who are most pertinent for your social media followers in seconds. You can instantly get a snapshot of their audience size, demographics and engagement, along with an easy-to-understand performance score so you can pair up with the most effective influencers.

Social customer service tools

Social media is a preferred channel for many customers to express their opinions or to ask questions regarding your company. To manage all of the messages you receive You may require:

Community management - interact with your community in a structured way with automated notifications, and defined team tasks and roles. Check your messages from all channels in one spot and track your team's effectiveness with feeds that can be filtered, which allows you to offer top-quality customer service.

Tools for social media analytics

Monitoring the performance of social networks is critical to understanding the impact of your campaigns as well as identifying the most effective methods, and correcting the flaws - that's why it's essential to use the appropriate tools.

Social media analytics - get an in-depth overview of the performance of your channels with regard to all crucial metrics, which include:

Overall engagement

Distribution of interactions

Most engaging post types

User activities

Quantity of interactions per 1000 fans

Number of fan posts

Most interesting posts review

The number of posts promoted and the interactions that they created

You'll also be able to see how you compare against your top competitors on these metrics to find out who's ahead of the pack. To add additional context to your success, you can benchmark your advertising budget and video strategy effectiveness against your industry, region, or country.

Google Analytics - know which social media platforms generate the most traffic to your site

 

How to manage and analyze the personas of social media's audience

Like we said before, understanding your audience's personas is the base to your Social Media strategy. Before creating any content piece or launch a campaign, you need to understand your community in a deeper way.

How do you manage and analysing the buyer profiles of your customers?

Step 1: Analyze audience data. Make use of the sources for data mentioned previously - the more information you've got an accurate representation of your audience you'll be able to create. Ideally, you'll be using software that combines multiple data sources on your audience, saving your time and manual work. Tips: Certain data about the audience won't be accessible within the analytics built into platforms or even Google Analytics. If you're looking for answers to questions that are very specific like a favorite tourist destination, you could consider running polls or conducting market research.

Step 2: Consolidate your audience data. If you've pulled the information, it's fragmented and difficult to understand. To see a full picture of your social media community you must bring all the data together and examine it all in one area.

Step 3: Define your audience personas. Your audience on social media is diverse: there are groups that share different demographics, locations, behavior and preferences. When you segment your audience according to these characteristics you're able to get an understanding of the personas you have. In turn, you can design content that entices people to engage and effectively nurtures your community along the funnel of marketing.

Step 4: Keep tabs on the personas of your audience regularly. It's not enough just to look at your community once and rely on the data for years. Remember that your followers are constantly evolving - there are new followers joining your page and your "old" fans could take on an interest in different types of content. To recognize these trends and react to them at the right time you should analyze your personas of your followers on a regular basis.

See this guide to target audience analysis for a greater insight into studying your social media audience.

 

How to manage social media content creation

After you've completed analyzing your audience personas you'll know the direction your strategy for content should take.

But, deciding on the right topics and formats for your content isn't everything. As your company grows you'll be faced with the task to produce large volumes of content at a fast rate. To tackle this challenge, you're going to need an optimized workflow for your content.

Here's how you can effectively control social media content creation tasks:

Step 1: Upload an online calendar to Your Google Calendar with one click. It contains all national holidays throughout all of the year.

Step 2: Assign team roles and responsibilities. This step is essential in enhancing efficiency, whether you're an agency, or a an organization with multiple offices across the globe. To produce content efficiently, you should have the following roles within your team:

Content manager - In charge of creating a social media strategy for content, managing an editorial calendar, and distributing content promotion budget, and tracking KPIs.

Content creator. In charge for coming up relevant content ideas, creating engaging posts, and optimizing them for various platforms.

Content editor in charge of working with all individuals involved in the creation of content across the enterprise, as well as reviewing articles, and approving them for publication.

It's also essential to have a formal approval process in place. With the sheer amount of content you need to create, it's easy to become overwhelmed by lack of clarity in procedures. To ensure that nothing remains in one line ensure that you manage your content through a comprehensive system.

Step 3: Leverage information from your social media user personas. Pay attention to their interests and the influencers that they follow. This will allow you to concentrate your efforts on developing content that is tailored to your audience, making this part of social media management much more effective.

Be aware that the more tailored your content on social media will be, the more efficient it will be in achieving your goals for business.

This guide provides step-by step instructions on how to personalize your social media marketing efforts.

Step 4: Round up ideas for content through analyzing your competitors Utilizing social listening to track and join online discussions, analyzing your personas' page using analytics, and curating interesting articles.

Step 5: Determine the amount of content you'll have to write. Naturally, you should not publish too little and disappear from the feeds of your readers or publish too much and appear to be spam. Understanding how many posts you'll need to make on a daily or weekly basis can help you manage your resources more effectively and be more efficient. What amount of content should you be creating?

Facebook 3 times per day

Instagram - enough to post 2-3 times per day

Twitter - enough to publish many times per day

LinkedIn is enough to post 5 times a week

Step 6: Create incredible content by using the variety of available online tools to create content, which we've discussed earlier. Be aware of formats that work well on every platform:

Facebook videos (75 million users use Facebook's video platform every day); learn how to benefit from the video format available on Facebook

Instagram Photos (Instagram's audience size is 28% larger than Facebook's audiences)

Twitter - tweets that include video (receive 10 times more engagement than tweets without videos)

LinkedIn - posts with videos (your video content is likely to be viewed by 5x more people).)

If you're looking to expand your production of content and increase efficiency then you require a complete solution. With Emplifi, it is possible to effortlessly manage all of your social media content each day, week or month. You can save time by having your team set up a schedule and then publish posts using video, images, as well as user comments directly in the calendar.

Additionally, due to the visual design of the calendar you will be able to have a clear glance at your social media accounts.

Step 7: Monitor your content performance and provide a report. Analyzing how your posts are resonating with your target audience allows you to pinpoint the most effective elements of your marketing campaign, and then focus your efforts on re-creating them in the near future. The metrics you should be monitoring:

Awareness metrics: engagement overview, number of interactions per 1,000 followers, the top-performing posts

Campaign goal completions: link clicks, sign-upsor purchases

You can get an instant overview of these data points with customizable dashboards. In order to keep your team in up-to-date on the most recent data, you can use automated reports which are sent directly to team members' mailboxes every time you want.

 

How to manage social media listening

Social media listening is an essential component of the social media management. If you do it on a regular basis it can assist you complete multiple tasks, including:

Monitoring @mentions and assessing how your campaigns are received on social media.

Find out what people on social media have to say about your competitors

Offering better customer care

Discovering the newest social media influencers, as well as brand ambassadors

Spotting and preventing any brand-related social media crises

The ability to identify larger discussions that your business should be part of

How should you listen on social media?

Step 1: Select the appropriate keywords for your queries. In accordance with the task you're trying to accomplish it is essential to select the correct keywords to focus into.

If for example, you are looking to locate influential people through listening, start with creating queries relevant to your topic. Within the query, list relevant hashtags, keywords and mentions you wish to track. Select the platform that you would like to monitor, along with the default region and language. Thus you'll be able to capture precisely the information you're interested in.