Social Media Management Guide: Everything You Need to Know
Updated: Dec 14, 2021
Our beginner's guide to social media management will help you learn the basics to help grow your social media presence and revenue. This guide will cover the following:
- What is Social Media Management?
- Why is Social Media Management Important?
- What Are the Key Metrics for Social Media Management?
- Traits of Expert Social Media Managers
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is a broad term used to describe the creation and distribution of content across social media platforms as well as interacting with followers and analyzing campaign and strategy performance. Like all forms of marketing, the goal is customer engagement and telling your brand’s story. Effective social media management will help you reach a wider audience and collaborate with a community. It lets you control the narrative on your own products, services, and brand. Beyond this, a strong understanding of analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) enables a business to not only monitor their performance, but control their own success by optimizing their strategies based on real-time data and insights. A talented digital marketing agency will always develop their social media management strategy in tandem with their social media ads, but it’s important to understand that these are two distinct strategies with different goals and KPIs. When executed correctly, they will be designed to support each other, and not compete with each other. Before going any further, here’s a list of a few of the main social media platforms you should consider for your campaign:
- TikTok
- YouTube
Remember that each platform has a different audience and offers different features, benefits, and drawbacks. Mastering each platform and conveying clear messages to your audience is crucial.
Why is Social Media Management Important?
Similar to search engine optimization, social media management is one of the most sustainable and cost-efficient methods of accomplishing your marketing goals and reaching your audience.
Some of the key benefits of a strong social media campaign include:
- Instant consumer feedback
- Whether you want to decide on the best colors of your next product line, find out how customers think you could improve, or even gauge their interests in your next big campaign, there’s no better way to get instant insights than to collaborate with the community you’ve built!
- Branding
- Telling your story, establishing your brand, developing your identity- whatever you want to call it, it can be accomplished with effective social media management. Show your customers the best of your business and leverage your community to improve in areas that aren’t your best.
- Share content
- Showcasing new products, sharing new blog posts, even showing support of a charity or humanitarian movement, the quickest and easiest way to do so, is through social media channels.
- Reach wider audience
- As your business and community grow, you’ll be able to reach even more people as your following shares and interacts with your posts.
- Build community
- Fundamental to all of the other benefits we discussed, building a dedicated community across multiple social media platforms will help accomplish all of your business goals and initiatives. Take care of your community, and they’ll take care of you. It’s that simple.
These are just a few of the many reasons to invest in quality social media management, but the possibilities are truly endless with a talented organization. Whatever your goals are, remember to always engage your audience in conversation. Talk with them, not at them.
What Are the Best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Social Media Managers?
As with any digital marketing channel, tracking and analyzing a campaign’s performance is essential to its success. While it’s always important to avoid getting trapped in “paralysis by analysis”, wherein you allow yourself to become overwhelmed with too many data points, an in-depth understanding of which KPIs matter to your campaign, how they can work together to help you understand the story behind the data, and how you can better optimize to achieve your goals is fundamental to your social media success. Since every platform offers a variety of features that change how people interact, the KPIs will vary for each. So for now, we’ll list the broad categories that you should consider. These categories include: reach, engagement, community growth, and traffic & conversions.
Here’s a closer look at important social media KPIs:
Reach:
Understanding social media reach is about understanding how many unique people are viewing your content. Brand awareness is huge for optimizing Reach KPIs. Some of the main metrics to track here are:
- Total Reach
- Impressions
- Share of Voice
Engagement:
Once you know who your content is reaching, it’s important to understand how your audience is reacting to and “engaging” with your content. Remember that each platform has unique forms of engagement and consider these metrics:
- Comments or Replies
- Shares, Reposts, or Retweets
- Likes and Other Reactions
- Mentions
Community Growth:
A strong community and following on social media will assure longevity in your marketing and business success. Building off the last two metrics discussed, wide reach and strong engagement both contribute to a well-developed community and inspire growth more than any one person ever could. Community growth metrics to consider are:
- Subscriber Growth Rate
- New Followers
- Total Subscribers
- Reach Growth Rate
- Engagement Growth Rate
Traffic & Conversions:
We’ve said it before: conversions are king, as well they should be. If your number one marketing goal is not to increase conversions, you need to reevaluate your marketing goals, or maybe your marketing agency. Conversions are gained through traffic making increased traffic almost as important. Conversions are your ROI (return on investment) and after all, that’s why you’re in business. Some important KPIs to track are:
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
- Conversion Rate
- Session Time
- Pages per Session
- New Sessions
- Sales
- Revenue
The best way to optimize for all of these major metrics is, of course, producing interesting and thoughtful content. Talented social media managers will use their knowledge of the greater marketing field to generate leads, stimulate growth, and guide consumers through the marketing funnel by optimizing and adapting your campaigns based on data and analytics, not guesses or assumptions.
Traits of Expert Social Media Managers
Choosing a social media manager is an important step in improving your marketing strategy and should be executed thoughtfully. Considering what traits a social media manager should possess, creativity is one of the first that comes to mind. The ability to consistently create fresh, compelling content across multiple platforms is no small feat. But another important trait is time management, or on a wider scope: project management. Meeting deadlines is crucial when planning a distribution schedule since certain days and times are more conducive to customer interaction. Just think: are you more likely to see or engage with a post at lunch time on a weekday, or one posted at 10 on a Friday night because the forgetful social media manager lost track of time? Aside from these, other must-have traits are attention to detail, strong analytical skills, clear communication, and a passion for their work. Lastly, a little charisma and humor will go a long way in this field. Remember that customer engagement is the goal so always be relatable.
Managing all of your social media campaigns can be overwhelming to many business owners. But social media is a marketing channel that can create great organic success when managed correctly. Partnering with a top-tier social media management agency is a great way to begin your journey into this ever-growing field. When looking for a social media manager you should partner with one who has a great understanding for KPIs and analytics, is innovative and thought-provoking, highly creative, sociable, and great at communicating with you and your audience. Never overlook the details, and always engage your audience in conversation and you’ll achieve marketing success through social media channels. Nxt Era Marketing is here to help you every step of the way. Schedule your free social media consultation today!
