Using Social Media Management to Increase Your Presence Online

Social media management is integral to any business’ success, regardless of industry sector. If you’re unsure how to use it to your best advantage, this piece will help you to understand what it is and what’s involved in social media management.

Social media management relates to any activity on social media networks.  Every business, online or offline should have some presence on social media because it’s yet another route to finding the right audience and with billions of people using it every day, if you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

Understanding Social Media Management

Social media management takes time to understand and to do it well, you need to invest time and energy into understanding what’s involved.  If you’re already doing some social media for your business but you’re not getting the results, perhaps you’re not doing it well enough or maybe you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it?  It needs plenty of time, so if you’re too busy doing other business-related tasks, it might be worthwhile employing someone to do it on your behalf.

Lots of big businesses have entire teams dedicated to social media management, headed up by a social media manager.  However, this does cost money and if you don’t have a big budget, you might just be relying on yourself.  It may be better for you to find a freelancer or a student who’s good with

social media and it needn’t cost a fortune.  If you decide that you have to save money and need to do it yourself then dedicate some time to it – perhaps an hour a day, because done well, it’s worth it for your business.  Regardless, you have to do some social media management no matter what, most especially if you want to grow your business and make more sales!

Do You Understand Social Media Management?

Let’s just recap on what social media management involves.

It relates to all of your activity online using social media channels.  Whether you’re on one social media channel or a few, you need to make the most out of your presence and ensure that you’re hitting the right audience.  As an example, if you run a B2B business (business to business) you should find LinkedIn very worthwhile. If your audience are Baby Boomers, check out Pinterest.  For GenZ Instagram is particularly effective.  However, most social media channels have more than one audience so there’s bound to be cross-over.

Remember, you don’t need to use all the social media networks, it is far better to do an excellent job on one or two channels than a bad job on all of them.

Create a Social Media Strategy

Part of your social media management’s success will be down to having a social media strategy in place.  We would recommend a strategy for 3 months; 6 months or a year just so you know what you’re planning in advance.  Your social media strategy needn’t be set in stone and should be fluid, so it evolves over time. Having a strategy for your social media will also help you analyse your insights, check this guide to social media metrics for more information on this topic.

What to Do If You’re a Small Business

If you don’t have a budget for social media management then take heart, you won’t be alone.  If it gets too much for you, why not ask a friend who’s good with social media to guide you or employ a freelancer from an online freelancing website, you could get a good deal!  However, if none of the above ideas are suitable, then you’ll have to use different tactics but there are lots of social media management tools available online that could help.  Some of these have to be paid for but some are free to use.  We’ll talk about them a little more later on.

Why Social Media is Very Important for All Businesses

Social media done well can really increase your business’ overall sales and grow your audience; so you reach even more potential customers.  Here are the advantages to using social media to grow your business:

• It doesn’t cost anything to set up social media channels.
• Advertising on social media channels is much cheaper and far more budget-friendly than other advertising methods.
• Using social media gives you the opportunity of gaining more prospects and turning them into paying customers.
• You can monetize your social media channels, for example, shop direct from Instagram.
• Social media helps you to reach bigger audiences and niche audiences too.
• You can gain metrics and insights into your customers’ behavior using social media management.
• Results are relatively quick from social media management.
• If you use an Influencer, you are pretty much guaranteed to get your business or brand in front of hundreds of thousands of people on social media.

What are The Best Social Media Platforms For Businesses?

All social media channels have their own audiences and some cross over; but we would suggest conducting some research to find out if your industry should use a certain channel.  You might find you’re currently using the wrong channels for your business but that’s easily rectified.  You might also find that there’s another social media channel to add to your current selection that will work for you.

Tools to Help with Social Media Management That are Found Online

For small businesses and start-ups there are a selection of online social management tools that should help you get to grips with your social media for business.  Some must be paid for whereas others are free to use.  Here’s our pick of the best:

There are a variety of good tools available online to help you with your social media management.  Some of these are free but most have to be paid for but they’re cheaper than hiring a Social Media Manager.

• Buffer is a paid online social media management tool that manages all of your social media networks in one, easy place.  It also has a scheduling feature so you can plan ahead.  The big bonus of Buffer is that you can use it on both a mobile device and desktop; so you can manage your social media on the go.
• Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tool that also costs to use.  However, it gives you access to insights and analytics, and you can also schedule posts cross-platform.
• CoSchedule is a tool that has scheduling, insights and even a social media calendar template that you can use to design your social media strategy.  We love this one because you can also use it to publish a blog if you have one.
• ZoomSphere is an all-around social media management tool that has some free tools to help you get started, with plenty of other tools like a social scheduler, content and workflow management, analytics, benchmarking and leads manager. What’s best about ZoomSphere is that the tool enables you to really grow your network by finding the right personalized metrics and system suited for your business.

Tasks for Social Media

Below, is a list of the types of tasks that social media management entails:

1. Creating a social media calendar and a social media strategy.
2. Researching your audience and finding new areas to utilize through social media channels.
3. Choosing the right channels for your business niche.
4. Developing social media campaigns.
5. Advertising on social media.
6. Engaging with your audience regularly through DMs and commentary.
7. Devising your social media profiles (these must be optimized).
8. Managing your social media posts and creating videos and images

This list is not exhaustive.

How Much Should You Spend on Social Media Management?

If you, do it yourself, apart from the cost of social media advertising and bolting on some online social media management tools, it shouldn’t cost too much except your time.  If you employ a single freelancer or an ad hoc person to manage your social media; expect to pay around $20 an hour upwards.  For an agency to run your social media; big businesses spend upwards of $3,000 monthly but this depends on the scope of the work and your location.

Social Media Management – Final Words

To start with, we’d recommend documenting a social media strategy and calendar to see what the scope of your work entails.  Then, we’d work out what you can afford, even if you have a small budget; you could allocate some of the work to someone else to free you up, if you need to do that.  Always do your research to make sure you’re using the right channels and remember; do one well rather than a dozen badly!