Weekly marketing wisdom you can read in 5 minutes, for free. Add remarkable ideas and insights to your inbox, once a week, by subscribing to our newsletter.
How To Manage Your Social Media Campaigns
It can become seemingly impossible to do everything you think you should be doing to build your brand online with limited time and resources. ‘How to manage your social media campaigns’, the road ahead, will help pave the way to your social success with ease.
It’s essential that your valuable time is spent on marketing activities that actually pay off, with a convincing ROI. Be a more productive online marketer by effectively planning and managing your social media campaigns.
Table of contents:
Why Managing Your Social Media Is Important
Traditionally, businesses would reach their customer bases through very different methods. Newspapers, TV, posters, billboard advertisements, radio ads etc. these traditional methods of marketing are on the decline and becoming less popular to businesses and their marketing budgets.
They are still popular channels to advertise with, but the problem is that none of these methods make it possible to track a ROI.
Social media has, in few words, changed the way that businesses communicate with their customers. What was once a one way conversation has now become a multi channelled communication platform, and a great foundation for companies to receive positive and negative feedback as one.
This can be used to improve products and services, and gain a better understanding of where there may be lack.
It is hard to determine how many customers end up buying a product because of a specific marketing campaign.
How many of them saw the advert in a newspaper ad? How many heard the advert on the radio? How many people have learnt of specific products through billboard advertisements or word of mouth?
These results are hard to measure at the best of times, and feedback is rarely measured on true hard cold factual statistics.
How to Manage your Social Media Campaigns and Conversations
Social Media enables communication and creates two way conversation. With the arrival of social media, marketing is now in a totally different specimen.
There is a very different reach and return. Social media allows for businesses and customers to communicate with one another on a more neutral playing ground.
Customers can now raise their opinions in expectation of a response, and businesses get to explore their customer care techniques and assess their overall progress.
When the internet landed, results became immediately traceable by tracking website visits and click-through rates. Evolution is frequent and results can be measured more and more effortlessly each passing day.
Metrics have continued to become more accurate, and we’re even beginning to be able to determine exactly why a customer left your website, and how thoroughly they browsed your pages. Demographics, age, gender, time of day search was committed; the list goes on.
Choose The Social Media Channels That Suit Your Business
There are many different social media networks, and each serves its own purpose and unique target audience. It is easy to assume that you must keep every social media account updated and churning out information about your business.
This is not the case. It is best to find networks that provide the most value for your business, and align with your marketing strategy. You will find a different audience behind every social media network you operate.
Successful social media management means knowing your target audience and how to find them, knowing what you want to show your target audience and how it balances with what they want to see, and knowing how to create engagement and interact positively.
Not everybody is out there to find your product or services, but you can find your niche and focus your efforts on those that make most sense to your business.
To choose your primary and secondary networks, have a think about where your target audience is most likely to spend their time online and what they would be searching for.
Useful Social Media Management tools to get started
Here’s what you’ve been waiting for, and handful of tools to get you on your way with managing your social media. Using these tools will help you understand how to manage your social media campaigns with ease.
We’ve all felt the burn of constantly switching between websites and apps and it can be enough to test your sanity sometimes. It’s time consuming and often anti-productive.
Below are some useful online tools which will show you the way on how to manage your social media campaigns & networks more effectively:
Hootsuite – This is a brilliant tool which helps you to monitor all of your social media accounts at once. You can apply different settings to your dashboard and watch all progress in one place. You can also interact and respond from the dashboard, removing the need to keep logging in and out of several different accounts.
IFTTT – is a web tool that allows you to create connections between different websites and services. – “If This Then That” – allows you to connect two websites, or Channels, into Recipes, using Triggers, the “this” part of the formula, and Actions, the “that” part of the formula.
Buffer – Similar to Hootsuite, you can link all the accounts you wish to manage and auto schedule posts to go out into your various social media streams. Unlike some other platforms, Buffer allows you to add as many future posts to your queue as you can imagine, and then posts your content at the optimal time.
Social Media Is ‘Current’ and ‘Now’
Businesses and brands are increasingly looking to social media to build engagement with new and existing customers. Millions of consumers share their thoughts, feelings, problems and queries about all sorts of products on Social Media.
Businesses can now consult with specialist companies or use a selection of online web tools to help monitor online interactions with existing and potential customers.
Whether your business is launching a new product, expanding to a new location or bringing in new business partners, a social media campaign can work very effectively at crucial moments in a businesses timeline.
Whenever you need to generate hype, inform customers of a change of plans or promote new services – Social Media is the most beneficial place to begin with your success. Think about what you can achieve by harnessing the power of social media.
Schedule your Social Media Content in Advance
Managing your online social media presence and various social media campaigns can be a weighty task. It uses up much time and energy, especially if your business lacks resources to hire more bodies to resume the responsibility of social media marketing.
To streamline your campaigns and make your efforts more effective, consider using online social media management tools. Put some time aside where you can fully concentrate on generating meaningful, attractive content. Creating your content in bulk helps to free up your time so that you can focus on other important activities and run your business.
Monitoring your social media is more rewarding than spending your time running your social media content.
The process of scheduling out your social media posts even be a time consuming activity, so it is best to consider using an auto-scheduler tool for a more efficient and effortless way to organise and schedule your content on all social media networks at the same time. This serves to give you an overview of your entire social media output.
What to post on Social Media
Find content that is meaningful to your target audience and share what the user will care about, not necessarily just what you care about. See yourself as an authority within your industry and a valuable source of information, a place for users to increase their knowledge, learn, share, comment and interact with your content.
Getting the right tone for your posts can take a while at first, as you must identify what exactly your target audience wants to hear and see. Once you begin to understand what approach works best for your business, you can start to tailor your output to your defined audience and start to revel in the rewards.
For more information on managing your content, read our blog: What Is Content Marketing?
Use #Hashtags to identify your social activity
People use the hashtag symbol before a relevant keyword or phrase in their tweets to categorise those posts and help them show more easily in Twitter search. Clicking on a hash tagged word in any message shows you the stream of tweets related to that keyword. Hashtags are an integral to the way we communicate online, and it’s important to know how to use them.
Hashtags are not just about throwing it about and adding them to every post haphazardly. Think of it from an outside perspective. Use them to search and see who is using what hashtags and don’t be scared to engage in threads that you haven’t created.
Use them to attract attention to your posts and identity what your post is about. This creates an opportunity to circulate your content to a highly relevant and concentrated network of viewers.
To Summarise
Hopefully you’ve gained some insight and useful tips into how to manage your social media campaigns. It is essential that your valuable time is spent on marketing activities that actually pay off, with a convincing ROI. There are literally hundreds of platforms out there you can use. You have to take the time to analyse the platforms on offer and be prepared to spend the cash to get the right solution.
Work out which functions and features are crucial to your business and this will help to provide the highest possible level of engagement and ROI. Contact us for a consultation to see how we can enhance your social media campaigns and grow your business and brand in the digital world.