Are you looking to increase your social media presence? Then welcome to the social media management guide.
Social media management is the practice of overseeing and maintaining your online presence on famous social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Businesses create visual and textual content to publish online that helps them attract an audience.
A lot of effort, hard work, and tools go into making sure that you are seen and heard online enough to drive traffic and acquire more sales.
Did you know? As of 2021, there are 3.5 billion social media users globally, and they’re increasing, which is nearly half the world’s population. Doesn’t that sound amazing? It just shows the luring power of social media – how the trend is attracting more and more users every year.
Today, I will be discussing social media management in depth. We’ll be looking at the definition of social media management, its significance, the best platforms of 2021, effective tools, and the best service provider of social media management services.
So, let’s get started.
What Is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of analyzing your current social standing online and then taking effective measures to make it better.
When social media managers start working, they study the conversions, post engaging content, create informative social profiles, collaborate with influencers, and offer services. The manager is often responsible for overlooking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts (of course, there’s more).
Although until now, social media management might seem like a daunting task, it can be made easier with the right tools and resources. Once you get the hang of it all, it’s easy and breezy.
Why Does My Business Need A Social Media Presence?
Okay, for someone new to social media management – this is a fair question. Why is a social media presence so important?
Before I bore you with some details, let me point out some facts that speak for themselves and indicate the importance of a social media presence.
These are some stats from 2021:
- There are 54% of smartphone users claim to use social media for searching for products.
- 49% of social media users rely on their favorite influencer before buying a new product.
- If we divide the market: 90.4% Millennials, 77.5% Gen X, and 48.4% Baby Boomers actively use social media worldwide currently.
- Smartphone users spend 3 hours on average per day browsing social media or sending messages via the internet.
Did you notice how much impact social media has played in 2020 (granted some of it because people were on lockdown. Courtesy of the COVID’19).
Regardless, social media platforms have been around for a while, and they make a major difference in how customers perceive your brand. So, even if you have a small business, leverage social media to its full potential.
Now, go back to the stats and notice how each line is about social media users. If you read between the line, you understand that social media is an essential platform to connect with new customers. Once you engage with new customers, that also means more business, which equals more profits and a boost in sales.
Some companies underestimate the influence of social media when the truth is their brand is ready to enter the social media market.
Customers might not visit a store daily, but they definitely visit an e-commerce website via social media four times a week – if not daily, which is still good.
If the world has more impulsive buyers like me, then I’m sure businesses are doing great because I’m someone who checks a sale as soon as it’s life and ends up buying a thing or two.
I’m also someone who checks famous brand websites thrice a week so that I don’t miss out on any great offers. Most of the time, I find out about a sale while browsing through Instagram or Facebook.
Did you know? 52% of social media marketers claim that social media fuels a brand’s sales and revenue. So, what are you waiting for? Start today or right away!
The Best Social Media Platforms To Use in 2021
Now, undoubtedly there are numerous social media platforms, so which one should you choose? The right answer would be all of them, but let’s face it, that’s not the best use of your time.
While there are plenty of platforms, there is only a handful among them where you can reach out to customers because they’re pretty famous, and users love them.
Let’s have a peek at the list in the order of their popularity. I’m sure you know most of these and use them.
Image Source: Stat Counter
Here is a list of detailed stats of the most popularly used social media platforms.
- Facebook – 2.32 Billion
- YouTube – 1.9 Billion
- Instagram –1 Billion
- Pinterest – 442 Million
- Reddit – 430 Million
- Twitter –330 Million
- LinkedIn – 303 Million
- Snapchat –287 Million
Still, wondering why you should invest in any of the social media platforms? Well, I’m going into the details now.
Facebook has held the position for the highest number of users for quite some time. It’s the social media platform that everyone knows about.
The, now massively popular, platform was launched in 2004 when Orkut and Myspace were popular and quickly took over their popularity with new features, amazing layout, and great functionality.
Some agencies would stay away from Facebook, but I think it’s one of the platforms you shouldn’t disregard because of how much smartphone users depend on it.
Did you know? Approximately 91% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 depend on online reviews before they trust a new brand.
Facebook is a great platform that offers businesses a rating and review section on their business pages. Brands can benefit from the section by encouraging customers to leave reviews about their products and services. Such reviews will encourage new customers to buy from you and generate ROI for your business.
Key benefits of Facebook marketing:
- Facebook gives access to customers of all ages, races, demographics, and ethnicity. The diversified audience holds great potential.
- With an incredible marketing plan, you can benefit from Facebook ads.
- Use Facebook pages to introduce your brand and invite friends.
- Share pictures and videos of your product unboxing to attract customers.
- Offer immediate customer support with Facebook chatbots.
- If you have an app or website, you can use your Facebook page to divert the traffic there.
- Facebook ads have numerous settings through which you can target each ad or campaign.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most accessed social media platform as of 2020. Another fun fact, the number of YouTube users is the 80% traffic of Facebook users.
YouTube is a widely popular video-based platform where people enjoy watching and posting video content. The YouTube competition is fierce because approximately 500 hours of video content is uploaded per minute. Okay, don’t get scared because, according to current stats, users regularly watch 1 billion hours of video.
I think the reason you should consider YouTube is pretty clear now. There might be alternate platforms to post videos, but none can come close to YouTube, which is why eight out of ten marketers consider the platform effective for video marketing.
Key benefits of YouTube marketing:
- The most frequently video-based website, which means you have access to a lot of traffic and make customers.
- YouTube videos are now seen on the top of search engine result pages (SERPs), which means you can get on top with your video.
- Your website gets votes and traffic if another website embeds your video in its content.
- Align your YouTube channel name with the website so that customers can find you easily.
- Publish attractive video content that entices users to make purchases.
- Encourage your users to share your video for better brand management and improving brand identity.
- Video content is evergreen, and you can reuse it multiple times whenever it’s relevant.
Much like Facebook, Instagram is a famous platform to find numerous influencers who boost the business image.
With more than one billion users, the platform is famous because of its simple interface and “photo album-like feel.”
What do I mean? Well, if you look at the Instagram layout, every user looks like a virtual album of photos and short videos. Feed post videos are ten seconds long; however, now, users also have the option to record IGTV videos that are longer in duration.
Key benefits of Instagram marketing:
- It’s an increasing community, which means you have a chance of attracting more customers.
- The abundance of visual content helps consumers buy more effectively.
- The 10-second post video setting is effective because not every consumer wants to watch long videos.
- Users love looking at visual content as compared to reading content.
- Like Facebook, you can target the audience you want with built-in marketing settings.
- It’s another growing channel you can use as a medium to connect with customers – the more, the merrier.
- Show off user-generated content that your customers submit to you. This will boost their confidence and give you access to more new and fresh content.
Reddit is a fast-growing and vibrant platform that doubles as a discussion platform. If you can get positive feedback about your product or service, then that means you earn thousands of website visits, greater ROI, and sales generation.
However, entering a Reddit community can be tricky because you need to be well-informed and engage with your users before they “accept” you.
Don’t worry, though; the Reddit community is very welcoming too, and if you have your facts straight, you can dive into any community to get meaningful traffic.
Key benefits of Reddit marketing:
- Hang around the subreddit to understand how it works and then creates a community to generate more traffic.
- The more upvotes you get, the more people trust you, which means a boost for your brand image.
- The use of powerful and attractive headlines can entice users to become a part of your discussion.
- Take advantage of cross-posting by posting across five or more subreddits with the same topic.
- On most platforms, people abandon the page or brand; however, on Reddit, users love interacting in communities and visiting websites with great, informative content.
- People are very straightforward and transparent on Reddit, so you can expect negative remarks; however, you can convey your brand and provide value as a marketer.
- You might feel the need to have separate accounts on Facebook or Instagram, but on Reddit, you can have a single account for private and public life. It gives you more opportunities, and you don’t have to come off as a business only trying to sell.
Twitter might not offer a higher reach than Facebook or Reddit, but it lets you engage with other brands and get easily endorsed by celebrities. It is where all the celebrities are at, and if you can get one celebrity to tweet you, you’ve achieved something great.
On Twitter, your job is to follow the right people that can relate to your business. For example, a clothing brand should be following celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Emma Stone.
The platform can help your brand attract a wide audience; however, the only drawback is one negative tweet, and you can easily become non-existent.
Key benefits of Twitter marketing:
- The platform offers a two-way communication channel with other businesses and customers.
- It is the easiest platform to create a long-lasting brand identity.
- If customers tweet about your product or service, it can go a long way.
- A Twitter account is free of cost so that you can benefit from organic posting and one on one interactions.
LinkedIn is a powerful job board website and mobile app where employers and job seekers come together. Employers match a candidate’s skills with the description of a job opening while job seekers apply for suitable jobs.
It may seem like that’s all LinkedIn is about, but it’s about a lot more. Now, companies and brands can create business profiles and offer products and services through it.
However, LinkedIn is more about B2B marketing, which means businesses exchange products and services using the platform.
Key benefits of LinkedIn marketing:
- Great for increasing B2B sales.
- LinkedIn has numerous high-profile and prestigious clients who are serious buyers.
- Since the platform has a sophisticated audience, it is best to create a positive brand image and reputation.
- You can form and maintain healthy business relationships.
- LinkedIn brings you one step closer to B2B clients, which means more leads come easily that you can turn into sales for profits.
Snapchat
Snapchat is an instant picture, video, and message sending platform which used to be considered a fun-to-use app. Still, over the last year, it has become an effective marketing social media platform.
The America-based mobile app has over 200 million active users. Wondering why people love the platform? It’s because it offers multiple features along with an array of filters.
Key benefits of Snapchat marketing:
- Another platform where you can attract customers and generate leads by creating a Snapchat account and posting stories.
- It’s a fun-filled platform where you can reach customers faster than Facebook or Twitter because users love watching stories.
- Snapchat has the greatest number of Gen Z users, meaning you can tap into a different market using the right marketing strategy.
- Instead of being all about business, products, and services, you can use Snapchat to make a personal connection with your customers to increase engagement.
- Give your customers a chance to see inside your business and give them behind-the-scenes of how you do business, create products, or offer services.
- Leverage Snapchat to show your customers the latest trends and what they’re missing out on; stay modern.
Pinterest is an America-based image-sharing social media platform that allows users to share, save, and discover visual information, i.e., pictures.
The website was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in 2009, and then later, they launched a mobile app in 2011.
Pinterest users love the social media platform because the content is always fresh, and there’s something new to look at every day.
Key benefits of Pinterest marketing:
- Pinterest is a browsing platform where you can convert browsers into buyers with your pictorial material.
- It’s a great social media platform where you can generate website traffic to increase profits. Just add your website link to the images to guide the buyers.
- The platform is a great way to increase inbound links because all the images have pins that include a link to the original source.
- People are addicted to Pinterest a lot more than any other platform because it helps them be creative, which means you can attract more buyers through it.
- You can integrate all your social media accounts with your Pinterest account to offer buyers more access to your business.
- The platform is a great way to find out what your target audience loves the most. For example, if you’re running a restaurant, you should look up the kind of content your buyers like to see related to food and then market the preferred way.
Effective Social Media Management Tools
For great social media management, you need the right tools that help you stay on top of your social media activities.
Social media management tools allow you to create, schedule, and publish content in one clean sweep. You can also use them to track the analytical performance and generate reports to study what kind of content is working.
You’re in luck, though, and I have a list of the best social media management tools you can pick from.
Let’s look at the top tools.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a personal favorite of mine. The famous social media management tool is used by more than 15 million people and 800+ of the Fortune 1000 companies worldwide.
The reason for the tool’s success is the “all-rounder” quality it provides. It means marketers can use Hootsuite to manage multiple social accounts of multiple business pages.
The tool offers four different plans: Free, $29, $129, and $599, billed monthly. The first 30 days of Hootsuite are free trial, so I’d suggest checking out the free trial and then make a decision.
Features OfHootsuite
- It allows you to monitor and manage multiple social media streams and brands at once.
- Marketers can schedule posts thirty days in advance.
- Hootsuite offers businesses to study the analytical data of each post.
- The Hootsuite plug-in lets you share marketing content with your followers in a few clicks.
- It offers easy access to check user queries without visiting each social media account individually.
- You can add multiple teammates to your Hootsuite account and assign tasks.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a tool similar to Hootsuite because you can combine multiple social media accounts in one place.
The tool provides a customer relationship management feature (CRM), which isn’t common with social media management tools.
The tool lets you save your customers’ profiles, which you can use to build better and stronger relationships.
It offers a free 30-day trial and three other subscription plans: $99, $149, and $249 billed monthly.
Features Of Sprout Social
- It offers professional-looking, detailed reports of all social media activities.
- It has regular social media monitoring features.
- Sprout Social has social engagement and analytical features to manage marketing.
- The tool comes with a report generation and customization tool.
- It’s a management tool that lets marketers manage tools, user access, and decide team roles.
Sendible
Sendible is a great tool that best suits agencies that have multiple clients and maintain a large number of social media accounts.
The leading social media management tool acts as a hub where you can bring all your accounts together to execute your social media marketing strategy.
There is no free version of the tool; however, it does offer a free 30-day trial period before you can subscribe. Once you subscribe, you can pick from four monthly plans: $29, $99, $199, and $299.
Features OfSendible
- Sendible allows you to customize the tools dashboard client-wise to attract customers.
- The tool can be integrated with graphic editors like Canva, which lets you add images for free.
- Users can also add YouTube videos by integrating the tool with the video-based social media platform.
- You can automate repetitive tasks to refrain from doing them manually again.
- Agencies can generate reports from any month and time.
- Measure campaign stats for specific brands and products easily.
- You can identify influencers and users who talk about your brand, which is a handy feature.
Social Pilot
Social Pilot is a cost-effective and easy-to-use social media management tool that is fit for agencies and individuals alike.
The tool offers features like scheduling posts and generating analytical data; however, you can’t monitor campaigns as easily as the ones I’ve mentioned above. It has a client management system, which makes it easy to deal with multiple clients at once.
Social Pilot is a very affordable tool that is as good as free. The subscription plans start with $10, $24, $40, and $80 a month.
Features OfSocial Pilot
- It has a content suggestion feature through which you can choose which type of content you want to post.
- The tool makes content finding easy.
- Social Pilot also offers a white-label report system that generates comprehensive reports.
- It has a feature that identifies the likes of your customers and gives suggestions for the next campaign.
- The brand safety feature identifies fraudulent pages that may be copying your brand.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr is an enterprise-level social media management tool that suits companies that deal with many clients and profiles.
It’s a comprehensive management tool that can be scaled for a large marketing team so that everyone has easy access.
Sprinklroffers custom pricing, which means you pay for what you get and whichever package you choose. The tool has been featured in the list of:
- Top 20 Social Media Management Software
- The Top 20 Customer Experience Software
- Top 20 Marketing Automation Software
Features OfSprinklr
- Sprinklr is an all-in-one marketing tool that lets users manage content, campaign stats, multi-channel marketing, etc.
- It also doubles as a Customer Experience Management (CMX) platform, which lets you have one-on-one conversations with social media users.
- You can manage 25+ different social media accounts for each brand.
- It offers a cloud-based social media management system for organic and paid marketing strategies.
The Benefits Of Social Media Management
Social media management has its benefits, which can help take your business to the next level. Let’s look at some of the advantages:
Improve Brand Awareness
You can use a social media management strategy to increase brand awareness, which will give a boost to your brand recognition. Once your brand is recognized, it will reach a broader audience, and more customers mean an increase in sales.
Brand awareness also builds a reputation for your business, which increases the trust of your customers.
Attract More Inbound Traffic
Social media management is also a strategy with which you can attract more inbound traffic. If you decide not to create social media pages, you’re limited to usual customers; however, more social media pages will attract more customers.
If you link more pages to your brand, you’re giving more access to your website and eventually increasing traffic as well.
Better Conversion Rates
When you successfully create more access points for customers, you eventually boost website and mobile app traffic.
But don’t just create pages; you need to regularly post interactive content to personify your brand and attract leads. Once you generate leads, you can convert those into sales, which is known as conversions.
The Drawbacks Of Social Media Management
Have you heard of the phrase? “There are two sides of a coin.”
Exactly like that, while there are advantages of social media management, there are also its drawbacks.
Are you wondering how that’s possible? Let me elaborate further.
Negative Feedback Can Tarnish Brand Image
Remember when I said earlier that customers rely heavily on online reviews before making a purchase? Well, that can’t always be helpful to your brand. If you have even a single negative review, you can end up losing customers easily.
For example, one of your customers receives a faulty product and posts about it on social media. Now, we’re all aware that negative reviews spread like wildfire in this digital age. If word gets around, you could lose customers, and your brand image is ruined.
Of course, you can jump back from it, but that will require a lot of time and effort.
Social Media Ads Aren’t Cheap
If someone tells you to market your products and services using social media ads because they’re affordable, stop listening to them.
Trust me, and social media ads do not come cheap. I mean, sure, they’re extremely effective and reach customers wherever you like (thanks to the added features), but they can cost a lot.
If you’re a new business, stay away from those ads, and focus on organic marketing for now.
Followers Can Decrease Overtime
If your social media posting and marketing comes to a halt, chances are your followers and customers will decrease over time.
Why? Because social media is a marketing platform where you need to be constantly active; otherwise, your customers can forget about you and move on to other brands.
Do you remember Michael Jackson? Of course, you just read the name, so you recalled the once-famous singer, but otherwise, he’s not really in hindsight, is he?
That’s exactly what social media management is about. If you fail to post regularly, customers will eventually forget you.
How Much Do I Spend On Social Media Management?
Like I said, social media management isn’t for every business because it doesn’t come cheap; however, for those wondering how much you should spend or what your budget should be – I’m here to help!
Now, if you decide to do your marketing yourself, then you need somewhere between $400-$5000 per month to make a difference and drive sales.
However, if you hire a company like Cydomedia, you can get a decent and customized package and a remote social media marketing team. The team will take care of social media management for you.
In the end, it entirely depends on your preference.
In Conclusion
I hope the article has offered a detailed insight into social media management and how it works.
I know all of it might seem too much information to digest, but trust me, once you get the hang of social media and publishing content – it becomes easy and breezy! All you need is the right social media management strategy to get started.
Good luck!
