What is Social Media Management (+ How Can You Ace It)

Social media management is the process of managing content and interactions on all your social media accounts. It is so much more than simply creating and posting content on social media. In fact, it includes everything from creating a social media strategy to executing social media campaigns. People often confuse it with social media marketing, but this is a much broader term that encompasses all of your social media activities. 

This might sound simple in theory, but actually takes a lot of careful planning, time, and effort to execute. Social media management is tough, but knowing the right way to do it can help you a lot. In this post, we will provide a detailed guide on how to manage your social media accounts effectively.


Your 7-Step Plan For Social Media Management:


Here is a step-by-step guide to social media management that you can use to build your social presence from scratch.

1. Identify and List Your Goals

The first and most important thing that you need for your social media management plan is to identify your goals. 

Why is it that you are joining social media in the first place? 

What do you want to accomplish by being active on social media?

Do you want to build a social presence for your business just to maintain brand recall and awareness? Or are you a new company that wants to build a brand from scratch and wants to use social media to help with that? Or is your goal simply to generate leads on social media and drive them to your website?

No matter what your reasons are for joining the social media bandwagon, you need to be clear about your objectives. This will set the tone for everything else in your social media management plan.


2. Choose Your Platforms

The next big thing is to choose between the numerous social media platforms out there. You need to do your research and find out the user demographics for each. Then, you need to identify the ones where your target audience is active and select those.

This choice also depends on the type of content that you want to post and the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. So, after you have identified the platforms where your target audience is present, you need to narrow down the list further using these criteria.

Having a basic knowledge of social media platforms is enough for this. For example, YouTube is the best platform for video content. However, if your target audience is gamers, then Twitch is the one you want to be on. 

Instagram is best for visual content and is a favorite among product-based companies and retailers. LinkedIn is great for B2B businesses as it is one of the best professional lead generation platforms.


3. Find Your Style, Tone, and Voice

After you have selected your platforms and made an account on each your first instinct would be to start posting content. But hold your horses, as you are not yet ready to start posting content.

Before you even start creating content, you need to set some brand guidelines. These include your style, tone of voice, colours, fonts, and other brand aesthetics.

This is important because these things are associated with your brand and help improve brand recognition. You need to maintain consistency in all of your brand communication on and off social media. So, you need to find your voice and set yourself apart from your competitors.

For example:

Beauty brand, Dove, has a very strong and clear voice and brand image of empowering and uplifting women worldwide. All of their campaigns, social media content, etc. are centered on this.

Another example is that of the candy brand Skittles. They have a distinctly upbeat and playful tone, which is supported by their use of bright colours in all of their content. 

It is important to maintain consistency in style, tone, and voice. Find yours and stick to it in all of your social media content.


4. Brainstorm and Create Your Content Strategy

The next step in your social media management plan is to plan your content strategy. This includes what kind of content to post on which platforms, content formats, topics to cover, etc.

There are a variety of content formats that you can experiment with on social media. From Stories to social media posts to IGTV videos, there’s a lot that you can do.

Ideally, you should make use of all of these and have them in your content mix. This way, you can cover more ground and reach more people.

Also, you can do a lot with your social media posts as well. You can create image or video posts or get more creative and use GIFs, memes, sketches, graphic design, etc.

You need to have a plan in place for how you will go about creating and managing your content. You can use content marketing tools or task management tools to help you maintain a smooth process of content creation.


5. Make a Social Media Content Calendar

Now that you have decided what type of content you want to post, it’s time to make a schedule. You will need an editorial calendar for that. This should include exactly what type of post will be published on which date and time.

You need to decide the frequency of posting for each platform. For platforms like Instagram and Facebook, posting 1-2 times a week might be enough. However, for more dynamic platforms like Twitter, you need to be more active to stay on your audience’s mind. 

You also need to decide which times and days to post on. 

Lucky for you, there’s already enough research done on this and you can simply leverage that to inform your decision. You can find out the best times and days to post on each platform and get the best engagement rates. In general, most platforms get maximum engagement midweek, during the late morning and afternoon hours.

Take all of this into account and form your own social media content calendar

Here’s an example of our content calendar that you can take inspiration from.


6. Nail Down Your Content Scheduling and Posting

After you have your content plan ready and have started creating content, it’s time to start distributing it. 

You can, of course, choose to do it manually and post each content piece at the designated times. However, that takes too much time and effort that you could utilise for other, more important things.

To enhance efficiency, solve this problem, you can use scheduling and posting tools like Social Media Schedulers such as Buffer that can automate this task for you.

Source: buffer.com

You can bulk upload your content and set the designated dates and times and it will automatically post content on different social media platforms. You can also create a recurring schedule and avoid having to manually enter dates and times into the tool.

This makes the process much faster and simpler than posting social media content manually. Especially if you are trying to manage several social media accounts at once, this is the perfect solution for you. It makes social media management much easier for you.


7. Manage Your Social Interactions

Just creating and posting social media content is not all that you need to do. As part of social media management, you also need to keep track of and get involved in social media conversations.

For example, if your followers comment on any of your posts, then you should reply to them. Often it happens that people ask questions or comment with a problem. It is important for you to respond to these comments and solve these problems. Social media has emerged as a new customer service channel and you should take it seriously.

Even if it is not something that important and just a random comment on your post, you can simply like the comment to show your appreciation. Little gestures like these go a long way in winning over your customers and encouraging them to engage with your content more.

Apart from this, you should also leverage social media listening tools to keep track of brand mentions and online conversations about your brand. This could be anywhere on social media, not necessarily on your own posts. These tools can help you stay on top of things and respond to these conversations.

Social media is a place to interact with others and network. You should, therefore, utilise it to engage in relevant conversations in your niche and connect with influencers and other industry experts. These connections can help you later if you want to run any social media marketing campaigns and need help promoting them.


Conclusion

If you want to build your social media presence and stand out among the crowd, then you need to keep your social media management on point. This post will guide you through everything that you need to do to manage your social accounts effectively. Use this as your reference and ace your social media management game.

About the Author
With over 15 years in content marketing, Werner founded Influencer Marketing Hub in 2016. He successfully grew the platform to attract 5 million monthly visitors, making it a key site for brand marketers globally. His efforts led to the company's acquisition in 2020. Additionally, Werner's expertise has been recognized by major marketing and tech publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, BBC and Wired.