In this post, we would discuss some of the best practices in social media management. This way you would be able to engage your audience and add incredible value to both your audiences and your company.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
Your audience is the lifeblood of your business. If you don’t know who they are, you may find it difficult reaching and connecting with them on social media. Also, you would be spending more to advertise in all the wrong places.
Young people use social media in a completely different manner than older people. Though, the number of older people is increasing hugely on social media.
The social networks you use to create awareness about your brand should reflect the preferences of your customers and community.
Check your page analytics to see who is engaging with you on social media. Also, check out the competition which social networks they are using to reach out to their audience.
Tailor your outreach and engagement communication in a way to reach out to them in the places they hang out.
You can use the online survey tools to ask your audience preferences of social networks. And based on the results you can create your presence on those channels. The best strategy for Social Media Management and Social Media Marketing is to completely figure it out and just don’t guess it.
Your website, YouTube channel, and Facebook page are fundamental in the entire social media management program. Use these digital properties effectively to reach out to your audience and engage them with your brand online.
Step 2: Don’t Ignore the Negative Posts & Comments
No one likes negative comments about themselves. Especially negative comments or feedback about the companies are more painful. Because other people make their perception of the company based on it.
But, negative comments or critical posts are good opportunities for businesses to identify their weak areas and making them stronger.
Those areas could be anything like operations, communications, or customer service processes. Even if you can’t solve the problem immediately, simply acknowledging the issue.
Apologizing, and communicating what you’re doing to investigate or address the problem can go a long way. Probably you can make that disgruntled customer into a loyal one.
Do not keep issues unresolved for a long time and keep making a trail of communication online. Rather take that complaint off-line and try to resolve it.
Especially if the complaint includes sensitive private information about the customer, do not keep that floating online.
Take your customer’s phone number and speak to him. Try resolving the problem in the best way possible as quickly as possible.
Step 3: Showcase Your Brand’s Personality
With so many companies vying for the attention of the online masses, it’s the distinctive voices that stand out.
No one really wants to talk to machines or a chatbot. But, people want to talk to real people. Especially, people who can listen to them and resolve their issues.
Allowing your teams to add their voice to the brand can give a sense of authenticity and genuine personality to your brand that engages and attracts interaction from your community.
If you showcase the human side of your business you’ll see that the quality of your engagements online will rise.
Step 4: Use an Editorial Calendar
Social media marketing is all about engaging your audience with great content that they like and interact with.
Editorial Calendar is the term that is basically used in the newspaper industry. But, nowadays it is also being used in digital marketing and social media marketing. An editorial calendar is an important part of social media management. The editorial calendar helps your team to drive your content marketing efforts on social media.
An editorial calendar helps you align and coordinate your efforts. Through an editorial calendar, you can make sure that your content programs are complementary to one another.
The best use of a Social Media Editorial Calendar is to instruct your teams to prepare content in advance. Everyone in the team knows their role and topic they have to create content.
If you have your Editorial calendar ready you can organize, administer, and publish or schedule the content. The Editorial calendar also is very helpful if your teams are located in different geographies.
Step 5: Be Good in Customer Care
The best way to engage with your audience on social media is to interact with them, listen to them, and help them solve their issues. Twitter & Facebook are the great platforms where you can interact and engage with your customers directly and in real-time.
If you show your audience that you care for them and you listen to them you can make them your loyal customers.
Also engaging with community members who are asking questions, looking for information, sharing frustrations, or even offering compliments is a great way to showcase your brand’s personality.
This should be part of your social media management to help your customers, resolve their issues, and keep them happy.
Step 6: Share the Stories
You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything. Great stories are at the heart of every great marketing campaign.
The very best marketers put stories at the heart of their work. Stories of customers, employees, advocates, fans, friends, partners, community, and anything which is important and relevant for their audience.
Social media is a natural extension of storytelling. Whether it’s customer testimonial videos or photos of your employee outing or anything which people would love to see, experience and share should be the part of social media.
Step 7: Remember & Practice the Four E’s Formula in Creating Your Social Media Content
Social media is a noisy place and everyone is vying to get the attention of the same audience. But, to grab your audience’s attention and engaging with them in a meaningful way could be a challenge.
What makes the real difference is great content. Content is the king of the web and in Social Media only the great content reigns. Great content is what gets downloaded, liked, shared, and talked about.
As a rule of thumb, the great content has four elements which make it meaningful and share-worthy:
- Enlightening
- Entertaining
- Educational
- Emotional
Make your content with these elements in it and you will see that capturing your audience’s attention would be easy.
If your content is meaningful, educational, entertaining, and evokes an emotion then it would be shared across the communities which would give your business more eyeballs and more profits in terms of more customers.
Step 8: Educate Your Employees on Your Company’s Social Media Usage & Policies
Irrespective of which industry you are in you will have employees who use social media in their day-to-day life. And mostly they share everything about their life online and that includes the workplace as well.
If your company is active on social media and anything goes online which can go against your organization would be bad for your company’s reputation.
You should make sure that everyone in your organization knows how to use social media so as not to make any bad reputation about your company online.
Have written policies about social media usage and mentioning the name of your brand over the web and social media should be documented and instructed to every employee whether they directly work on your brand social channels or use their personal social channels.
Make sure everyone in your organization adheres to the Social Media usage policies. The social media guidelines can include:
- Basic dos and don’ts of online etiquette.
- What to do and not do in response to negative comments.
- Who in the company can post to official channels?
- What to do if they have questions or concerns about a post.
The best way is to hold workshops or Q&A sessions with your employees to guide them on the social media policies of your company. This would surely help you and your brand in a situation of crisis.
Step 9: Simplify Your Metrics
Measuring your social media metrics is important and gives you important insights based on which you can make your decisions. The truth is everyone loves numbers but nobody wants to create reports.
Similarly, no one wants to read those lengthy reports.
So rather than trying to build huge, complicated dashboards full of metrics and pages of graphs, try finding 3-5 key metrics that can really help you determine the success of your social media efforts.
Those metrics can be different depending on your business goals – sales, awareness, advocacy, and engagement. But they don’t have to be complicated to help you see whether you’re putting in your efforts in the right direction.
For instance, if you are trying to measure the social media awareness of your brand you can simply look into the data which shows the shares, comments, likes, and engagement numbers.
Similarly, if you are trying to measure your sales data you can simply look into leads, inquiries, conversions, cost of leads, cost of conversion, etc.
More you simplify your metrics more it would be easy for you to do your social media management and drive meaningful metrics out of it.
Step 10: Keep Improvising on Social Media Management & Social Media Marketing
The social media metrics are useful only if you understand them and based on the data you make your decisions and improvisations based on that. For instance, if you see that a lot of your customers complain on social media then you should look into the process and fix the problems so that your customers don’t get that problem again.
Also, you can let your customers know that what changes you have done in your organization or the processes to address the customer’s issues. That would make your brand more customers friendly and credible.
Step 11: Use Social Media for Socialization Rather than Just Marketing
Many companies use their social media just for promotions and marketing their products, brands, or services. But, if you see closely they have a very little following and very less engagement.
Social media is such a powerful tool in the hands of brands which gives them direct and real-time access to their audience, customers, employees, partners, etc., whom they can engage and build a more credible brand and loyal customer base.
All you need to do is carefully use it and harness the power of this powerful medium.
Step 12: Ask Your Audience to Participate in Your Communication
This is what makes social media even more useful and helps you involve your audience in making your brand.
Think of the political campaigns in any country, see how the political parties and politicians engage people. How they get them involved in sharing their voices online.
And how people support their favorite parties and leaders. 2014 Lok Sabha election in India was the best example of public participation in Political Social Media campaigns.
And how it changed the incumbent government with the unprecedented downfall in terms of seats they could manage to save.
Conclusion
Social Media Management is an important part of the entire organizational structure and especially of marketing and customer service functions.
Everything you do on social media in terms of engaging with the audience, customers, and community as a whole goes a long way.
It provides businesses a great opportunity to win the trust of its customers and audience. It also offers great opportunities to create relationships on a personal level with potential customers.
You can also maintain a good relationship with existing customers.
Using Social Media Management strategy effectively, your business can grow very fast.
