Staying on top of the constantly shifting landscape, terminology, and sheer number of different social media platforms is a more than full-time job. It can be challenging to keep up with your personal social media accounts, much less the official account for your company. So how can you effectively manage your company’s social media accounts without spending every waking hour expanding your social media audience and responding to their posts?
Narrow Your Focus
Primary aspects of marketing include knowing who your customers are and how to cater to their needs, as well as identifying new audiences who might become customers and reaching out to them. This applies to social media as well.
You don’t need to be active on every platform at the same time. Even if you are active on several platforms, you don’t need to allocate the same amount of time and energy to all of them.
Understanding the user base of each social media platform will allow you to prioritize a select few and scale down efforts on, or entirely abandon, others. This is called developing a channel strategy.
As Sculpt points out, the ideal balance of time and effort should be 80 percent spent on your primary channels of communication or platforms and only 20 percent on your secondary or exploratory channels.
That means that if your company specializes in business to business (B2B) services or products, your primary channels should be LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to communicate and engage with your primary and existing customer audience. Secondary channels, such as Nextdoor, Reddit, or even TikTok should be used only sparingly to test the waters for new audiences and remain connected to current trends.
Plan Strategies Ahead
Take the time to sit down and create a strategy for your social media marketing. Identify what your goals will be and how you want to measure the success of each effort to achieve those goals. SociallyIn suggests that by creating a schedule for what content to release, as well as when and on which platforms, you can stay on top of your goals without stressing about forgotten tasks. Some third-party programs offer the ability to schedule messages ahead of time, allowing you to save time and effort with batches of similar messages across platforms.
From a day planner to carefully timed automated releases, planning out your marketing campaign’s runtime and analysis period will improve your experience and results. As you find marketing campaigns that work, consider planning to repeat the campaign on an annual basis, pending analysis of the efficacy each year. This would also have the benefit of having a chunk of dedicated time each year without having to develop a new marketing strategy.
Go With What Works; Ditch What Doesn’t
By setting a clear, measurable win-condition for a strategy or campaign as well as a specific time frame from start to finish, you can identify what does or doesn’t work on each platform and with which audiences.
How many more hashtags of your campaign or company merit success or failure? If a particular marketing effort is intended to increase followers on Twitter, but instead increases traffic on your online shop, is it still a failure? How long do you wait to determine the impact, or lack of impact, of the campaign?
These are just a few questions to bear in mind when establishing the parameters by which you measure success. Envision-Creative lists many tools and services, both free and paid, to collect and measure information about your social media audience.
Automate and Engage
While it may sound contradictory to both automate your social media presence and engage with your audience, it is by combining these two approaches you can maximize impact and reach while minimizing the time and effort you spend sifting through your feed for relevant content.
Automating
By using automated social listening programs, you can trawl different platforms for mentions of your brand and your most recent campaign, as well as any keywords you believe are important to your company or brand.
Homing in on the mentions identified by your social listening program, you can reply to the most relevant ones and acknowledge feedback, which will increase your perceived engagement with your customer base. You could further automate the process by pairing your social listening program with a chatbot, either platform-native or third-party.
A chatbot can handle simple or common questions, mentions, and requests while collating more complicated conversations for a human to address. SocialBakers offers a variety of automated cross-platform services and analytics while SocialMediaToday suggests a few more tools which will be helpful.
Engaging
Consumers have become increasingly alienated by having advertisements one-sidedly thrust upon them by every possible avenue of communication. It is by listening and responding to their questions, complaints, and suggestions that a business can create a positive relationship with their customers, increasing customer loyalty and positive public exposure.
Inviting your audience to create content and submit it, tag you, or otherwise advocate for your brand and this campaign is a way to get free advertisement. By reposting or otherwise using your company’s official account to promote the art, videos, and clever quips of your social media audience, you are demonstrating that you listen to and engage with your customers.
Hosting a giveaway on Facebook over the course of a month and requiring likes to be entered creates a limited and measurable campaign to test the efficacy of a giveaway with your audience. Using the increase in likes during and the month for one month after the giveaway period, as compared to the average number a month prior to measure, is one way to measure the success of the event in pleasing and building your audience.
Influencers are another way to reach a wider audience. Offering swag, a discount code, or early access to new products and services is a way to incentivize so-called “influencers” to publicize your current campaign.
In particular, inviting your audience to record themselves performing “challenges,” dances, and themes associated with your brand is an effective way to utilize an influencer’s audience to increase engagement and expand your customer base. LyfeMarketing provides many more pointers on engaging with your social media audience and customer base.
Social media management can be challenging. A dedicated team of experts can help. Contact Wordsmyth Creative Content Marketing today for help with your social media needs.