Social Media Management Basics (2)

Welcome back, In the first part of this article, we discussed key concepts in social media management and defined some terms. Today we will talk about incorporating social media management into your organizations' information dissemination structure, how to create a social media strategy for your business, social media marketing tools and what you need to know to excel as a social media manager.

Social Selling is not for every Business

Social media marketing is not the most viable form of marketing for every business out there. This is true for many reasons, some businesses, owing to their structure and the nature of their customer base, do not need social media to drive sales, take for instance, a gun store at a city center, such a business might be on social media but does not need it to drive sales in reality. its success depends on many factors of which social media is not a key component.

how then can you promote your business on the internet and gain traction without using social media marketing.

The internet is a vast pool of information with lots of opportunities for everyone. Social networking platforms are a small fraction of this pool.

How to Grow your business online without the use of social media

There are several ways to do this.

Use Google services:

One is to add your business details on Google using any of its free tools such as Google maps, Google my business, and Google workspace.

Email Marketing:

Email marketing comes in handy for targeting a specific set of buyers if the products or services you offer caters for the needs of people within a particular culture and community.

for the gun store owner in our example above, it will be more profitable to curate a list of emails that comprises of Hunters associations around his locality, Private military Contractors and security firms, then create a sales funnel based on this data which he will constantly update with information about new products and drive sales.

Own a website:

You can create a website and optimize it to appear on search engines like google and bing. you can do this using Content management systems such as WordPress, Wix, and Google Sites.

Creating a well optimized website where you display your product and services enables search engines to direct customers searching the web to a landing page with your business information and product. If done well, traffic on a website can turn over massive sales over time.

Search engines like Google and Bing use keyword research to direct users seeking information to where it is available on the web.

What a social media manager should know to incorporate social selling into an organization's model

Having social media presence as a corporate body or brand involves more than making post on the business page. it requires researched strategies that have been proven to produce results. These strategies include:

The use of keyword research:

research keywords for the niche your organization operates in and use this research to generate valuable social media content. Search engines like Google and Bing use keyword research to direct users seeking information to where it is available on the web.

The search engines crawl the web searching for certain keywords usually typed frequently by a users and match them to content on the web that contains those keywords.

The goal of a social media manager then, is to research what topics in a niche many people are searching for and generate social media content that targets those searches. Various tools are available for carrying out keyword research for social media contents, below are some.

1. Google keyword planner
2. Ubersuggest
3. Google trends
4. Moz keyword explorer
5. SEMrush
6. KWfinder
7. Keywords Everywhere
8. Google Search
9. Bulk Keyword Generator
10. Google Ads

The use of graphic design tools.

The aim of graphics design is to summarize bulky information into an image that draws attention and simultaneously conveys a message.

Certain social media networks are built for fast information relay. People who use such networks have lower attention spans and consume information as they come. if your organization operate in such an environment, compressing your message into one image is the best route to take.

Research has shown that certain color codes and design patterns do well for certain industry, for example, Orange and Red is often associated with the food and health industry, Green and Brown with the pharmaceutical and agriculture industry and Blue with the technology industry.

Colors with brighter hues stand out on social media such as Facebook and Instagram.

The aim of graphics design is to summarize bulky information into an image that draws attention and simultaneously conveys a message.

Social media is a game of trends and numbers

a brands social media manager ought to be attuned with current trend and campaign patterns making trend at a moment. They can use this trends to come up with creative ways to tailor their contents and win new followers over.

a good example will be using a tiktok challenge to market your brand.

Consistency in updating your social media profiles is more effective than infrequent posting once as quantity matters a lot on social media, people tend to remember what they constantly engage with, and when design patterns is added to consistency, it makes a brand to stand out among competitors.

No room for errors

while working as a social media manager, you are the face of the company in public, research shows that poor communication skill and bad spelling affects how people perceive quality over time.

A social media manager must be a professional communicator and ensure that every detail is well placed and cross checked before being pushed.

With newer tools like Canva and SaaS such as Simpu and Trello, a one man social media team is possible

Social media management teams

To accomplish all that have been said above, your organization needs a social media marketing team. A team will enable you churn out efficient and timely content. The more impact a brand wants to achieve through social media, the more people it needs to create this content.

Some skilled personals you will need on your social media management team are

1. Influencers
2. Graphics designers
3. Content writers
4. Technical editor
5. Videographer/Photographer
6. SEO Expert.

The list is no where near exhaustive as some skill sets can cover for the absence of others. This depends on what type of content you choose to drive, on what social media platform and they type of business you operate.

Three things to consider before planning a SMM strategy for a brand

These three things are important while planning a social media strategy for your brand. These three key elements help social media managers concentrate their resources on creating the right content and cutting down on strategies that don’t work.

• Conduct a social media audience check: you need to determine if there is a social media audience for your organization and if it requires being on social media at all, so you don’t invest in brand advertising for what can be achieved in other ways, recall our example above of the gun store owner.

• Decide on the right social media platforms: some organizations will thrive better on linkedin in contrast to tiktok or facebook. Deciding on what social media to concentrate your forces can accelerate growth rate tremendously.

- Analyze your target audience: advertising to everyone is advertising to no one, conduct a social media analysis on your target audience, who are those that use your products or service the most? Where can you find them? How can you tailor your content to ensure they come in contact with it during searches?

Social Media Management Life Cycle

This is a life cycle of the various stages for creating content as a social media manager.

• Keyword Research and Content generation: Conduct your keyword research and generate topics from them, create contents based on your research.

• Social media posting Schedule: Create a posting calendar for the content you have generated. What content will appear in what platform on which day and in what time.

• Client approval: Send this calendar to your client for vetting and approval

• Engagement monitoring: Publish content based on agreed and adjusted calendar, reply to engagement, monitor and record activities.

• Analytics, Health Check and Repeat: Analyze your report, conduct a health check to determine what worked and what didn’t, concentrate your efforts on what work when creating content next time and repeat the process.

Social media content creation strategy for teams

Teams can leverage on the steps below to create contents that work within a given time frame.

• Create a social media posting calendar
• Assign team roles and responsibilities
• Round up content ideas by looking at trends in the niche, joining online conversations and curating interesting articles.
• Decide on how much content you need to create and in what format
• Use a health check to analyze strategy and improve growth

How to perform a social media health check

- Step 1: List all of your company’s social media profiles

• Step 2: Use Social media analytics to review your key Performance metrics i.e most engaging content format, question response rate, audience interests,
• Step 3: Put all that information into a neat social media audit template
• Step 4: Analyze the data and Identify areas that could use improvement.