Most of us use social media regularly, but when it comes to social media management, you have to be willing to get strategic. As a business or brand, people expect you to have a social media presence. The measure of success can sometimes be interpreted by how large a following is. But understanding how to manage your accounts with quality followers can feel overwhelming and random. One thing that can help guide decisions is knowing your audience. Creating content directly for your target audience is ideal for optimizing social media. You can maintain an engaging social media presence by researching and understanding what your viewers care about. This will get you closer to having quality followers that can become potential customers.

Setting Goals

How do you want to use social media management to market and grow your business? Following a style guide with set fonts and colors is a great starting place to maintain brand consistency online. Next, your goals around the post designs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound; in other words, SMART. Evaluate what outcomes you hope to achieve through your social media activity. For example, the first could be brand building by generating awareness and interest in your brand. The second could be generating sales or sales leads. A third could be providing customer service and building community and customer loyalty. Say that you want to build brand awareness through social media. Your SMART goal would be to “have 100 followers by the end of 2-3 months”. 

Your social media needs to be where people can go and follow along with a capsule of your brand and how it can benefit them. By setting goals, you can help create a clear path to build your social media so you can guide followers to becoming loyal customers along the way. By setting SMART goals, you can track your growth.

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs

Social media is a wealth of collecting and presenting data. Good social media management uses that data to learn how to present their brand in the best light. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are a way to keep track of all the data so you can use it to build a successful following and gain more potential business. They should be measurable, directional, and directly related to your goal. For example, say your goal is to build brand awareness by gaining 100 followers by the end of 2 months; your KPIs would be the following two points: 

1. Account/Website traffic – Watching the analytics on your posts to see how many people are visiting your page and interacting with your posts.
2. Conversion rate – seeing how many people who visit your page start following so you can optimize the landing page or the traffic to your site.

Defining a Target Audience:

There are so many different personalities on the internet, so by defining your target audience, you are able to curate your social media profiles so that it attracts the type of person you want to your brand. 

To find your target audience, you must have an image of exactly who you want your customer to be. A good starting point for creating a customer profile is to ask yourself where this person lives. What are they passionate about? What are their interests? How old are they? What does their living situation look like? What do they do for work? How much money do they make? How do they spend their money?  

Once you have these answers, you can start to map out your customer’s journey. How does your brand appeal to this person, and how would they find you? Keep these things in mind:

• Awareness: When is my target most receptive?
• Interest: How can I relate my product to my target’s needs?
• Desire: How can I show my target my product really fits in their life?
• Conversion: How can I get my target to take action?
• Advocacy: How can I make my target into an advocate?

Once you have your target audience mapped out, you can plan your social media strategy around how best to gain their attention and make them want to advocate for your brand. 

Creating a Social Media Presence:

Deciding which social media platform you use matters in achieving your marketing goals. Considering your goals, your target audience, and the content you plan to share, you should have narrowed down the social media platforms that could work for you. It’s also worth taking a look at what your competitors are doing. As there are so many different platforms now, determining which one is best for you so you can focus on how you want to present yourself is crucial. 

Here are some platforms from Buffer’s list of the top 20 social media platforms and what kind of content you can post to them.

Facebook: has the largest amount of users and lets you post all types of content. 

YouTube: video-centered platform

WhatsApp: messaging app

Instagram: image and video sharing platform centered

Facebook Messenger: messaging app within Facebook 

WeChat: originally a messaging app, but it’s evolved into an all-in-one platform

TikTok: short video content platform 

Snapchat: focuses on photos and short videos (known as snaps) shared between friends

Twitter: posts of real-time information in just 280 characters, along with videos and photos.

Linkedin: a platform where industry experts share content, network, and build their brand

Pinterest: a one-stop shop for inspiration and discovering new products and ideas

Reddit: dedicated forums for anything you want to talk about

Selecting the right social media platform for your business gives it a better chance of success.

Social Media Policy:

Nine in ten consumers will buy products from a brand they follow on social media. But to ensure that you get all the benefits from your platforms, you must engage with your followers to reflect your brand. This means that regardless of who manages your accounts, your presence online will feel seamless across the board. One way to ensure this is to create a social media policy for your employees.

A social media policy should achieve three core things:

• First, it must empower employees.
• Next, it must protect a brand.
• Finally, it must guard against legal risks to the brand.

To start, list the official social media accounts of the company and ask employees to follow them. From there, you need to define responsibilities. Here are some examples of things you can include in your policy:

1. Posting
2. You can talk about the company on personal accounts, but it must be on brand and what can be talked about
3. Create sample posts
4. Make clear what can’t be shared
5. Tone of voice 
6. How to deal with conflict

It is important to remember that the internet never forgets. So by having a social media policy, you can safeguard as much as possible your brand’s image and integrity. 

Conclusion

These are the building blocks of social media management. By keeping the tips from this article in mind, you can start off strong when using social media to help build your brand. While there are a lot of moving parts to social media management, by clearly outlining your goals on how you want to use it and who you want to attract, you will be successful no matter how many followers you gain. 

Interesting in hiring a professional social media manager? Please reach out to Sales@CreativeRepute.com to begin the discussion with our team, or fill out the Request A Quote form on our website to connect to an Account Manager.