What's Involved In Social Media Management?
Without a doubt, one of our key services at Firebelly and one we get asked about the most is social media management!
If you run a social media profile for business, you’ll know how much time and effort goes into creating content, generating ideas, posting content and engaging with your community.
As a brand or business, you should have a dedicated person or team to manage your social media. If that’s not an option, you should look to outsource your social media management to an agency or an expert in the field.
What Does Social Media Management Mean?
Social media management is developing a strategy for your social media channels, creating and sharing various content forms suitable for your audience and creating genuine conversations around your brand. Managing a social media account involves developing a strategy, content creation, scheduling and posting and engaging with your community.
What Does Social Media Management Involve?
If you run a business and run your social media, you’ll know that there is SO much more to social media management than simply ‘just posting’. There are plenty of steps in the evolution of a post, and mostly it’s behind the scenes!
If you want to take control of your social media and implement a strategy or if you’re going to become a social media manager, I’m going to go into more detail about each step that’s involved in the social media management process below.
Let’s go!
Calendar build and plan
When posting on social media, having a plan is vital! Having a plan in place will allow you to plan your content in advance and always be in tune with the seasons, holidays and national themed days.
For us at Firebelly, we build a content calendar in advance that is suitable for the client and their needs. We find that by making a personalised calendar, we can create content further in advance.
Posting without a plan is like driving to somewhere you don’t know without Google Maps! You might get there in the end, but it might take some serious time!
I always recommend to my clients and friends to stick to your content calendar but, of course, allow room to be spontaneous with your content and also space to be responsive to ongoing trends or events.
Whether you prep and plan your content one week in advance, one month or three months in advance, having a plan and a direction is vital to aligning your content across social media platforms.
Content Creation
Your content is essential to your success across social media platforms. What you create and publish creates your brand identity and creates awareness for what you stand for and what your business is all about.
Without it, no one will see your brand’s personality and learn what it’s about, and ultimately, become a customer!
Content comes in a few different forms, and various platforms favour one type of content or multiple formats (hello Instagram & Facebook!).
Photography
Showcasing your brand through the use of photography can create your brand image and feed aesthetic. At Firebelly, we work with amazing photographers that capture the essence of the brand. Before any shoot, we make a mood board with our client to ensure we capture the needed shots.
Taking photos in batches is vital; not only does this use your time efficiently, but it also reduces your costs to have four shoots a year, rather than a shoot every time you have a new product.
Graphic Design
One of the best things about social media marketing? You don’t need to create your graphics on expensive software. If you haven’t heard of Canva, where have you been?! Canva is undoubtedly one of the best tools for social media management. It is a simple graphic design tool that can create GORGEOUS and high-quality graphics for every platform and functionality for a vast range of posts.
If you are not using Canva, I recommend you use it! It will change your life.
Videos
Videos are possibly the most varied across all social media platforms. If you want to create long informative videos, YouTube or IGTV is the perfect platform. You can use a professional set up, lighting, editing the video with graphics, or adding additional content.
If you prefer to create raw and fun content pieces, TikTok and Reels are for you! The wonderful thing about reels is that they are of low quality, quick, and short content pieces. They can be created quickly and consumed with ease as they are between 15-60 seconds. I’ve written a blog post all about Tiktok that you can read here.
Posting & Scheduling
One of the best tools to come out for social media managers are scheduling tools! These tools are one of the most efficient means to save you time. Using a scheduling tool, you can plan your posts and captions in advance, and the tool will automatically post to your feed, meaning you can still live your life!
There are some AMAZING scheduling tools out there that you can use to schedule your content, some are free, and some have a paid subscription. Of course, the free versions are limited, and the paid versions have full functionality with no limitations. However, if you are just starting, I recommend using Facebook Creator Studio; it is FREE and easy to use.
You can even write your captions, tag accounts, add locations, hashtags and choose a time and date that is most suitable for your audience!
I’ve written a blog post all about various scheduling tools here.
Community Management
Nurturing your audience is vital to building an engaged community, and an engaged community will help your account grow, gain consistent engagement and turn your audience into paying customers.
You need to do a few things daily to nurture your community, reply to DM’s, respond to comments, engage with your followers, and leave meaningful comments.
Want to know a little more about community management? I’ve written a full blog post here.
Which Social Media Platform is right for you?
You don’t need to be on all of them!
I’ve written a full blog post on why you don’t need to be on all the platforms all the time; you can read more here.
Let’s take a closer look at each platform to help you decide which platform to post on!
The ‘original’ social media platform, I’d recommend for all businesses to have at the very least a Facebook page where you post regularly; you’ll need a Facebook page to set up ads. There are many ways to reach your target audience on Facebook. I would recommend that the most effective is via ads or market within Facebook Groups!
Without a doubt, one of the most popular social media platforms! Instagram is a great place to find customers and share information in a variety of ways and formats. From photos to graphics to quick videos to longer informative videos to lives, you can do A LOT on Instagram; you just need to work hard at it to stand out from the noise.
Did you know that there are 1.074 billion users in the world!? Be you, be unique and clear on your messaging to stand out from the crowd.
TikTok
If you follow me on socials, you’ll probably know that TikTok is one of my favourite platforms! New to the game of social media and becoming increasingly popular in 2020, TikTok has grown FAST. Small businesses have seen incredible growth and success by simply posting 15-60 second raw videos. The best thing about TikTok? It doesn’t need to be perfect! Roll up your sleeves and start creating videos!
If I had to recommend a platform to focus on, I’d recommend Linkedin! Linkedin, as a professional networking site is vastly underused. If you can publish videos on LinkedIn, this is an excellent way to share information and communicate with your clients exactly what you can do. Whether your business is D2C or B2B, this platform will work for you.
Google My Business
Yes, this counts under social media! Why? Like all other social media platforms, you can share posts, offers and photos to your Google My Business page; the more you update it, the more Google loves you! Perfect as an SEO tool.
Pinterest is seriously underrated and is influential in the purchasing decisions of consumers. In 2020 Pinterest saw a HUGE increase in users and currently has 459 million monthly active users. The great thing about Pinterest is that users are on there to create boards for inspiration for predominantly home, lifestyle, travel and fashion. If you are a service or product-based business, I’d recommend using Pinterest to your advantage!
YouTube
YouTube is the home of entertainment, education and ALOT of workout videos. I don’t know about you, but I use Youtube as a search engine and can nearly always find what I’m looking for on it! YouTube is a great outlet if you want to educate or entertain your users; different to TikTok, Youtube videos usually have a higher production value and are made with camera and lighting equipment and are edited. Don’t worry if you don’t have a fancy kit; start with what you’ve got!
Ready to plan your social media content?
I hope you found this post all about social media management helpful! If you are looking for an expert team to manage your social media accounts, please reach out; we can help!
Still not sure which platform is right for you and your business? Drop a comment below, and I can help you select the right platform/s for your business.
Remember, you don’t need to be on every single platform to see results; focus on the platforms where your audience are active and generate native content.
BIG love,
Mary-Anne. x
p.s if you would like to check out more marketing tricks that I’ve been sharing on TikTok, you can view ALL of my videos here.
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