Social Media Management – Harvard Consulting Service

Social Media Marketing

What Is Social Media Management?

Social media management is the process of analyzing social media audiences and developing a strategy that’s tailored to them, creating and distributing content for social media profiles, monitoring online conversations, collaborating with influencers, providing community service, and monitoring, measuring, and reporting on social media performance and ROI.

All these tasks, which were once marginalized by businesses, have now stepped into the limelight of companies’ marketing strategies.

Why Is an Efficient SMM Process Important?

The business potential of social networks is immense. Brands can leverage social media platforms to successfully drive their objectives across the marketing funnel, from raising brand awareness to increasing store visits.

But to be able to accomplish this, they need efficient social media teams.

The more goals you want to achieve through social media marketing, the more people dedicated to this channel you’re going to need. This demand will eventually lead to building complex social media team structures.

If you’re a large brand, you might even have multiple teams in different offices and regions of the world, leveraging different strategies to meet different targets.

Conducting a social media audit

A social media audit can largely improve how you manage social media:

It will give you a granular picture of the effectiveness of your strategy
It will allow you to pinpoint where you’re wasting your resources
It will show which social channels are bringing in the most results
It will demonstrate the impact of social media on your web results

So, how do you go about performing your social media health check?

Which Social Media?

Step 1: List all of your company’s social media profiles, including those from different regions and belonging to your different sub-brands.

Step 2: Use social media analytics to review your key performance metrics, such as follower growth, engagement (including the average engagement rates for particular months), publishing frequency, most engaging content formats, top-performing posts, traffic sources, community sentiment, question response rate, average response time, audience interests, demographics, and behaviors.

Data Analysis

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. For example, if you see a dip in your engagement volume, it might be a result of low content quality, inaccurate targeting, or wrong publishing frequency.

That’s exactly the type of information you need to single out shortcomings in your strategy. From there, you can take first steps towards fixing them and making your social media management activities more efficient.

Analyze your target audience

Analyzing your social media community is everything when it comes to managing social media efficiently. There are plenty of benefits to analyzing your followers – including building stronger customer relationships, creating more relevant content, and boosting social media conversions.

On the flipside, if you don’t do market research beforehand, you’re at risk of getting on a wrong path, wasting both money and resources.

How do you build a detailed picture of your social media audience?

Start off by segmenting your audience into personas according to their shared characteristics.

Or, if you want to make your life easier, you can let AI do the job for you.

Funnel tools

Analyzing your top to middle of the funnel audience is especially important. That’s because people at these stages, sometimes called an unknown audience, are your potential customers.

The better you know these users, the more effectively you’ll be able to nurture them towards conversion with tailored marketing campaigns.

So, which tools are going to come in handy at this point?

Social Media Data

Native social media analytics. The audience data you can get from social media platforms is quite detailed and includes:

Facebook audience insights: demographics, page likes, locations, activity
Instagram insights: top locations, times, and days when your followers are most active
Twitter analytics: demographics, lifestyle, consumer behavior, mobile footprint
LinkedIn analytics: demographics, job function, seniority, industry, company size, employment status

Audience Analytics. These enable you to see your Facebook audience grouped into personas based on their demographics, interest, and behaviors. As a result, you can save time you’d have to spend on manual audience research.

You’ll also be able to immediately turn the result of your audience analysis into action.

Bottom of the funnel tools

Analyze the bottom of the funnel users, which are sometimes called a known audience. And use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to focus on every part of the customer experience

These will give you a better understanding of the people who purchased your products, including their demographics, the touchpoints on their customer journey, and content that eventually made them hit the buy button.

Here are some of the CRM tools you can use:

Content management tools

Social media listening

Keeping tabs on online conversations around your brand is crucial to understanding the real impact of your campaigns that goes beyond just likes and comments.

Social listening – monitor social media for topics and queries, uncover the conversations about your brand, and analyze the sentiment around them
Google alerts – create alerts for relevant phrases and topics appearing online and receive regular email reports, so you never miss a mention of your brand

Influencer collaboration

Managing influencer relationships is a relatively new addition to social media managers’ scope of work. Yet, it’s also become one of the most important tasks on their to-do lists. Here’s how you can effectively manage influencer marketing-related activities:

Find influencers tool with AI – discover the most fitting influencers for your social media audience in seconds. Get an instant overview of their demographics, audience size, and engagement along with an easy-to-understand performance score, so you can pair up with the most effective influencers.

Social customer Care

Social media is a go-to channel for many customers to express their opinions or ask questions about your business. To be able to manage all the incoming messages, you might need:

Community management – interact with your community in an organized way with automated notifications, and defined team roles and responsibilities. View your incoming messages across channels in one spot and monitor your teams’ efficiency with filterable feeds, so you can provide top-notch customer service.
Sparkcentral – take your community care beyond social, and engage with your followers on WhatsApp, SMS, and live chats.

Analyze Social Media Audience Personas

As mentioned before, analyzing your audience personas should be the foundation of your social media strategy. Before you create any content piece or launch campaigns, you need to understand your community on a deeper level.

How do you go about managing and analyzing your buyer personas?

Step 1: Analyze audience data. Use the data sources listed in the previous section – the more information you have, the more accurate picture of your audience you’ll be able to build. Ideally, you’ll be using software that aggregates multiple audience data sources, saving you time and manual labor.
TIP: Some audience information won’t be available in platforms’ native analytics or even Google Analytics. If you need answers to very specific questions, such as one’s favorite travel destination, consider running polls or doing market research.

Step 2: Consolidate your audience data. It’s likely that after you pull the data, it will be scattered and difficult to read. To get a holistic view of your social media community, you need to bring all the data together and analyze it in a single spot.

Step 3: Define your audience personas. Your social media audience is diverse: there are groups sharing different demographics, location, behavior, and interests. By segmenting your audience according to these characteristics, you’re able to get a more detailed understanding of your personas.
As a result, you can create tailored content that sparks engagement and effectively nurtures your community down the marketing funnel.

Step 4: Check up on your audience personas regularly. It’s not enough to analyze your community once and rely on this data for years.
Keep in mind that your audience is constantly evolving – there are new people starting to follow your page and your “old” followers might develop interests towards different content. To be able to spot these trends and act on them in time, you need to analyze your audience personas on a regular basis.

Social Media Content Creation

Once you’re done with analyzing your audience personas, you should have an idea of the direction your content strategy should take.

Yet, deciding on content formats and topics is not everything. As your business scales up, you’ll face the challenge of producing big volumes of content at a fast pace. To be able to tackle this issue, you’re going to need an optimized content workflow.

Here’s how you can efficiently manage social media content creation activities:

Step 1: Download a social media calendar into your Google Calendar with one click. It includes all national holidays for the whole year.

Step 2: Assign team roles and responsibilities. This step is critical to improving your efficiency, whether you’re an agency or brand with multiple offices around the world. To produce content efficiently, you should have the following roles on your team:

Content manager – In charge of creating a social media content strategy, managing editorial calendar, distributing content promotion budget, and measuring KPIs.

Content creator – In charge of coming up with relevant content ideas, creating engaging posts, and optimizing them for different platforms.

Content editor – In charge of collaborating with all the people involved in content creation across the company, reviewing posts and approving them for publishing.

Step 3: Leverage data on your social media audience personas. Pay attention to their interests and the influencers they follow. This information will help you focus your efforts on creating tailored content, making this area of social media management much more efficient.

Remember that the more personalized your social media content, the more effective it is in driving your business objectives.

See our guide for step-by-step instructions on how to personalize your social media marketing activities!

Step 5: Determine how much content you need to create. Obviously, you don’t want to put out too little and disappear from your audiences’ newsfeed or publish too much and appear like spam.Knowing how many posts you need to create on a daily or weekly basis can help you manage your resources better and be more efficient. How much content should you be creating?

Facebook – 3 times a day
Instagram – enough to publish 1-2 times a day
Twitter – enough to publish multiple times a day
LinkedIn – enough to publish 5 times a week

Step 6: Create amazing content using a variety of available online content creation tools that we discussed before. Pay attention to formats that work best on each platform:

Facebook – videos (75 million users visit Facebook’s video platform every day); learn how you can make the most of the video format on Facebook
Instagram – photos (Instagram’s audience size is 28% larger than Facebook audiences)
Twitter – tweets with video (receive 10x more engagement than without videos)
LinkedIn – posts with video (your video content can receive 5x more engagement)

If you want to scale your content production and work more efficiently, you need a comprehensive solution. With Socialbakers, you can easily manage all your social media content for each day, week, or month. You will be able to save time by having your team schedule and publish posts with images, videos, and user mentions directly within the calendar.

Additionally, thanks to the visual layout of the calendar, you will be able to get an instant overview of your social media content.

Step 7: Monitor your content performance and report on it. Tracking how your posts resonate with your personas allows you to identify the most effective elements of your campaign, and focus your resources on replicating them in the future.Here are the metrics you should be tracking:

Awareness metrics: engagement overview, number of interactions per 1,000 followers, top-performing posts
Campaign goal completions: link clicks, sign-ups, purchases

You can get an instant overview of these metrics with customizable dashboards. And to keep your team in the loop on the latest data, leverage automated reports that are sent straight to the team members’ inboxes as frequently as you need.

Social Media Influencers

Not that long ago, managing influencer relationships was the job of PR agencies. However, with the increasing popularity of influencer marketing, collaborating with influencers became an inherent part of social media management. Brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022.

Luckily, with the rise of end-to-end influencer management solutions, this task has become much easier. Let’s take a look at how to build a successful influencer marketing strategy:

Step 1: Define your goals and KPIs. Some of the most popular influencer marketing goals include:

Raising brand awareness: volume of social shares, brand mentions, earned media, reach, direct traffic, brand search
Increasing sales: volume of sales qualified leads (SQLs), sold products or services
Reaching new market segments: reach, volume of users other than your usual audience personas engaging with your content, visits to your website, purchasing your products or services

Step 2: Find the right influencers for your audience. You shouldn’t work with someone just because this person is hugely popular or has worked with multiple international brands before. Instead, focus on finding someone who is the right match for your audience, even if they’re niche. So, how do you find influencers your audience trusts?

Use an AI influencer search tool: Skip manual research and let AI provide a selection of top social media influencers that are the best fit for each of your audience personas.
Use social media listening: Find out who’s already mentioning your brand or talking about the keywords related to your business or industry. Then, see how well the influencer matches your audience personas to be able to assess if you could strike up a fruitful collaboration.

Step 3: Understand the performance of the influencers. To ensure you’re partnering with someone who’s not only the right match, but also effective, review their performance using analytics. Pay attention to metrics such as engagement, follower growth, and promoted posts efficiency, which will give you an idea of the influencer’s effectiveness.

Step 4: Get to know the influencer. Talk to them about your goals, expectations, campaign ideas and let the influencer do the same. The more campaign details you’ll provide, the better your collaboration with the influencer will be. Find out how to develop successful relationships with social media influencers.

Step 5: Work on content strategy. Many marketers make the mistake of forcing influencers to leverage certain content formats, topics, or publishing frequency. In reality, though, it’s the influencers who should be deciding on the final shape of the campaign. After all, they know best how to engage their audiences in a meaningful way. Get ideas for your next influencer campaign with our blog discussing seven iconic influencer marketing examples.

Step 6: Measure your performance. To find out how effective your influencer collaboration is, you need to closely monitor your performance throughout the campaign. Don’t forget to compare the ROI of your influencer campaign to the ROI of your other digital marketing activities – it will allow you to estimate how cost effective your influencer collaboration was.

Social Media Customer Care

Excellent customer service on social media is key to acquiring and retaining a loyal, engaged audience.

It also has a direct impact on a company’s revenue. According to Statista, 59% of the global population are active social media users. It’s essential for every business to implement a social media strategy to engage with their customers. That’s why customer care on social media is crucial. Now let’s look at how to provide top-notch customer service on social media:

Step 1: List the platforms where your customers are reaching out to you most frequently, so you can focus your time and resources on managing these channels.
Step 2: Assign roles and responsibilities in your social media customer care team. You can have a designated person for each platform or topic (e.g., technical product-related questions vs. complaints). It’s also a good idea to have one person overlooking all the customer care activities – someone making sure the responses are appropriate and approving the outgoing messages.

Step 3: Create customer service guidelines. Doing so will enable you to keep your responses coherent and aligned with your brand’s tone of voice.
Should you appear friendly or professional? Should you reply to questions in the comment section or follow up in a direct message? Should you proactively engage in conversations with your customers, even if they’re not directly related to your business? These are some of the issues that a style guide will help clear up.
Step 4: Monitor social channels with listening for brand mentions, comments, and questions. Give answers to a maximum number of customers each day to provide timely help, join conversations while they’re still relevant, and spot conflicts before they develop. If a crisis does escalate, though, keep calm and read our article on how to manage a social media crisis.

Step 5: Report on your performance. Just like with other social media marketing activities, customer service is something that should be frequently reviewed. Reporting on your customer care performance in terms of types of queries you’re receiving or average response time will allow you to identify gaps and fix any shortcomings.