What Is Social Media Management and How is it Used by Businesses Today?
Social media management is the practice of creating content for and overseeing engagement with social media accounts directly linked to your business. Utilizing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social media platforms creates touchpoints for your audience to interact with your company. Depending on the nature of your business’s operations and the online habits of your audience, the platform(s) and styles of content you use for representing your brand may vary:
- Are you an entertainment enterprise (e.g., mini golf)? Light-hearted posts on Instagram may best resonate with your audience.
- Are you an authority on matters (e.g., a law firm)? Info-centric content shared on LinkedIn and Facebook will likely connect best with potential clients.
- Are you centered around timely customer service (e.g., a cellular phone provider)? A platform like Twitter that allows agents to direct message users with phone/service problems is well suited for quick customer satisfaction, whilst promoting your new products, services and sales.
Once you know which social media platforms best align with your goals, you can begin deploying them. Let’s say you operate a chain of local restaurants and have decided to create a Facebook page and a Twitter account to promote your locations, food selection and daily specials. At this point, it will become evident why social media management is vital to your business’s success. Using hashtags and tagging other related social media accounts, where applicable, will help your profiles get noticed by fans (and soon-to-be fans) of your company. By employing a strategy and sticking to it with regularly updated content across your platforms of choice, a bevy of followers and engagement will come to your (or your client’s) social media accounts.
How Do Social Media Management Tools Empower Users?
As a large social following is the ultimate goal for you and your business, you may find that managing multiple social accounts simultaneously becomes time and labor intensive. As time goes on and your business’s footprint grows, you can run the risk of more resources being allocated to this operation than planned. Or, if you are a social media specialist for an ad agency, you may have multiple clients with multiple accounts under one umbrella, each requiring care and attention to detail to ensure satisfaction. If either of these scenarios applies, you will quickly realize managing dozens of account passwords and logging into each to schedule the same posts over and over to be more than cumbersome. At this point in your development, a social media management tool can be your biggest ally.
As an all-in-one hub for all things social, a management platform will simultaneously simplify life and produce better results. With your slate of accounts connected to a singular hub, you can:
- Publish and schedule all posts for all platforms months in advance.
- Respond to questions and comments from your followers.
- Maintain a commendable reputation by practicing social monitoring to hear your audience’s thoughts about you.
- Performance track the success of active campaigns.
- Collect data for company/client reports.
These are the baseline features that any competent social media management platform should offer. Without them, performance will not be ideal.
What to Look for in a Quality Social Media Management Tool
Besides the functionality listed above, a quality social media tool will go the extra mile to deliver features like easy-to-navigate menus, dashboards with timelines, scheduled posts, messages, to-the-second post scheduling and integrated Facebook and Instagram analytics to quantify your social tactics. The best of the best will be developed by a team that thinks from inside the mind of the user and covers every small detail the experienced social media specialist would want in his or her arsenal. That’s what the developers at GaleForce Digital Technologies did in creating their SocialForce platform. They considered what already works, what needs to work and how it can all work with a user interface that exhibits unmatched ease of use. After a simple account connection, users can manage profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest within a system designed for flexibility and easy alignment with modern business procedures. SocialForce’s unique dashboard is easy to configure and allows for organization by:
- Platform
- Client
- Post type
- Staff group
Post scheduling and editing is also made easier with the advanced capabilities of SocialForce. Its scheduler directly integrates with Facebook, allowing clients to view scheduled posts on their respective pages. En-masse editing is another uniquity of the platform, whereby users can edit scheduled posts at the last minute, with changes reflected across all applicable pages. This level of unprecedented user-friendly interface, paired with GaleForce Digital’s world-class customer service, makes for a handy tool that accomplishes all you need easier and more affordably than anything else on the market. You’ll make deeper connections with customers and clients without needing deeper pockets.
If you want to learn more about SocialForce and the social media management revolution it is creating, call GaleForce Digital Technologies at 1-866-233-8499.
