By Ismail Simba via LinkedIn
What is this and who is it for?
Among community managers, digital marketers, influencers and highly enthusiastic users, social media management is a bit of a headache. For each client, page, or profile, you have to come up with content plans, keep up with your audience as well as spend numerous hours generating reports and then explain those reports to people whom most of the time have no idea what you are talking about.
In this guide, I’ll try to explain how it all works and how you can easily make it work for you.
Social media keeps evolving every day, and I probably missed a few things here. Please leave your comments below and I’ll update this article from time to time.
What is Social Media?
There are many, many, many definitions as to what social media is. But simply put, social media is any platform that is designed to allow a lot of people to communicate and share information with each other without the limitations of geographical locations. This is why many social media platforms are on the internet as websites (some exist outside the public internet or do not have websites).
By all definitions though, we can see that social media goes well beyond Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube.
Why Should You Use Social Media?
Social media is without a doubt, one of the greatest inventions of our time. At very little to no cost at all, you can reach billions of people. Facebook alone is estimated to have around 2.41 billion active users. This alone should be reason enough. But moreover, many social media platforms are built around particular interests and demographics making it easier to target a particular audience.
For example, consider the previous image where I ask you if you can recognise these platforms. In order, from top left, the platforms are Reddit, Discord, Weibo, Wattpad, and Tumblr.
Reddit is designed to act kind of like a forum with a focus on information sharing and anonymity. Discord is designed to act as an advanced internet relay chat. Weibo acts as a replacement for western social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube e.t.c) in China. Wattpad is a place for amateur writers to share their stories. And Tumblr used to be the to-go-to place for people who wanted to browse adult stuff without leaving an incriminating web history.
So, say you’re a company designing a video game, you’ve just released a beta version and you want to interact with your testers, Discord would be the ideal solution for you.
OR, you are a publishing company trying to reach budding writers, Wattpad would be the place for you.
OR, you are a sex-toy company trying to reach your audience, Tumblr would have been the place for you.
The thing to remember is, there is a social media platform for almost every interest or demographic you can think of.
So, Which Social Media Should You Use?
Most companies and businesses target everyday ‘Joe’. Often times, Joe is your average person. He has a recurring weekly routine. Monday to Friday, he goes to work at the same time and goes back home at the same time. Most Joes use at least one of the big fives. These are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube.
So to start with, you should be on all of these, unless you are targeting a niche audience that never goes outside their bubble.
Outside of the big five, you should explore for new platforms to interact with your audience based on their interests.
How Does Marketing Work on Social Media?
Social media takes marketing to a new level because; while you can do almost everything you normally would with offline marketing, here you get more features and more control.
You can interact with your audience individually as if they were sitting right across the table from you. When you put out information, you can see how many saw it and reacted to it, and how many didn’t. You can also see if the reaction was positive or negative. This allows you to improve your marketing strategy and business goals.
Social media allows your business to be constantly aware of what the customer thinks of your services and products.
Creating and Managing Social Media Pages/Profiles
While as a business, you want to use social media to market your product/service, you must remember that the goal of most individual users isn’t to be marketed to. Most people use social media to get information, catch up with friends or to find entertainment. So when building or managing a page/profile, keep this in mind.
Step 1 – Create an Account
Creating an account these days is as easy as clicking a link and filling in information. To stand out and attract an audience, you want to go the extra mile. Research the platform you want to use and prepare all graphics beforehand ensuring everything is the correct size so it doesn’t get cropped later when you upload it. Some platform profiles support gifs and videos, this could be an opportunity to show your business’s creativity.
Step 2 – Fill in Everything!
Most platforms have a fixed design, as in; you can’t change how your page is organized visually other than the pictures you upload and the information you fill. To ensure your page displays correctly to whoever is viewing the platform, make sure you fill all the information correctly.
Step 3 – Keep Your Info Up to Date
Every time your business updates location, phone numbers, e.t.c, make sure to update the information on your page as well.
Following these steps allows your page to blend in with the platform making it look just like any other page, and making it more likely for the average user to view it.
Creating and Managing Content on Social Media
Creating Content
To be effective, your content has to be informative and/or entertaining. But above all, your content must be relevant.
Say for example you are managing a page for a hotel and you want to promote a package for Valentine’s Day. Take a look at these 3 captions below.
“Get 50% off for a lovers’ getaway at hotel xxx this Valentine’s day! The package includes dinner, music, games and more.”
“50% off the lovers’ package! Dinner, music, games and more. What are you waiting for?!”
“Treat your Valentine to an evening of relaxation. World-class dinner, live music, couple’s games and a whole lot of pampering, they deserve the best!”
While all 3 captions contain the same information, it is represented differently and this can have a huge impact on how the audience reacts to the information. So ask yourself, if you were just scrolling around looking at memes, which caption are you most likely to click on and read more about?
In my experience, the 3rd kind of captions tends to perform best. Be descriptive but not too much. Be relevant (you’ll notice caption 2 says nothing about Valentine’s day). Be entertaining (I think I’d enjoy the 3rd caption more, but maybe it’s just because I wrote it).
The same goes for pictures and videos. Tone down the branding and marketing and focus more on making your content creative, informative and entertaining.
Viral Content
You’ve probably heard of the word ‘Yeet’. The word came from a 6-second vine. Form there, without any kind of ad buying or promotion it exploded. So much so, that almost everyone now knows of it. This is what we call going viral, and it is the social media content manager’s wet dream.
There’s really no formula for how to make content go viral (as far as I know), it just happens. But, to keep your chances of going viral high among other things is why I recommend keeping your content relevant/current.
You can also experiment with content using stories (these are posts that disappear after 24 hours) to figure out what resonates well with your audience.
Managing Content
If you’re managing a single personal page, this is not much of an issue. But if you’re doing it for work, it gest a little bit tricky.
Let’s take Instagram for example. As more people like your post, the post gets more and more suggested to those people’s friends (people who are following them). And as a person consistently likes your posts, the more likely your posts are to appear on their feed. This is more or less how most social media platforms work.
So, you want to be consistent. This means, posting around the same time the same day every week (remember the Joes). To figure out exactly what time, you’ll have to experiment with your audience to figure out at what time most of them will be active on the platform. Instagram shows you this, so you won’t have to experiment as much (see picture below).
Keeping consistency when managing multiple pages can become an issue, that is why we use management software such as Hootsuite and Sprout. Both are great, and the choice is just a matter of preference. Personally, I prefer Hootsuite because it has a free option that allows you to manage content for up to 3 social pages from one place.
Tracking Performance
What to Track
When thinking of social media performance, the terms you want to keep in mind are; Reach and Impression, and Engagement Rate.
Reach and Impressions
Reach is the measure of how many unique users of the platform have seen your posts. The higher, the better.
‘Impressions’ is the measure of how many times users have seen your posts.
If Joe views your post 5 times, it’ll count as 1 reach but 5 impressions. If Joe shares the post with his friend and the friend views it 3 times, that’s a total of 2 ‘reach’ and 8 impressions. Impressions should always be measured against reach, where there is a big gap between impressions and reach it means either; your post impressed your audience so well that they are coming back to it more, hence you should make more content like this, OR you did something so wrong your audience can’t believe their eyes and they have to check again.
Engagement Rate
Engagement Rate is the measure of how many people saw your post versus how many interacted with it.
If 100 people saw your post but only 10 people clicked on it, that’s a 10% engagement rate. Each platform usually has an established average engagement rate. You want yours to always be above this. Currently, I use this benchmark as my point of reference.
How to Track
The content management software we mentioned above (Hootsuite and Sprout) has inbuilt tracking. However, this is usually limited and it is harder to manipulate and compute the data you get from them.
I recommend making an Excel/Google Sheets tracker instead. You can then enter the raw data manually and the sheet will calculate everything for you.
The downside for this is you need to be familiar with Excel/Sheet formulas and it may take some time to set up. But the upside is worth it. You can set it to track exactly what you want, and it’s absolutely free.
The way it works is; you enter raw data on the months’ tab, the calculation tables will then display the data you want to track, and the performance charts will show you how the data is trending.
To play around with it, click File > Make a Copy.
By Ismail Simba via LinkedIn
