As a business with budgets, it can be hard to outsource every area of your operations that you ideally would like to. Social media management tends to be one of these areas. I get a lot of people contacting me who realise how important their social media presence and activity is, but just don’t feel they have the time or skills to manage it daily, but also don’t have the money to hand it over to someone else.
So, it becomes a compromise. Even though you may not be a specialist in managing social media, you undoubtedly know your customer best and sometimes that is the hardest part to discover! Today I am going to give you a handful of tips and tricks to help you on your way to nailing your social media management all on your own.
Be consistent
Just like practice makes perfect, consistency is absolutely key when it come to your social media presence. With everything being all about engagement right now, disappearing from your social feed for weeks or months on end is going to hurt your growth and also your messaging.
Come up with a realistic number of posts that you can manage per week. It doesn’t necessarily need to be daily, but use your insights to help find the right balance to achieve good engagement with the time of day you post, your post frequency, and the type of content you provide.
Have a plan
So, here’s a question for you. How can you manage and grow something that has no forward thought put into it? Answer, you can’t!
Trust me when I say this, if you don’t put some time and effort into planning your social media presence and its objectives in the beginning, you are going to be chasing your tail from the get go. A simple spreadsheet is all you need to develop a plan and strategy that you can stick to and keep accountable of.
You will know what is coming up for your business; product or service launches, sale periods, events – the list goes on. Use these to plan what you want to highlight on your social platforms. Then (because no one likes all sales), determine how you can leverage these content ideas to add value to your customer too; this gives you a another whole lot of potential content!
Create campaigns
Much as the point above, this one comes down to planning and knowing what is happening or going to be happening in your business.
If you have a huge event on the way, don’t minimise its impact and exposure with one or two social media posts; create a hype by combining email, social media ads, blogs, video and REALLY get the exciting news out there. But again, don’t just sell sell, sell; highlight the benefits, the value and the pain points that it solves.
A major event or product launch could provide you with a 4-6 week campaign depending on your objectives, so get strategic!
Measure
Now all of the above is great to get you creating and posting content, but there is no point in any of it if you don’t track your results. Remember how we set objectives earlier? Now is the time to see if they have been reached!
Develop reports and measurements relevant to your objectives and analyse them regularly, comparing results over time to see how your activity is tracking. This will help you again to see what is working and what is not!
Don’t be afraid of advertising
Finally, a little offside tip to the above points. Platforms including Facebook and Instagram can really restrict the organic reach of a business’ activity. This means that advertising is often one avenue to consider to amplify what you are doing.
Sometimes this seems really scary to people, but I promise you it doesn’t have to be! With the right objectives and targeting, a social advertising campaign can create incredible ROI, but it’s all in the setup! So if you need help in this area, certainly get in touch and we can chat about what you want to achieve!
If you’re still not sure about how to go about this whole social media management thing, don’t stress. Firstly there are a lot of us out there who can help! But, if you don’t yet have the budgets to outsource this kind of work, consider having someone help you audit and strategise about your activity moving forward; this could just be the little bit of help you need to get on track and seeing some awesome results!