How to have stellar social media management
In this day and age, it’s nearly impossible to have a thriving business without a solid social media presence. But your digital profile is so much more than a place to share pictures or status updates. Social media is a space where you can connect with your customers or others in your industry, highlight your strengths as a business, and reach new audiences. Developing a strong social media account isn’t as simple as tapping a few buttons, though. It takes time and dedication to build your brand’s social profile to reflect your message and reach your desired audience. However, there are a few main things you can consider when managing your social media — and we’re breaking them down for you.
Develop a strategy
You might be wondering why so much strategy needs to go into crafting your social media posts. Can’t you just post what you like and be done with it? Not if your audience isn’t engaging with it. To be frank: your time is worth more than that. If you’re already taking the time to post on social media, you might as well take it a step further and make sure you’re posting efficiently in order to grow your brand. So what exactly does posting efficiently look like? Well, that all depends on your social media goals. Goals can range from getting people to click on your website and buy your product or service to simply growing your brand awareness on social media. Once you’re able to identify your goal(s), you can strategize the best way to reach them. If this sounds intimidating, you’re not alone — almost half of social marketers say their biggest challenge is developing social strategies to support their goals.
The first thing you need to do when stepping up your social media strategy is think about what kind of posts you want to include. Keep it diverse — a feed full of informational graphics might be useful to your audience, but they’ll get bored quickly. Instead, mix it up with graphics, photos, videos, and more. Different platforms offer types of media that are unique to them; for example, Instagram offers reels and guides, whereas Twitter allows you to post fleets or make moments. Some features might make more sense for your brand than others, so choose wisely to make the most of what will help your posts succeed on social media. You should also take advantage of the features each platform offers because their respective algorithms tend to reward those who use all of their features, meaning more people will be introduced to your content.
The type of content you post needs to also be strategically thought out. Is it informational? Entertaining? Personal? This all depends on your brand’s identity and your audience, so make sure you have a strong grasp on these aspects before diving into your social strategy. You also want to make sure your copy and visual assets are further promoting your brand identity. Your captions should be written in a brand voice that correlates to the type of content you post, and the colors and design elements of your posts should be consistent with the rest of your brand.
Make a content calendar
After you have developed a strong social media strategy, you should create a content calendar for your posts. A content calendar is just what it sounds like — a calendar mapping out what you’re going to post on certain days. Your content calendar can include a week’s worth of posts or over a month’s worth. Generally, a one-month calendar will offer you the best flexibility in terms of planning content in advance.
At the beginning of your month, brainstorm how much of certain kinds of content you want to post. When thinking of your content calendar, decide if there’s a certain theme you want your week or month of posts to explore. Look at current events and see if there are any relevant conversations happening that you could tie into your posts. Consider what’s going on for your brand at the moment — are there any new products or updated services you want to promote? If you wanted to do a mix of videos, photos, and graphics that varied between informational and entertaining, think of how often you want to feature each type of content. Remember — you don’t need to post every single day. Posting at least three times a week at your audience’s peak engagement hours should be a good starting point to provide consistent posts to your followers.
You can plan out your content calendar as simply as writing down the dates and what you’ll post in a Google Doc. However, you can also use a calendar app to better visualize it. Comparing your content calendar with a calendar of national holidays can be helpful to make sure your posts are relevant to what’s happening in your follower’s day — for example, if you’re a jewelry company, you’ll want to pay attention to when Mother’s Day is and tailor that week’s content to the occasion. Posting for fun, smaller holidays like National Ice Cream Day are unique ways that you can get creative with your content and stand apart from your competitors.
Once you have an idea of when you want to post certain content, it’s a good idea to have the actual posts made in advance. If you want to include videos of your new product, go ahead and take a few that you can use throughout the month. If you like to feature photos from other creators, source a month’s worth and save them to your phone so they’re on hand. You should also design any graphics you plan to use throughout the month. When you have your visuals designed for the month, apps like Planoly can help you visualize what your Instagram feed will look like to make sure everything is cohesive and fits your branding aesthetic.
The next step is to create captions for each post. While your visuals might be compelling, you want a solid caption to provide more context and engage with your audience further. When crafting your caption, you can think back to what your social media goals are. Do you want to direct your followers to your website? If so, you could say something like, “Learn more about this product at the link in bio!” If you want to increase your amount of quality followers, you can pose a question in your caption that encourages people to respond. While you can use over 2,000 characters in an Instagram caption, remember that less can be more — research has found that 138 to 150 characters is typically the most engaging caption length. And don’t forget to add in relevant hashtags to increase your post’s reach.
Remember that every social platform is a bit different; luckily, you can use the same assets while tailoring your posts slightly for each account you have. For example, while you might opt for a wordy post on Facebook, you’ll need to either shorten your copy for Twitter or create a thread — a series of Tweets — in order to optimize for the shorter character allowance.
Schedule your posts
Now that you’ve created your month of social media posts, you can go ahead and schedule them. This will be helpful in the long run because you won’t have to pause what you’re doing each day to post. Plus, sometimes we get busy, and scheduling ensures you’re consistently posting at the peak hours to get engagement. If you don’t know when your engagement is at its highest, you can check your insights or use an app like Later.
Later can also be a good tool for you to actually schedule your Instagram posts. You’re able to tag other accounts on your post, include hashtags, and use a link in bio feature that attaches different websites to certain posts. Later also gives you a feed view and calendar view, so you can have an idea about what your upcoming week looks like and how it will appear on your feed. Click here to see some of the other scheduling tools we love.
Just because you’ve scheduled a full month of posts doesn’t mean you should just forget about them until they’re posted. You should check regularly on what’s coming up for the week and make tweaks as necessary. For example, if you see that a certain type of post is performing extra well or a particular topic is more timely at the moment, you should move things around in order to continue maximizing your engagement.
Engage with your audience
The most important thing you can do when managing your social media is listen to your audience. While you’re posting for your brand, it’s up to the people who follow you to engage with your posts. Without a strong audience, you’re essentially just posting into the internet void. Since you’re putting so much work into creating strong posts, you want to make sure your audience is responding equally as strong. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take note of what they’re saying directly to you. This can be something as straightforward as a comment that says, “I love this!” or “So interesting!” This tells you exactly what kind of content they’re interested in, so you can learn from this feedback and continue posting content that they’re responding to. Responding directly to your audience’s comments or DMs is also an important step in making them feel heard and connecting with their needs. Less direct forms of feedback come with looking at your insights. This is data that shows how much your audience is interacting with your posts, whether it be through likes, comments, shares, or saves. Insights can be complicated, but learning the basics can help you make sense of the numbers.
Brainstorming, designing, and scheduling a month’s worth of social media posts might feel like a lot to do in one sitting, but dedicating one or two days at the beginning of the month to doing so will save you lots of time later. It’s relieving not to think about what you’re going to post every day and trust that it’s already been taken care of so you can spend more time working on the other aspects of your business.
While these are simple steps to help you become a social media master, we understand the process can be time consuming and even intimidating. That’s why we’re here to help! Reach out to Creative Juice and our team of professionals will help lead you toward stellar social media management. 🍑
