Social media management is the process of planning, creating, publishing, and monitoring content on one or more social media platforms. Social media management is quite complex, often involving multiple strategies and channels. In addition to learning the basic best practices, social media managers must also stay up to date with trends, continuously monitor reports for improvement, and organize their project plans in a way that makes it easy for their team to follow every day.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn more about social media management and the tools you need to succeed. Keep reading to discover everything the modern marketer needs to know about winning the game of social media.
Social media management explained
Social media management strategy is a process that involves analyzing and developing a strategy tailored to the business goals of each individual client or brand. It involves monitoring social media conversations, creating and distributing content, and measuring and reporting on the effectiveness of the strategy. If you’re interested in becoming a social media manager or strengthening your skillset, this guide is for you.
Why is social media management important in 2022?
In 2022, social media will continue to be an integral part of any company's strategy. It can help them reach their goals and connect with their customers.
Social media marketing management allows you to build and manage all of your brand's components through engaging content that connects with audiences. It also produces higher ROI for paid and organic advertising online. With the seemingly never-ending rise of social media, businesses can now reach out to their potential customers wherever they are, as long as they understand how to do it.
What is a social media manager?
Social media managers are responsible for developing an overall strategy and managing a variety of online activities. Their primary goals include driving sales, helping customers, and developing effective campaigns.
What does a social media manager do?
A social media manager is in charge of representing a company's brand across multiple channels. They can respond to comments and create content. A social media manager may help organizations improve their online presence or even build their following from the ground up.
What skills do you need to become a social media manager?
Social media managers need to be skilled at creating engaging content, backend platform analytics tools, and keeping up with the latest social media trends. While there are countless other skills, these are the main ones you need to succeed.
How can you become a social media manager?
There are opportunities for social media managers in companies, although many choose to freelance and start their own agencies.
What are the most prominent social media platforms for businesses?
At any given time, there are usually one or two social media platforms that people generally consider to be the most popular. But no matter what’s trending, businesses in 2022 can count on using each of the following tools as part of their strategy:
Facebook allows you to post text and photos, as well as videos and pictures from your business. This can be very powerful for communicating with your customers and potential customers.
Facebook demographics
In January 2022, it was revealed that almost 10 percent of Facebook's audience was made up of women between the ages of 18 and 24. The platform's biggest demographic group was men between the ages of 25 and 34.
Perks of marketing on Facebook
Facebook is a massive social network that has more than 3 billion active users. It can be incredibly effective if you use it the right way. Take advantage of its reach, the wide variety of features you can use to interact with users (think groups, pages, etc.), and paid advertising options.
Challenges of marketing on Facebook
Getting a Facebook page up and running requires a lot of time and effort. Like any social media account, you may also need a dedicated staff member to manage the page and create engaging content.
But Facebook specifically has more complex and in-depth uses which require someone who is knowledgeable and willing to keep up with their ever-changing rules.
For example, even if your business page has been up for more than five years, you may still run the risk of losing it because of new violation terms, and there is little to no recourse when this happens.
LinkedIn is a great way to connect with like-minded industry experts and symbiotic brands that fuel your brand’s network. It's also a great way to market your company and attract new talent.
LinkedIn demographics
Almost 40% of LinkedIn's global users are between 25 and 34 years old. The platform's 35- to 54-year-old age group is responsible for 30% of its total user base, while the 18- to 24-year-old group accounts for 24%.
Perks of marketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a powerful marketing tool that enables you to connect with a community of professionals and drive actions that are important to your business. Use it to promote your brand and attract followers.
Challenges of marketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn rewards longtime users, so it may be hard to get traction at first. You may even find that a competitor is already dominating the space, which means you’ll have to alter your approach in a way you wouldn’t on other platforms.
Instagram is a great tool for businesses to boost their brand awareness and build and track their audience engagement. It can also help them find new customers and develop effective marketing strategies.
Instagram demographics
According to a report released by Instagram in January 2022, over 17% of the platform's users are men. More than half of the global population is aged 34 years or younger.
Perks of marketing on Instagram
Having an Instagram business profile gives you the tools and functionality you need to run your business efficiently. It includes features such as analytics, call-to-action buttons, and third-party integrations.
Challenges of marketing on Instagram
Bots, growth, and finding the best posting schedules are the main challenges of marketing on Instagram. They all require time and effort to master since there is no one size fits most strategy.
With Twitter, you can stay up-to-date with the latest news and events happening in the world. It's also a great way to build brand awareness and improve your public reputation.
Twitter demographics
In 2021, the global audience of Twitter was composed of over 35 million users aged 25 to 34 years old. The second-largest demographic on the platform was users aged 35 to 49 years old.
Perks of marketing on Twitter
Twitter is useful for customer service and community building. You can also use it to grow your brand voice.
Challenges of marketing on Twitter
It's hard for new users to figure out all of Twitter's tricks and nuances, especially since it has so many little-known details. In addition, the platform is based on a 280-character limit which makes it incredibly short-form.
TikTok
TikTok helps businesses of all sizes create and manage their ads, promote their brand, and increase their follower count.
TikTok demographics
In the US, 25% of TikTok's active users are aged 10-19. There are also 22.4% of the company's active users in the U.S. who are aged 20-29.
Perks of marketing on TikTok
TikTok is a great tool for businesses to create effective and engaging advertisements that will make their brand popular with the masses. With this app, you can design and create branded challenges that will allow users to participate, among many other opportunities for engagement. There are also great TikTok ad opportunities.
Challenges of marketing on TikTok
Getting noticed on TikTok can be hard, especially if you're not experienced in video editing. You’ll have to get used to shooting hours of content only to edit it down into a logical story using the tiny in-app editing features available through your phone. Your videos may also be seen by the “wrong side” of TikTok and receive more hate than love, depending on your brand or product’s political affiliations.
YouTube
If you're looking to improve the effectiveness of your video marketing, then planning a YouTube marketing strategy is a great place to start. It can help you reach a wider audience and increase your traffic.
YouTube demographics
According to data sourced from Statista, the total number of YouTube users is 53.9% male, while 46.1% are female. This data is based on the company's reporting structure, which supports both male and female users between 16 and 64 years old.
Perks of marketing on YouTube
YouTube is a vital part of any company's marketing strategy. It's easy to upload and import video content, which makes it an ideal tool for any business. Online video marketing is also a unique opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses.
Challenges of marketing on YouTube
Getting into the YouTube space is a long and hard journey. There are many steps that you need to take to create and publish a video, let alone make sure it is seen by your target audience. Creating a successful YouTube channel requires a lot of hard work and consistent dedication long term.
Snapchat
With Snapchat, marketers can reach out to their audience in real-time. It's a great tool for storytelling and local campaigns.
Snapchat demographics
As of January 2021, Snapchat’s female users make up more of its population than male users, with women aged 13 to 17 accounting for 11.8% of the platform's total audience globally.
Perks of marketing on Snapchat
According to a study conducted by Snapchat, adding commercial content to your campaign can help boost promotional results. It found that the addition of these ads doubled the lift across the funnel and increased awareness of the Discover brand’s content.
Challenges of marketing on Snapchat
The platform skews toward younger audiences and is based on the concept that the content disappears shortly after being shared, which means marketers have to tailor their marketing plans to these two factors.
Social media management tips to live by
No matter which platforms you use, there are several tried and true best practices you can follow that will optimize your campaigns.
Conduct competitor research
Before you start working on your online presence, it's important that you identify and organize all of your competitors. This will allow you to evaluate their current state and how they're doing in terms of their online presence.
You'll want to look for both direct and indirect competitors. A direct competitor is a business that offers the same product or service to the same customer base as yours. An indirect competitor is a business that sells products and services to a different customer sector. Having a good understanding of your indirect competition helps you identify areas of potential growth.
Audit your current social media performance
Start by reading each profile with fresh eyes. Open your backend analytics and data tools. What goals did you originally set for this platform? Assess whether or not those have been reached and why. Keep in mind that as you continue to manage your brand’s social media, you will learn a lot along the way, meaning your old goals may become irrelevant as you better understand the platform and your audience as a whole.
You can also compare your profiles to your competitors’. What do they have in common? What are they doing that you aren’t? How do their statistics align with yours? Make a note of all of this. Also, be sure to see whether or not they are engaging in influencer marketing and if it makes sense for your brand to do so as well.
If your audit reveals some weaknesses or poor performance, that’s okay — simply conducting the audit in the first place puts you ahead of the game!
Set realistic SMART goals
One of the most effective ways to make goals more powerful is by using the SMART mnemonic. There are many variants, but the main one is usually:
S - Specific
It’s clear and detailed. For example, setting a goal to get 100 more Twitter followers is more specific than “getting more followers on social media”.
M - Measurable
It usually has a quantity attached to it. Followers, comments, and likes are all easy to measure and track on social media.
A - Attainable
Is it actually possible to get 1 million views on your very first-ever YouTube video? Probably not. Instead, conduct research on what is realistic and what isn’t before getting started so you aren’t unnecessarily disappointed later on.
R - Relevant
Does this goal align with your greater marketing objectives? What about the company’s goals for the quarter or year? For example, you may feel like everyone is on TikTok, so your brand should be too. But take a beat to decide if it’s truly relevant to your needs before you begin allocating valuable time and resources towards it.
T - Timebound
Make sure you add a due date or time range in which the goal needs to happen; otherwise, you may find yourself and your marketing agency deprioritizing it when other projects come in.
Work out a realistic budget
The general rule of thumb is to spend about 5% of your revenue on your marketing budget. It may be more for B2B or less for B2C. Make sure your budget includes tools to make the content, a marketing project management tool, and any additional help from third-party collaborators.
Know your audience and their platforms
Before you start looking for potential customers, it's important to get a general idea of who they are. Your ideal customer is someone who is interested in what you're selling and how it fits into their lifestyle. Gather as many details as possible about them to create a personalized marketing strategy.
There are a variety of social media tools that can help you find out more about these people, such as Facebook's Audience Insights tool. You can also plug in all of the information from your personas into your social media platform of choice to create new audience demographics.
Also, check the information you already have access to, such as customer service and sales department analyses.
Ensure to provide customer support
Get to know your audience and build authentic relationships with them over time. Respond quickly and generously to complaints made online. And always take constructive feedback to heart.
What is a social media posting tool?
A social media scheduling tool is a tool that helps you manage the various posts that you'll make on your social media accounts. It can be used to ensure that you're always up to date with the latest trends and information. Using one in combination with a digital marketing project management platform can greatly improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
Top social media posting scheduling tools for business
There are many effective tools for planning, scheduling, posting, and analyzing social media content out on the market; however the following brands we highlight here are leaders in the space.
Hootsuite
Ryan Holmes created Hootsuite in 2008 to manage various social media platforms. Its user interface features a dashboard, which allows users to manage their accounts and connect with other social networks.
Buffer
Buffer’s goal is to help users manage their social media accounts. This app allows them to schedule posts to various platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as analyze their results.
Sendible
Sendible helps agencies and businesses plan and manage their social media strategies. It’s especially adept at managing multiple accounts on the same platform.
SocialPilot
With SocialPilot, digital marketing professionals can easily manage their social media activities. It allows them to schedule and publish posts from their editorial calendar, analyze their performance, and monitor their followers' activity.
Sprout Social
With Sprout Social, brands and agencies can manage their social media conversations and get the most out of them.
What is social media management software?
The point of social media management software is to enable organizations to effectively manage and engage with various social media platforms all at once. This means having a space to plan out campaigns, implement strategies, and receive real-time feedback. Working off of spreadsheets alone may work in the short term, but in order to scale faster and more effectively, you’ll need to adopt social media management software.
Features to look for in the best social media management tools
The following features are ones you’ll use to save time, streamline your social media workflows, and get the most out of your strategy on a daily basis.
Scheduling
Scheduling refers to content posting. These types of features will automate the posting process so that your content is reaching the right platforms at the right time without having to manually log in and prep pieces.
Automation
Automating can mean everything from triggering an automatic response to @mentions on Twitter to reposting the same piece of content across all channels at once.
Free templates
There are free templates for every aspect of social media management including ones for implementing and monitoring strategy. For example, Wrike offers a social media planning template.
App integrations
Third-party tools can work in sync with your project management solution to eliminate repetitive administrative work, allowing teams to focus more on content quality than data entry.
Reporting and analytics
These tools allow users to get better insight into what’s working well on their social media profiles and what isn’t. This insight can be used to determine future goals, budgets, and more.
Why use Wrike as your social media management tool?
Wrike's marketing project management software helps you get the most out of your marketing campaigns. With Wrike, you and your team can manage all of your marketing projects in one place. It allows you to monitor and track your social media campaigns. Here’s how:
- Centralize communication
Break down silos and make collaboration easier. Centralizing communication is a crucial step in making social media management easier for everyone. It also makes it easier to react to developments in real-time. - Visualize everything
With Wrike, you can get a 360° view of your marketing project. Take a deep dive into individual post-performance or zoom out to see macro views of all your campaigns and omnichannel marketing. - Monitor progress
Results are the most important thing when it comes to social media management. With Wrike, you can track and communicate with your followers in real-time within one single platform. - Align workflows
With marketing project management tools such as Wrike, you can improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts and increase the effectiveness of your workflows by viewing where all of your social media projects overlap. This can help your team uncover roadblocks before they happen or reallocate resources on the fly without missing a beat. - Customize your dashboard
There are many factors that go into making a successful social media strategy for marketing. From the type of team that you hire to the goals that you set, the types of project management tasks you’ll need to do can vary. With Wrike, you can easily create and manage customized workflows that make sense for your team and will help you get more done in less time. - Access reports
With Wrike's marketing project management features, you can visualize and gather valuable business intelligence quickly. See how your campaigns are performing, which channels are or are not sparking, and whether or not your audience is engaging with your output. - Respond in real time
Social media moves quickly. With Wrike, your team can automate notifications and see comments made directly on the marketing assets so they can act immediately. This can help cut down on review cycles so you can shorten the time between conception and publication while also improving the quality of your content. It’s also necessary to respond to followers quickly, especially if something has gone wrong.
Next steps
The best, most successful social media management practices use the right tools and techniques to pull it all off. A project management software can help you organize your goals, teams, and content all in one place. It can also help you analyze and finetune your approach as you go. Discover how Wrike can help you improve your social media planning and execution with our free trial.
