How To Master Social Media Management

Social Media is where consumers spend a lot of time these days, especially those Millennials…

As you can see in the infographic below, Millennials in 2014 spent on average over 3 hours per day on Social Media. This will be increasing as the new Generation Z are likely to spend even more time online.

It is therefore crucial for brands to be active on Social Media. Of course, being seen these days on Social is not easy as there is a lot of competition.

In this post, we share our best tips to help you become the Master Yoda of Social Media Management.

1/ Come up with a strategy

Before you start posting random photos of cats in hats on social media, you need to come up with a solid long term strategy. You’ll want to align the content of your social media activity with your brand values, brand pillars, and your brand promise.

To figure out what those are, get the whole management team together and have a few brainstorming sessions. These sessions should ALWAYS involve sticky notes.

2/ Use the right tone of voice

Once you have figured out what your brand is all about, you’ll need to create a brand guidelines document which lays out your brand’s personality and tone of voice. Your brand’s tone of voice should be well thought out based on who your ideal customer is. That brings us to point 3.

3/ Know your audience

Before posting on social media, you need to know your audience better than your twin brother or sister (if you have one).

You should create a sheet that describes your ideal customer. This is what we call a brand persona, and it should include as much detail as possible.

Examples:

• What do they look like?
• How old are they?
• Where do they hang out?
• What are their hobbies?
• Are they introverts or extraverts?

We even like to give our brand personas names. Once you know who your audience is, you’ll be in a better place to figure out what they care about and which content they will relate too, find useful or funny. And hopefully, they’ll share every single post you publish!

4/ Invite the right people to follow you

Now you know who your audience is, you’ll want to get them to follow you as it’s no good to post content that no one will see.

Before you invite people to follow you, make sure you post a few posts so that your pages are not empty when people click on them, and they’ll be more likely to follow if they know what kind of posts to expect.

A lot of social media managers make the easy mistake of inviting all their friends to follow their brand’s page. Although this works well to get more followers as friends will follow as a favour, they might not be interested in the content.

This means less engagement (likes, shares and clicks) which harms your page stats and leads Facebook, Twitter or Instagram’s algorithms to think that your content is not good, when the real issue is that you don’t have the right people following you.

5/ Write good copy

No typos, please. Every social media manager should also be a good copywriter. Thankfully today, it’s easier than ever not to make silly mistakes using free apps such as Grammarly, they will tell you instantly if what you are writing has terrible spelling mistakes, trust us on that one…

6/ Use hashtags

Obviously you’ll want to use hashtags, as they are a great way to get more reach (get seen by more people) interested in your posts.

There are plenty of tools you can use to find the most used and popular hashtags, including Ritetag, All Hashtag or Hashtagify. We like to use the Leetags app as it is clean and easy to use.

For Instagram, you can use 30 hashtags, and we recommend using all 30 in the comments of your post. They will still work as well as on the actual post, and give your post a cleaner and less ‘desperate for attention’ look. On LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter, we use between 3 and 5 hashtags per post.

7/ Keep an eye for content on Reddit

Reddit is a great social network to find content ideas, simply follow all the subreddits that would appeal to your audience. Reddit’s algorithm will show you the most popular posts within your niche, which can reveal what content is currently trending and relevant to your target audience.

8/ Use social media management tools

To save time on your social media work, you’ll want to use a tool such as Buffer or Crowdfire, which allow to schedule and publish posts on multiple social media platforms at once.

We’ve already written a blog on this topic if you want to learn more, give it a read next to find out which is the best tool to use.

9/ Automate with Zapier

You can automate a lot of things on social media today, so automate as many tasks as you can using Zapier. You can automatically send a welcome message to a new follower on twitter or Instagram, and you can even automate posting blogs to your social media pages.

This is done using RSS feeds. By connecting your Buffer or Crowdfire account to Zapier and creating zaps from multiple blog sources, you’ll be able to eat popcorn while you watch your social media accounts manage themselves.

10/ Post user-generated content

It’s always best to produce your own images and creatives for your social posts. But this takes a lot of time and effort, and usually are not the best quality.

A very popular alternative is posting user-generated content. This is any original content that is created by other people on social media. This is quite a good way to post high-quality content as you can choose to post only the best posts, ze ‘creme de la creme’ of ze sociul mudia.

A good way to find the best content is using Pinterest, as their photo recognition algorithm will show you the most similar, and most popular images to post based on what you are searching for.

11/ Analyse and report on your social media efforts

Lastly, but arguably the most important, you absolutely need to report on your social media activity. As part of establishing a Strategy in point 1, you’ll have set the metrics you want to focus on (more followers, more engagement, more views, etc…).

We recommend picking one at a time, for example, our current focus is growing the number of followers on our Linkedin page.

To analyse and report on your objectives, create a spreadsheet with all the data you want to keep track of to show your team. You can make use of the Facebook, Twitter or Instagram’s insights tabs which show a lot of interesting stats about your social media performance.

THE END!

We hope you found this listicle useful and give us a shout if you want us to give you a free 1-hour social media training and strategy call.