What is Social Media Management?

Social Media makes it easier for people to listen, interact, engage and collaborate with each other. But, as the number of social media platforms and conversations increase, it quickly becomes a time and labour intensive task to effectively track, engage, monitor and manage this activity.

This is where Social Media Management can help. By engaging with a Social Media Management specialist or company to assist you with this task, Social media management solutions can help you manage online interactions in a more efficient manner. Not only can content be effectively planned and distributed, but Social Media Management will also help to consolidate how you listen to and participate in relevant conversations in the various places they’re taking place such as Twitter or Facebook.

A quality Social Media Management solution will also help you to more easily monitor what people are saying about your business, and by automating the process of delivering your outgoing messages through multiple social media outlets simultaneously, help you to amplify your social media presence across several social networking sites.

Why Should You Care?
We all know how important word of mouth is, and social networking is like word of mouth on red cordial. As a business, it’s vital to tap into and join online conversations not only about your brand, but also those about your competitors, your industry and your areas of expertise.

Even if you haven’t launched an outbound social media strategy, you to keep a pulse on what people are saying — good or bad — about your company, competitors and major trends. And, by representing your company in a positive, authentic way, you can build credibility for your expertise and business and link to customers and prospects quickly.

You can also help mitigate damage should negative conversations about your company emerge by quickly responding to complaints. Social media can also steer people to your other marketing programs.

Done right, social networking can help you better understand prospective and current customer needs, increase visibility and generate leads. But it takes a lot of time and energy to stay on top of all of this. Think about the time it takes just to cover some of the basics, such as:

• Creating content in multiple places, such as a blog, Twitter, a Facebook page, etc. Then monitor and scan the views, decide what comments to approve, and respond to replies on these sites and engage in a meaningful way, all in a suitable timeframe (fast)
• Scanning Twitter followers for conversations you may want to join, or checking your RSS reader subscriptions for relevant articles and new ideas
• Checking Google Alerts to see when and where your business is mentioned on the Web
• Creating and monitoring a community and topics on a site such as Facebook or LinkedIn

The list above and your to-do list is only going to grow. Plus, as you spend time building goodwill, establishing early relationships and creating awareness, it can become difficult for you to measure short-term payback on your social media efforts. All of this, whilst you are still required to maintain pace with other marketing activities — Web site management, blogging, search engine marketing, email marketing and  sales management.

Social Media Management removes much of the stress of trying to deal with the above whilst running your business. By engaging a professional to assist you and guide the way through this process, they will have a process whereby you act as the approver on everything they generate on your behalf. A Social Media Management consultant will generate 30 days of content in advance, through planning and content calendars, they will target specific content for specific platforms, they will advise on a healthy mix of promotional content, versus competitions and offers, general interest content, and content that is educational and engaging, the will then ensure posts are distributed in a timely fashion across each network or social media platform at a time of day where the engagement is likely to be the greatest giving you the best opportunity for reach, and finally a social media management specialist will monitor each platform, respond to queries, seek your feedback on complaints or customer feedback and wrap up all activity into a digestible report that you can review monthly.