Social Media Management: A Guide to Getting Started

The importance of social media management cannot be overlooked. It’s such a powerful tool. You can engage directly with your target audience, establish a brand identity, improve awareness and ultimately grow your business. Sounds great, right? If managed well, it can be incredible.

But if managed poorly, social media can end up being a waste of resources, time and money. So to give you the best chance at success, here are our top tips for getting started – based on years’ of experience delivering social media services for clients.

1. Get To Know Your Target Audience
2. Prioritise the Social Platforms That Matter to You
3. Set Goals
4. Focus on Social Media Engagement
5. Promote Content

Ask yourself who you are trying to reach. Your content should reflect what your target audience will relate to and engage with. Get granular with your understanding of your audience. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What are their challenges? The answers to these questions can help to inform content that resonates.

If you are after some guidance on getting to know your target audience and audience research tools, we’ve blogged on the subject before.

When considering which platforms to invest your time into, it is important to strike a balance. Spreading yourself too thinly across lots of channels will mean you can’t give them each the attention they deserve, while relying on just one platform will limit your reach.

First and foremost, your decision should be based on where your audience is spending time and engaging. There’s no point setting up a Snapchat account if you’re trying to reach senior professionals and executives. When getting started, there’s value in checking out which platforms your competitors are using and where other content is performing well for them – to get an idea of where and how your target audience is currently being reached.

Having clear goals will help to guide your content, provide a metric for success, and enable you to identify areas for improvement in your social media management. They should focus on what you value most – this might include engagement rate, new followers, a certain demographic of followers, or impressions. We recommend using the SMART method to set goals:

• Specific – define your goals

• Measurable – use metrics to track your goals

• Achievable – be sure you have the resources to reach your goals

• Realistic – ensure your goals are attainable

• Time-sensitive – give your goals timeframes for when they need to be reached

It’s not enough to simply post on social media and leave it at that. Engaging with your audience and other stakeholders is vital for building a relationship with customers and establishing your brand as an authority in your space. This can be done in a range of ways, such as answering questions, commenting on posts from other accounts, organising competitions, encouraging audience-generated content, and jumping on relevant hashtags. This list goes on!

It’s difficult to reach more than 20 percent of your followers organically. This highlights the value of promoted content, especially when first launching a social media channel and pursuing growth.

An advertisement strategy is a sure-fire way to expand reach, engage your audience and it can provide an impressive return on investment. It is possible to create and track incredibly bespoke ads, targeting very specific demographics. This is great for getting in front of the people that matter to your business.

Using these steps, you’ve got a great chance at social media management success. But if you still need some help, we’d love to chat – so get in touch at louise@energypr.co.uk.