Social Media Management Best Practice
Can you recall a time when social media best practices were not a part of our daily lives and activities? Many of our choices, conversations, and opinions revolve around social media. This is true whether you’re searching for a product or service, or you’re marketing a solution across Canada.
Today you need to create content across multiple social profiles. And it’s now more important than ever to stay on top of social media management best practices.
They help you to get the most value from your team’s social media management activities.
Today, the vast majority of Canadian businesses have joined the social media movement to increase their presence within their communities, and the world. Whether you’re a big or small business, joining social media can be extremely beneficial.
However, without a strategy to build and manage your social communities, you can miss the full potential of your social activities. Or worse, do harm to your brand image.
This is where digital marketers and a social media community management team come into play. It is crucial for your business to develop and build a social media presence. Having both a community management strategy and a social media strategy in place will help your brand’s reach.
If you don’t have the resources or experience in-house, then you won’t see the full growth potential from your efforts.
In the B2B world, your social media account is a tool to build your sales pipeline. But you can’t look at social media through this lens alone. Doing so means missing the key link that creates a robust social presence: building trust between your audience and your business.
This is done through engagement with your content. To engage with your audience is to build a relationship. To build a relationship is to build trust.
The result is credibility, reliability, and brand awareness that creates ongoing sales for your firm. With that said, let’s take a look at the social media management best practice for 2020 and beyond!
Check out the Social Media Best Practices!
The Social Media Management Success Equation:
Engagement + Building trust = Enhanced business reputation
Social Media Management Best Practice
Social media engagement is essential when building a business presence online. Think of engagement and promotion as two sides to the same coin. However, when promotion becomes an obvious centre piece of your engagement platter, your business will suffer.
Here are a few tips to help get you on the right track.
1. Ask Questions to Begin the Conversation
How do you begin a conversation with a person? You ask them a question! For proper social media engagement, you must make your target audience feel like they are being heard. The only way to do this is ask a question and allow the conversation to flow organically.
The conversation can be anything; from how their week is going to any promotions or offers they would like to see. Ask anything that will relate to your brand!
Rule of thumb: human beings thrive on interaction.
Here are two great examples of businesses interacting with their customers:
- An accounting firm asks their audience about tax season preparation: “Are you getting ready for tax season?” They offer tips and tricks for getting prepared prior to the seasonal crush. They inject humour with cartoon imagery showing an overburdened accountant who clearly was not prepared.
- A manufacturing company may engage with their audience with a contest or giveaway that features one of their best-selling products.
Ask relevant questions and, most importantly, respond back with answers and/or comments as soon as possible. It is important that you follow each question with further engagement in real time.
Alongside engagement, you are also building a relationship with your customers by learning their opinions and what matters most. These questions can also be asked in polls or surveys.
The results of which benefit your brand or small business by offering statistical insight into the lives of your audience.
These statistics can then be used to benefit for business, like cleverly promoting upcoming products or services.
As you can see, social media community management and engagement are crucial to increase a business’s marketing game.
Recap: The many benefits of asking questions on social media
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- Opens a window into the lives of your audience.
- Builds trust with your audience.
- Makes the audience feel like you care.
- Provides content to publish and share.
- Supplies your small business with statistics that you can use in the future.
- Develops your brand personality online, which opens door to further sharing of your online content.
2. Provide Value to Your Target Audience
As a successful business, you “provide value” to your customers in many ways. However, how do you provide value to them through your social media content and online presence?
Think about ways that you can provide value that are effective and will catch your audience’s attention. Create online campaigns to test ideas to get to know your audience better.
Through testing you can understand what offers you can provide that they find valuable. Below are some ways in which your small business can provide value online.
Here’s how you can provide value:
- Provide access to numerous events, services, or products that are exclusive.
- Take polls that may bring some insight or beneficial information for those involved.
- Share your expertise: offers tips and best practices.
- Provide motivational and uplifting posts to inspire and inform.
- Share exclusive promotional offers, coupons or deals to your most loyal and engaged followers.
- Provide exemplary customer service to empower not only your customers and loyal fans, but also your team members.
- Engage with user-generated content by going through your brand mentions.
Still not sure?
Let’s say your business is selling dog products. You might provide more value by offering in-depth information on training techniques, safety precautions, or how-to-use your products.
3. Prioritize Quality of Content Over Quantity
Today’s social platforms are packed with content. If you post content too frequently, you may generate “unlikes” as a result. Recent changes to the Facebook algorithms mean businesses must modify their strategies to build community engagement with quality content.
Your community wants exclusive, original, and important content that adds value to their lives, but not be overwhelmed with promotional material. Keep this valuable guideline in mind: The 1 in 7 rule. This rule states that only 1 in every 7 posts should be promotional based.
The other 6 posts should be different. Try using an important back story, fact, question, comment, or some other form of community management. This approach will make your audience want to stop, view the post, and not skip through it.
4. Create an Emotional Trigger to Connect with your Audience
The days of endless promotion are over. Buyers on social media are seeking genuine solutions. They want information that helps them solve a problem or increases their own knowledge and expertise.
As humans, we thrive on interaction. Major brands on social understand this emotional connection. With this in mind, they associate themselves with a community or charity-based organization to demonstrate their values and culture.
Social networks are an excellent way to profile and share community work that your company is involved in. Show that you donate a percentage of profits to charity, or participate in fund-raising events such as walk-a-thons.
Your audience can relate to these generous acts. And as a result, appreciate your company more deeply.
Your customers want to feel that your business can provide the knowledge and expertise they are looking for. Your content must be top quality and delivered in an authentic manner. Authenticity inspires an emotional response – this is the sense of having a genuine connection.
Your audience wants to feel that you care about them – that you’re paying attention to them. They don’t want to feel that you’re simply focused on making a profit.
Strong community management develops continuity and consistency, which builds trust in your brand through an emotional connection with your follower base. There is untapped value in your online assets that you can uncover and develop with strong community engagement practices.
5. Keep Track of Your Social Media Statistics
This is more of a behind the scenes social media community management technique. It begins with developing a social media presence and engaging with your audience. Then, over time, you’ll also improve the way several social media algorithms view your company.
Before long, you’ll understand all the statistics you’re receiving. They’ll includes audience types, where they are from, their age, and other important information. This data is vital for successful community management.
Once you have the proper statistics, you can utilize them to direct market, promote and share content with your audience. From there, you can find more people that may turn into followers, leads, and eventually customers.
6. Use Each Social Media Platform Correctly
This may be the single most important tips we can offer to you!
If you’re not seeing the results you expected it may be due to one important reason: you may not be using the platforms correctly. When it comes to community management, it’s imperative that you are involved in the right community base. Therefore, let’s talk about the most important social media channels and how you can properly engage on each one.
Facebook – 2.41 Billion Monthly Active Users
As a small business, it’s essential to post at least once a day on Facebook; twice if you have the ability. With that said, it is always critical that you include a photo or graphic alongside your Facebook posts. Photos help to make each post as engaging as possible.
Without an image, the likelihood of an individual stopping to read the words that you posted are slim-to-none.
Ask a question, include some humor, or share a fact. But however you do it, be sure to capture attention with a beautiful picture or graphic!
To finish your post, you must include what is known as a “call-to-action.” This is crucial if you are a small business. A call-to-action is a mere sentence that is intended to direct the customer exactly what to do.
For example, if you are a chef, share clever insight cooking lemon pepper chicken. Then recommend people to your website to check out the most recent holiday chicken recipes you have put up.
Before you post again on Facebook, remember the Rule of 3:
- Post engaging content: facts, clever stories, jokes, or questions.
- Post with high quality and relevant images.
- Finish it with a call-to-action. For example: Check out the latest services we have added to our website, Top Toronto Social Media Marketing Agency
Twitter – 321 Million Monthly Users
Twitter can be used as a method of quick engagement, taking polls, asking questions, and quickly promoting work. It is important to post on Twitter at least 5-15 times a day, especially as a small business.
It’s also essential to utilize proper hashtags, as they may lead to new followers. What’s more, it’s important to curate relevant content that your audience will benefit from or find value in. It is good to generate a lot of content, but remember, “Quality is King.”
Re-tweeting your audience or liking their posts is another great way to engage. It gives you an aura of “humanity” rather than just being a profit-hungry business. To your audience, it looks like you share in their likes and opinions.
Before you Tweet again, keep in mind:
- Post consistently each day or week.
- Share your follower’s tweets.
- Point followers to your website if content is 100% yours.
- Use 1-2 hashtags.
- Use high quality and relevant images.
Instagram & Pinterest – Combined Over 1.25 Billion Monthly Users
These two photo sharing platforms prove that visuals are extremely important when it comes to social engagement and community management. These two platforms can also supplement other text-oriented social channels, especially if you’re a photo-based small business.
As something like a coffee shop, wedding photographer, or antique dealer, visuals are critical to properly showcase your small business.
If you are utilizing Twitter or LinkedIn to market your wedding photography business, you might not see great community engagement results. This is because you are focusing on the wrong social media platform.
This is because visuals, unlike text, give your audience a clear picture in an instant. After all, “a picture is worth a thousand words!” Instagram has proven this immensely with a surge in popularity to become the second most engaged social media platform after Facebook!
You can utilize these photo platforms with different methods. Try sharing your office photos, latest products, promotional events, contest winners, and numerous other options
Alongside the many benefits of photo-based platforms, Pinterest has a feature known as community boards. Here, you can share “pins” across larger communities with an increased likelihood getting “re-pinned”.
For some small businesses, Pinterest has proven to be one of the best platforms for community management and generating traffic.
But just like the other social media platforms above, engagement is key. Therefore, engage with your audience by liking their photos, re-pinning their work, commenting when possible, and sharing their visual content.
This creates a dynamic relationship between you and your audience, where they feel a connection to your product or service.
7. Leverage Tools To Make Social Media Management Easier
Today’s marketers use tools as part of our social media management best practices. What are the most valuable tools to help you grow your social media following?
Hootsuite – Popular and Powerful All-In-One Tool
Hootsuite is probably the most prominent social media management tool and used by small, medium and large companies. It’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to find content, schedule your posts, analyze performance on over 35 social networks.
Hootsuite works with streams. You set up streams to monitor content on each social network.
You can use Hootsuite to schedule content. It’s easy to add content to the queue and schedule them. It helps to make it look like your business has a 24/7 presence on social media channels.
And most importantly, Hootsuite provides reports to analyze the engagement performance. You can download them in several different formats to analyze the data.
Buffer – Social Media Scheduling Tool
Buffer is a favourite among many digital marketers. Like Hootsuite, it has been in the market for some time.
It’s easy to set up scheduled posts. Then start adding content to it as you browse the internet.
The best part is it gives analytics in real-time. You can tap the “Top Post” icon to see what kind of content works best on each social platform.
Sprout Social – Excellent for Teams
If you work in a team, Sprout Social is a useful tool. Everything is in 1 inbox, and you can see live activity that’s happening. That means you’ll know when a team member is working on a task. And you’ll save time and avoid the wasted effort of duplicated tasks.
Sprout Social allows you to queue and publish your social media posts. There’s a ViralPost tool that helps you figure out the best time to post to maximize engagement.
When it comes to reporting, Sprout Social can track the performance of individual members. You can see who has been very responsive and provides excellent engagement.
Sendible – Great Post Scheduler That Allows Customization
Sendible is a social media management tool for teams to schedule posts. It gives you a preview of the post on each social media platform. You can optimize the content, so the post fits that social network. For instance, you may want to change the image size.
The scheduler is interactive and easy to use. You can drag and drop the content on the calendar.
AgoraPulse – Create Contests To Engage Your Followers
At first glance, AgoraPulse is just another all-in-one social media management tool. It provides monitoring, schedule, and reporting features.
Where AgoraPulse stands out is the competitive analysis and contest application on Facebook. Contests help to increase engagement from your followers and reward your loyal fans.
Rebrandly – Advanced Link Shortener Tool For Any Social Network
Rebrandly is not a social media management tool, per se. But it’s an essential tool for any business that wants to generate leads and sales from social media marketing.
Rebrandly is an advanced link shortener tool. That means you can turn a long link with lots of characters into a short custom URL that looks pretty. And you can use your own branded link.
Using branded links can increase trust and drive higher click-through rates. There are many other features at your disposal. One interesting feature of Rebrandly is the link retargeting. This means you can track who has clicked the link and follow up with them with a retargeting ad.
Engagement Through Social Media Community Management
If all of this seems somewhat difficult to accomplish we are here for you. It takes time, dedication and practice to master each social media management best practice. Take it one step at a time and ask for help when you feel like you are being overwhelmed.
Now that you have a more complete understanding of social media community management best practices, are you excited to up your game with a powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Want more information of the benefits that starting social media can bring to your business? Book a free call today, and we can show you what you’re missing out on!
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