Social Media Management: 4 Lessons Learned
Prior to getting involved in management of Social Media accounts for various entities, I did all of my research and found out the “best practices” for management of different social media pages. For the purposes of this article, we’ll use Facebook as my main example. So I did all my research, planned out the best strategy I could think of for posting relevant, fresh, and engaging content, posting on a regular schedule, monitoring the pages for any comments or feedback that I could reply to, and testing the waters with different types of posts and different times of day for posting. Then I waited for my pages to become insanely popular from these tactics alone.
This, however, did not work exactly as I had planned.
I had some “Likes” some “Shares” and a few of my posts met with some decent engagement, but I will tell you the secrets that I learned from this…
- Social Media Management is not a one man show:
Social Media Management is truly a team effort. Having your employees take part socially with your brand will yield better results than trying to go it alone. Look at it this way, you can share your brand’s Facebook page and reach just your own network of 800 connections, OR you can also ask your 10 co-workers to share your brand’s page and touch exponentially more connections than you would have alone. That leads me to lesson #2.
- More followers/connections = more engagement:
The more followers your brand has, the more likely you are to get “Likes” and “Shares”. This is a simple numbers game. Example: If you have 500 followers and an average of 5% of them interact with your page regularly, that’s just 25 engaged consumers who may comment/like/share. Now, if you have 1000 followers with the same math, you now have the chance of reaching 50 interacting people, instead of 25. This leads me to lesson #3.
- Paid Advertising is Incredibly Helpful:
My gratification and excitement began to increase when I started using Facebook’s paid advertising. Again, I did my research and looked into the different types of ads I could run, the different demographics/interests I could pinpoint, and the goals I was hoping to achieve with each one. The differences between Facebook ad-types will be covered in another post, but needless to say, if you have a budget to draw from to reach more individuals, who are your prime demographic, (and who you might night be able to reach organically) why wouldn’t you? And finally….
- Learn and Know your Audience:
Paid advertising for Social Media can be incredibly gratifying IF you are engaging with someone who truly uses/wants/needs your brand. Do your research and find out who your market is, including their age range, gender, location, interest, shopping habits – you name it, Facebook can probably let you pinpoint it.
A lot of Social Media Management is trial and error, and something’s that you find work really well for one brand may not work as well for another. Brands that know their audience, keep it fun, creative, and fresh, are those who generally reach a wider audience.
What are some of your Social Media Management Lessons Learned?
[hupso]
