Social Media Management is the act of monitoring and participating in social conversations across platforms.

Businesses use Social Media Management as part of their overall marketing strategy to achieve a number of goals which may include the following:

• Increased Brand Awareness
• Increased Customers (Sales)
• Decreased Costs (allocating advertising dollars away from print, tv, or radio)

The 3 keys to making social media successful for your business:

Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement is the process of participating on social media platforms. This includes creating and sharing great content that is of interest to your audience.  It includes growing a relevant audience on your platforms.  Engagement means responding to customer messages in a timely manner.  Engagement is interacting with other social media accounts (liking, commenting, sharing).  On most social media platforms their algorithms will show content more from the accounts that are getting more engagement.

Social Media Listening

Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the Internet.

Social listening is important because it gives you feedback on how the  public perceives your business.  It’s like collecting comment cards.  What are you doing right?  What do you need to improve?

An example – a restaurant’s business was declining and they couldn’t figure out why.  Prices were the same, menu was the same, people that came in raved about the service and food.  When they did some monitoring of Facebook groups – they discovered that there were some comments made about a plaza next door that had just reduced the parking spaces.  So the challenge this restaurant was facing was the public couldn’t find parking – were getting frustrated and going elsewhere.  The conversation on social media allowed this restaurant to identify an area they could improve to get more customers.  They made alternative arrangements for some more parking and announced this on their social media channels and business immediately began to grow again!

How do you sort through all of the noise and zero in just on what is relevant?   One of our favourite tools is Google Alerts, which monitors a number of online sites and emails a summary to our team.  You can also set aside a few minutes each week to search your business name on Facebook, Twitter, etc just to see if anything pops up.  There are also a few automated systems you can purchase if this is very important to your brand.  Our team at Dufferin Media is very used to monitoring all of the platforms so we almost always catch conversations especially in local groups.

Social Media Analytics

Monitoring the results of your social media efforts is a key part in the process of being successful on social media.  You need to know where you are winning and where your efforts need to improve.  Each platform has its own set of Social Media Analytics.  Facebook offers insights, Twitter offers Analytics, Google My Business has pages and pages of data.

How do you figure out which numbers are important?  This is done by establishing KPI’s for your business –

Key Performance Indicators and monitoring the results of these statistics on a regular basis.

For example if one of your goals is Increased Brand Awareness the most important KPI’s for your business are the “Reach” or “Impressions” which represent how many eyeballs saw your content.  Once you have a few months of data you can set some goals, and review results on a regular basis.  You can use Analytics to improve your efforts too – for example if your goal is increased reach, you can monitor the results of a few months of posts and identify which types of posts are getting more shares.  Then you can use more of that type of content going forward.

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The article is written by Sarah Clarke – www.sarahclarke.biz

Social Media Consultant and owner of Dufferin Media – www.dufferinmedia.com