Social media management services help large and small businesses expand their social presence and nail their marketing objectives.

It doesn't matter how big or small your brand is. Social media marketing is now the No.1 way to reach your audience and achieve your KPIs. More than 77% of businesses use social media to engage with potential customers – but not all of them do it right.

In fact, often a business owner can make the mistake of not utilizing their social platforms as well as they could. In doing so, they waste time and money publishing pointless social posts that no-one sees, and which don't make an impact.

And that's where social media management services come in. From agencies to software solutions, these services aim to lighten the load and manage social media accounts for clients.

From helping to create an overarching strategy to social media content creation, using management services such as Brandwatch can help catapult your brand to the next level.

This guide will explain what social media management services are, how they work, and what you can expect to gain from employing an agency or subscribing to software.

Our aim is to help you navigate the complex world of social media marketing, so you can grow your brand's voice and nail your content marketing targets.

What is social media management?

Before we look at the benefits of social media management services, it's important to first understand what we're talking about. Social media management is an umbrella term for overseeing a brand's social output.

This covers everything, from social strategy and content creation, to employee management and feeding back into a company's wider objectives.

Understanding social media management

There are some basic steps all brands need to address when they begin to focus on social media management. It might be that one employee deals with all of this. Or, you might work on a management structure that encompasses an entire team.

Either way, to effectively manage your social media accounts, you should:

  1. Establish your goals: Determine the desired outcomes for your social media efforts, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or generating sales leads.
  2. Choose the right platforms: Select the social media platforms where your target audience is most active, and tailor your strategy accordingly.
  3. Create content: Develop high-quality, engaging content that reflects your brand's voice and values.
  4. Schedule posts: Use social media scheduling tools to plan and publish posts at optimal times, ensuring consistent activity on your channels.
  5. Engage with your audience: Respond to comments, messages, and reviews while initiating conversations that encourage interaction and build relationships with your followers.
  6. Monitor performance: Regularly assess the results of your social media efforts through analytics to identify areas for improvement and fuel informed decision-making.

The role of a social media manager

This guide is most useful for social media managers and single business owners. It doesn't matter if you manage multiple platforms for a global corporation, or are in charge of your own Instagram business account, the media management principles are always the same.

The role of a social media manager is to implement, manage, and monitor your brand's social media strategy. You might also have to do content creation, client relations, and reporting.

  • Strategy development: Collaborating with stakeholders to identify business objectives, target audience, and key messages in order to formulate an effective social media plan.
  • Content creation: Crafting a diverse mix of posts that resonate with your audience, including visuals, captions, articles, and video content.
  • Community management: Building and nurturing relationships with your followers while addressing their questions, concerns, and feedback.
  • Analytics and reporting: Analyzing performance metrics to draw insights about what's working, what's not, and how to continually optimize your social media efforts.
  • Crisis management: Monitoring for online reputation threats and taking swift, appropriate action to mitigate any negative publicity.

As you can see from the list, social media managers have a lot of responsibilities. That's because social platforms have become the most visible window for brands over the past two decades. Your brand reputation can rise and fall on the success of a social media campaign, which makes managing socials so important. 

In this guide

Below is our full guide to social media management services. We'll start by looking at what agencies and tools provide, and how you can spot what you need.

From there, we'll look at the wider benefits of social media management across various pillars, from strategizing to managing costs, partnering with agencies and targeting the right audiences.

Services offered by social media management companies

Let's start by looking at what a social media management company might offer your brand. They could suggest taking everything off your plate and running your socials for you. They might offer a hybrid approach, where they undertake some services but not everything. Or you might choose to keep it all in-house and use social media management tools instead.

Here's a look at those three options:

1. Comprehensive social media marketing services

A top-notch social media management service usually offers a comprehensive suite of marketing services to handle all your social media needs.

This could include having a dedicated social media team to manage accounts on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and more.

It's the sort of thing big agencies provide to even bigger clients. However, a medium-sized or small business can still use comprehensive services if they provide value for money.

With their knowledge and expertise, comprehensive digital marketing services ensure your brand stays relevant and engaging in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Here's a breakdown of the key services they provide:

  • Account setup and branding: The team will help create your social media accounts and ensure coherent branding across platforms.
  • Community management: By actively engaging with your audience, they foster a positive relationship between your brand and its followers. This could involve replying to comments, messages, and resolving issues as they arise.
  • Marketing strategy development: The service will help you craft a winning marketing strategy that aligns with your brand goals and objectives.
  • Performance tracking and analytics: Keep track of the success of your marketing efforts through regular and concise reports to continually optimize your campaigns.
  • Content creation: Leave the creative side to the experts, who will operate and manage everything from photoshoots to publishing. All you need to provide is approval for such projects.

If you're willing to pay for it, social media services like these will take everything off your hands. That means you can focus on your products or services, and leave the marketing to others.

2. Partial social media marketing services

If you still want to oversee part of your output, then you could employ a social media management firm to do some of the job. This option usually comes about when brands need to expand into new platforms but don't have the expertise to do so.

Instead of throwing all social media responsibility to an agency or external manager, a smart solution is to commission someone to oversee one platform, or one area of a social strategy.

Examples include:

  • Platform focus services: You get an external worker or an agency to launch your brand on a new social platform. Perhaps you spot a gap in the market to launch on TikTok but need help doing it.
  • Specific services: You might be amazing at creating content and timing social media posts. However, you might not know how to analyze social media and come up with a bullet-proof campaign. A social media marketing agency might be able to offer this service and elevate your output.

3. Social media management tools

There is, of course, an option to do it all yourself with the help of software. Tools like Brandwatch give you the ability to oversee your output without the heavy social media management costs that come with employing an agency.

Whether you work for yourself, as part of a small team, or for a large corporation, the ability to control your social media output is essential.

Tools provide this level of control. You can do everything, from analyzing your existing social media accounts, to creating a social media strategy from scratch. Build new profiles, combine your content marketing campaigns into one, create posts, and target the right audiences.

Improve your social media skills with tutorials, improve your community management, and analyze all the data so you can develop further strategies.

>> Learn more about social media management at Brandwatch here!

No matter your choice, the three above options all provide a level of social media management that aims to grow your business and make life easier for you.

Cost analysis of social media management

Let's now look at the costs associated with social media management. You could opt to keep everything in-house and use software to manage social media accounts. Or you could employ an external expert or agency to take the job off your hands.

Evaluating social media management pricing

When analyzing the costs associated with social media management, it's essential to consider the various factors that contribute to the overall pricing structure.

To make an informed decision, examine the component costs involved in your marketing budget, which may include:

  • Management fees: These are the primary fees charged by social media management companies, covering their services and expertise.
  • Content creation: High-quality content, including custom graphics and writing, often come at an additional cost.
  • Paid advertising: If you choose to invest in paid social ads, budget for ad spend and any associated campaign management fees.
  • Tools and software: Factor in expenses for software subscriptions and licenses, which assist in scheduling, analytics, and client reporting.

Remember, it's likely that an agency or social media management company will use commercially-available software to run your campaigns. So, you might decide it's better to pay for the software yourself and keep the activity in-house.

Either way, fees can range from a few hundred dollars a month to thousands.

It's unlikely you'll know the exact fees agencies charge until you contact them and begin going down their sales funnel. The same goes with software, although generally it is cheaper than engaging with an agency.

With that in mind, here's a quick look at Brandwatch's pricing.

Value-based pricing strategies

We've looked at what a social media management agency might offer your business. Now let's look at the other factor that determines value for money: quality and personalization.

This is known as value-based pricing, where the emphasis is placed on the value you receive from the service instead of simply comparing the individual costs involved.

Consider the following factors when choosing a value-based approach:

  1. Quality of work: Assess each agency's expertise, experience, and reputation in the industry. Higher quality work often correlates with better long-term results.
  2. Results-driven: Evaluate which provider is likely to deliver the best results for your business, such as increased brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
  3. Tailored services: Determine whether the agency offers customized solutions that align with your specific needs and goals.
  4. Scalable plans: Make sure that the agency can accommodate your business's growth, with pricing plans flexible enough to expand as your needs change.

To implement value-based pricing as part of your decision-making process, calculate the ROI of each provider (agency, external expert, or software) by comparing its expected benefits to the associated costs.

An agency might cost you $10,000 a month for high-quality work but without the tailored service you need. A social media marketing tool might cost $150 a month and not provide content at all, but will give you data to create a tailored strategy.

Now it's time to look at the benefits these services bring – whether that be through agencies or software.

Developing effective social media strategies

The first thing social media management services will help you with is to develop a better strategy. Whether it's an agency helping you with this, or tools you can use yourself, the idea is to understand your brand position, where you want to go, and how to do it.

Crafting a dynamic social media strategy

To create any successful social media strategy, it's essential to understand your target audience and align your efforts with your overarching marketing goals. A media management service will help you with this, or you can pull data from software like Brandwatch to see how your various social media platforms are currently performing.

Either way, you'll start by conducting thorough research on your target market, examining their preferences and behavior patterns.

This information will help you identify the appropriate social media platforms, types of content, and engagement strategies to consider.

Next, establish a clear, concise content strategy to guide your social media efforts. Your data will help you here, as you can fine-tune your strategy much more effectively.

Determine the themes, formats, and distribution methods you want to employ, and create a content calendar to stay organized.

Remember to maintain an optimal mix of promotional, educational, and entertaining content that speaks to your audience's needs and interests.

Setting and measuring marketing objectives

As with any successful marketing strategy, setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) marketing objectives is crucial.

You'll need to do this if you're working with an agency or external employee to develop your strategy. After all, the SMART objectives provide a great framework when communicating your strategy plans with external services.

Your social media objectives may include:

Audience growth: Increasing your followers or page likes

Engagement: Boosting the number of likes, comments, and shares

Website traffic: Driving users from social media platforms to your website

Lead generation: Gaining potential customers' contact information

Sales: Converting social media followers into paying customers

Whatever your objectives, the strategy you create needs to be realistic and deliverable. Think about who is going to actually create your content, post it, monitor it, deal with crises, harvest data, and feed back through reports?

Will you do it? Will a fellow worker? Will an agency or external company? Knowing this will help you understand whether you need social media management services, or can live with software that keeps everything in-house.

Analytics and adaptation in social media management

A major aspect of social media management is understanding how to analyze data and put it to good use. Anyone can do it with the right tool. Here are the benefits you can realize when doing it right.

Trend identification

Analyzing data from your social media channels gives you insight into trends. To do this, first look at the engagement metrics associated with your brand.

These metrics provide insights into how your audience interacts with your content, and therefore highlight what's trending. Some common engagement metrics include:

  • Likes and reactions
  • Comments and replies
  • Shares and retweets
  • Click-through rates
  • Mentions and tags

By tracking these metrics, you can uncover patterns and trends in your audience's behavior.

From here, you can begin to pivot your social output towards the trends, or spot areas where you can start new trends.

For instance, say a video game company analyzes data on its audience and realizes people love watching clips of other players failing in the game. The company decides to launch a campaign showing the biggest mistakes players make in the game, which drives interaction with the audience. 

Strategy adaptation

You can also use data to tweak your strategy and launch subset strategies that target certain audiences.

For example, you might have an overall strategy to boost followers on Instagram and, in turn, turn direct sales from the platform. Your data shows you have two audience segments: 18-24 year old women, and 50-59 year old women. So, you target both subsets with different messaging.

Social media management services can help you achieve this and align your social media posts with the right audience.

Competitor analysis

You can use software or instruct an agency to run competitor analysis too. Doing this means you get an understanding of what your rivals are doing, and spot where you can improve.

Perhaps a competitor is pouring lots of resources into Facebook marketing campaigns but getting very little ROI. Or, they might be setting trends on TikTok and eating up a large share of the industry on that platform.

By analyzing your competitors, it's possible to conduct smarter social media management and develop a strategy that takes the wider industry into account. Learn from their successes and mistakes, see what you can copy or make different in your campaigns, and manage your growth much more carefully.

Mastering social media advertising

Advertising on social media is a difficult course to navigate. We've seen companies pull ads from X, while Meta has enjoyed a surge in ad revenue. Effective social media management is required if you're to nail advertising on these sorts of platforms.

The two main stages are implementation and monitoring. Here's a little bit about each stage:

Effectively implementing paid advertising campaigns

To successfully implement paid advertising campaigns on social media platforms, it's vital to set clear objectives and target the right audience.

An agency can help you with this, although a tool like Brandwatch could be a faster, more effective option.

Your aim is to align your ad strategy with your social media goals. If you want more click-throughs to your website then you need to create promotional posts that encourage it. If you simply want to boost visibility then eye-catching ads may be more your thing.

Monitoring your campaigns

Whatever your goals, the service you use to create and deploy commercial content needs to include a monitoring solution. Only with this data will you know if your campaign is running as you planned, and you're getting a good return on investment.

Software like Brandwatch pulls all data from your social media channels into one place, so you can get a proper overview of campaign performance. Look at your own campaigns, benchmark them against rivals, and see how audiences respond.

If you work with an agency on this, make sure to ask them for comprehensive updates on your ad campaigns. You can then track success in real time and see if your money is being put to good use.

If your ad campaign isn't hitting its targets then you can swiftly change course or stop it.

The benefits of partnering with a social media marketing agency

If you plan to go down the marketing agency route then you'll likely enjoy benefits that come with the higher costs. However, cost isn't everything. It can be worth paying for external experts to do the job you don't have the time or resources to do. So, here's what to expect:

Building a positive brand image and online community

Working with a social media management agency should help you develop a positive brand image and foster a growing online community. After all, that's the entire point of an agency.

A skilled team knows the most effective tactics for engaging with your audience and promoting your products or services. They can help:

  • Showcase your brand's unique qualities
  • Increase your brand's visibility
  • Strengthen customer trust and loyalty

However, you can't simply throw the agency the passwords to your social media accounts and assume it will work its magic. Agencies need buy-in from a business owner or whoever oversees your marketing efforts, so they know what to do for you.

You need to have a good relationship with the agency and ensure there are monitoring, feedback, and reporting stages built into the agreement. That way you can track the success of campaigns and ensure the agency is doing the job you pay them to do!

Dedicated teams for continuous social media presence

The beauty of an agency is you can effectively buy a team of social media professionals who have 24-hour oversight of your social media presence. This is vital if you're a big brand that needs round-the-clock monitoring and production.

Indeed, having a team at your disposal also means you can act fast on new trends and get your content noticed before anyone else.

This should, if the social media agency agreement works correctly, lead to increased website traffic, further lead generation, growing brand identity, or boosted customer retention.

That's not to say an in-house social media manager or their small team cannot do these things too. But what an agency buys you is greater access to 24/7 oversight.

Being selective

Agencies also let you pick and choose what you need from their social media management service. For example, you might not need someone else to create content or schedule it. What you need is an agency to analyze social media data, spot trends, and guide your future content decisions.

Or, you might have access to all relevant social media data points and simply need help deciphering it, to create a fresh strategy.

A good social media management company should be flexible and offer as much or as little help as you need.

Targeting the right audience

One of the biggest reasons a business employs a dedicated social media manager or uses an agency is to better understand its audience. No business has a single audience demographic anymore. Not only do businesses appeal to multiple subsets but audiences are found across various social media networks.

You might find you appeal to 18-24-year-olds on Instagram but +60-year-olds on Facebook.

Using social media services correctly means you can target the right groups and better understand your audience.

Understanding and engaging your target audience

As a social media manager, it's crucial to identify and understand your target audience before you engage. There's no point creating an ad campaign, for example, without understanding what your audience likes. Otherwise you risk pouring money and resources down the drain.

So, start by defining the demographics of your ideal audience, such as their age, gender, interests, and geographic location. You can use a research tool like Brandwatch to help here.

Then, dig into their online behaviors, including the social media platforms they use, the type of content they engage with, and the challenges they face daily.

From here you can begin to create a strategy that directly and indirectly engages with your customers.

Creating content that resonates

Once your strategy is in place you can begin to create and publish content that works. An agency might do this for you (at a cost) or you can use your social media marketing platform to do it.

Here are some tips to help you create compelling social media content:

  1. Focus on their needs: Address your audience's pain points and challenges through your content to show that you understand their needs.
  2. Tell stories: Use storytelling to evoke emotions and make your content more relatable.
  3. Share valuable information: Educate your audience by sharing tips, insights, or best practices relevant to your industry.
  4. Visual appeal: Utilize eye-catching visuals, such as images, infographics, or videos, to captivate your social media users and increase engagement.

Remember, you can use data mined from your social media marketing software to better inform your content decisions. This might mean publishing at optimized times, targeting specific groups, or jumping on trends before your competitors do.

The last word on social media management services

Managing your social media, whether you're a small business owner or work for a large corporation, is not always easy. There are big challenges that come with dealing with 24-hour publishing and marketing. Crises hit, trends emerge, and all the while you have to keep an eye on key performance indicators to show whether you're earning a return on your investment.

It can also be expensive. A social media management company can charge thousands of dollars a month simply to schedule posts.

If you're seeking to create a new social media management strategy then we hope this guide has helped answer some of your questions.

Social media marketing requires expert knowledge to get right. You can hire an agency, or take it in-house with the use of digital marketing software.

No matter your choice, always be mindful of the social media management cost attached to your decision, and how you can ensure ROI. That way, you can get on with your digital marketing efforts knowing your strategy is in safe hands.