Social media management has evolved significantly over the past 15 years as brands and businesses become more active across social networks. 

Social media was once a place solely for individuals to chat with each other and share stories. These days, it's a social network, with platforms where you can interact with a brand's target audience and expand a brand's influence. 

Social media is part of the wider media sphere that includes TV, radio, and online publications. Brands need to be across all forms of media when creating effective marketing strategies. 

This guide will take you through the stages of managing social media and offer tips on how to get it right. 

See how consistency across all messaging aids social media management and streamlines processes, so you can save time and resources. 

We'll also look at social media tools you can use to research and analyze audiences, so you can produce content that actually resonates.  

Finally, we'll look at how to outsource social media management duties, and what you should be looking for if you plan to hire a social media manager. 

Social media management tips 

  1. Understanding social media management 
  2. Defining your social media goals 
  3. Choosing the right platforms 
  4. Creating compelling content 
  5. Scheduling and publishing 
  6. Engagement and community management 
  7. Analytics and reporting 
  8. Efficient social media workflow 
  9. Social media advertising 
  10. Staying updated with social media trends 
  11. Evaluating and adjusting strategies 
  12. Managing multiple accounts and platforms 
  13. Optimizing for growth and engagement 
  14. Outsourcing social media management 

Understanding social media management

It's important to understand why managing social media has become such an integral part of business communications, and the roles that social media managers oversee. 

Importance of social media management

Effective social media management is essential for the following reasons: 

  1. Brand awareness: Building a strong online presence helps you reach a wider audience and establish your brand in the minds of potential customers. By managing social media, you can develop this presence in a systemized, strategic way. 
  2. Lead generation and sales: By sharing valuable content and targeted promotions, you can encourage potential customers to engage with your brand, ultimately generating more leads and sales. 
  3. Customer service: Social media provides a convenient platform to address customer questions, resolve issues, and demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. A social media manager may not do this themselves, but they might be tasked with overseeing a customer service function. 
  4. Reputation management: Proactively monitoring your social media channels allows you to address any negative feedback or potential crises before they escalate. 
  5. Strategizing: Social media managers need to think ahead of what's next for their brand. One of the top social media management tips is to use a tool like Brandwatch to help create your future strategies. 
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Role of social media managers

A social media manager's primary responsibility is to plan, implement, and monitor their brand's social media strategy. 

This is a lot of work, and many managers have teams of staff or a network of social media professionals to alleviate the workload. 

Management tasks typically include: 

  • Overseeing content creation: Managers may have to design and produce engaging visuals, write captions, and optimize content themselves. Or they might need to oversee that process with an employee doing the actual work. 
  • Audience engagement: It's unlikely that a social media manager at a large organization will need to get hands-on with audience engagement. However, specialized social media professionals may be required to respond to comments and messages, foster community growth, and encourage interactions among followers. 
  • Analytics: Social media managers are more likely to be aware of and understand the key insights behind their brand's social media posts. They'll need to track and analyze social media performance to optimize content and strategy, perhaps using a tool like Brandwatch Measure to help. 

Defining your social media goals

A big aspect of social media management is overseeing your brand's strategy. You therefore need to set actionable goals and create a route to success. 

It all starts with creating a social media strategy in collaboration with identifying your target audience. 

Establishing a social media strategy

Establishing a clear social media strategy involves setting realistic goals, determining the platforms that align with your target audience, and creating a content plan. 

Your strategy should ultimately support your business objectives. It's not easy to do, but a tool like Brandwatch can help you create a winning strategy from scratch. 

Be SMART 

Start by outlining your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. 

For example, a taco restaurant in Dallas may want to increase its brand awareness and boost customer engagement on social media, with the ultimate goal of generating more sales. 

By using SMART goals, the restaurant can figure out an effective social media strategy. 

Create a content plan 

Once you've nailed your SMART goals, it's time to create a content plan that caters to your audience's preferences and needs. This may include: 

  • Engaging text and visuals (photos, videos, infographics, GIFs, animations, memes, carousel posts) 
  • Post frequency and timing in a social media calendar 
  • Content themes and topics 

Always keep your goals in mind when planning content, and maintain a consistent brand voice across all platforms. 

Identifying your target audience

Once you've outlined your goals and have a content plan, it's time to figure out whom to target.  

Understanding your target audience is a crucial component of any social media marketing strategy. 

To do so, you'll need to use a tool like Brandwatch Audience to research and analyze demographics and psychographics, such as: 

  • Age 
  • Gender 
  • Location 
  • Interests 
  • Online behavior 

Once you've gathered data, you can create customer personas that paint a vivid picture of your ideal audience. 

Then consider which platforms are most popular with your target audience and focus your efforts on those channels. 

For example, our taco restaurant in Dallas might attract two types of customers: older people via Facebook and teenagers via TikTok. 

Choosing the right platforms

One of the best social media management tips you'll ever hear is to focus on prioritizing the value of each platform. 

There is no point in launching your brand on every social platform if you can't manage each one properly, or if your audience is only found on one social media channel. 

For example, a beauty salon in downtown Atlantic City might thrive on social media usage from just one channel, like Instagram. 

If this channel is delivering enough clients, then there's no need to waste time and resources on launching an X account. 

Here's what to think about when choosing the right platforms for your social media management strategy: 

Consider what platform works best for your brand

Each social media platform has its advantages and unique audience demographics. To maximize your business's social media presence, you need to leverage different social media platforms effectively. 

This can be done in the form of tailoring content, posting frequency, and engaging with users. 

Different social media platforms 

  • Facebook: Broad audience, but increasingly favored by older demographics. This platform is suitable for various content types, including information sharing and user engagement. 
  • Instagram: The most popular visual platform, with a wide audience. Ideal for publishing images and short videos to create a mood board for your brand. 
  • X: Fast-paced and news-oriented, this platform is perfect for real-time engagement, crisis management, and breaking news. 
  • LinkedIn: Business-oriented. LinkedIn is great for professional networking and sharing industry news, as well as B2B lead generation. 
  • TikTok: A video-first platform that uses a powerful algorithm to give users similar content again and again. Perfect for social media marketing efforts that focus on viral videos and sounds. 

By understanding the characteristics of each platform, you can optimize your content and interactions to achieve better results. 

Audience research and platform selection

Before launching on a social media platform, it's important to conduct audience research to determine where your target clients are most active. 

After all, there's no value in launching an X profile if your entire audience is on Facebook. 

You can use a tool like Brandwatch to run audience insights and generate the following: 

  1. Insights and analytics: Analyze your audience demographics, such as age, gender, and location, across all social platforms. 
  2. Competitor analysis: Research your competitors' social media presence to identify which platforms are most successful. 
  3. Experiment and measure: Test different platforms with a limited scope to gauge engagement and measure their effectiveness. Adjust your strategy based on your findings. 

Creating compelling content

A social media calendar can look empty quickly unless you stay on top of content creation. 

As a social media manager, you might not be making the content yourself. However, you still need to understand and be knowledgeable about the content creation process. 

Here are some social media content creation tips: 

Develop a social media content strategy

Start by weaving a social media content strategy into your overall strategy. 

This will provide guidance on the type of content to create and ensure consistency across your channels. 

You've already set your goals, outlined your target audience, and chosen your platforms. Your content strategy also needs to include: 

  1. Content types: Based on your audience's preferences, define what types of content will work best (for example, images, videos, articles). 
  2. Brand voice: Maintain consistency in tone and style across all your channels to create a recognizable brand identity. 
  3. Creation platforms: Will you create your own content, source images and videos from stock image websites like Getty, or perhaps use AI-generated content? You can sign up for creation platforms like Pixlr or Canva to help you do the work. 
  4. Publish content: Who will actually publish what you produce? Will it be you, a colleague, or even a consultant? 
  5. Scheduling content: Your strategy needs to detail how you'll schedule posts and who is responsible when it comes to ad-hoc or quick-response posts. 
  6. Analyzing: Who will analyze your content to assess its success against your key performance indicators (KPIs)? Usually, this is a job for social media managers. 

Scheduling and publishing

Time is everything when it comes to social media management, and using scheduling and publishing tools is the easiest way to save time. 

Some tools, such as Meta Business Suite and X Pro (formerly TweetDeck), are free to use but don't offer enough insights to benefit your strategy. 

That's why a tool like Brandwatch Publish can help small to large organizations with scheduling posts on a mass scale. 

Using social media scheduling tools

Social media scheduling tools can greatly improve your efficiency in managing your online presence. Being able to schedule social media posts in advance means you can plan an effective and cohesive content calendar. 

By automating the scheduling process, you'll save time and resources. 

Of course, any tool still requires you to invest time in learning its features and capabilities. This knowledge will help you streamline your content planning and simplify the publishing process. 

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Timing your social media posts

The biggest advantage of a social media scheduling tool is its ability to time posts at the perfect time. Tools like Brandwatch and Meta Business Suite use AI to help with this. 

Things to consider when scheduling posts include: 

  • Weekdays versus weekends: People may use social media differently on workdays compared to the weekend. 
  • Peak hours: Posting during high-activity times can help you reach a larger audience. 
  • Events: Be sure to check what's happening at the times you plan to schedule a post. If you're a pizza restaurant, and the Super Bowl is approaching, then scheduling content in the days before the big game could be worthwhile. 

Engagement and community management

It's not enough to simply post on social media and hope to generate an audience. Interaction with the community is just as crucial, which is why you need to manage social media holistically. 

Here are some tips to consider: 

How to foster audience interactions

Fostering audience interactions starts by knowing your audience. 

Once you understand their preferences, you can tailor your content accordingly. You can do this by running social media analysis with a tool like Brandwatch. 

After that, it's time to build a sense of community by getting your hands dirty and interacting with social media users. Some effective ways to do this include: 

  1. Responding promptly to comments, questions, and messages 
  2. Reacting to other social media content and viral moments 
  3. Liking and sharing user-generated content that aligns with your brand 
  4. Setting a tone – whether it be ultra-professional, humorous, or somewhere in the middle – that resonates with your target audience 
  5. Connecting with influencers in your niche who can help spread your brand message 

Managing your online community and fostering interaction requires a dedicated oversight of your brand mentions and user engagement. 

There's no use chatting with users or launching a brand campaign if no one sees it or responds. 

It's crucial that you monitor all audience interactions and work on your social media tactics to create meaningful relationships. 

Consistently sharing user-generated content, for example, can encourage your followers to create more content for your brand, increasing your presence and reach. 

Analytics and reporting

One of the social media management tips that can prove invaluable to your overall strategy is to champion analytics and invest in good reporting tools. 

This way, you can see the successes and failures of your work across social channels and show your findings to other stakeholders. 

The process involves two key stages: monitoring and evaluating. 

1. Monitoring social media analytics

It's essential to monitor your social media analytics regularly to optimize your social media management. 

These analytics provide valuable insights into your audience's preferences, engagement, and demographics. 

Utilize reporting tools and get comprehensive analysis from Brandwatch, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite, and figure out what you're doing right and wrong. 

Things to look for include: 

  • Engagement: Keep track of likes, comments, and shares to understand what resonates with your audience. 
  • Reach: Monitor your followers and impressions to gauge the visibility of your content. 
  • Clicks: Observe the number of clicks on your posts, links, and calls-to-action to determine potential leads. 

You can then dig deeper into your analytics and look at things like: 

  • Sentiment analysis: What users actually feel about your brand or service, and what they tell other users. 
  • Demographic changes: See where your brand sits within social media demographics and how that is changing over time. 

2. Evaluating campaign performance

You can regularly evaluate your brand's social media performance during the monitoring stage. 

Use your KPIs as a benchmark and see how metrics are developing over time. 

Are you generating leads on one channel but interacting with users more on other social media platforms? Where is the best place to allocate your resources, and what social media campaigns are working better than others? 

You can create campaign performance reports in a social media management tool and share your findings with others. 

Efficient social media workflow

Two quick wins when you're managing social media content are around automating workflows and collaborating with team members. 

This's about saving time and staying on top of team workloads, whether that be creating a content calendar or running analysis. 

Let's take a look at these two aspects in action: 

Automating repetitive tasks

Social media automation tools are necessary if you are to manage and implement a social strategy correctly. A platform like Brandwatch can help with: 

  • Content scheduling: Pre-plan and automate social media posts across various platforms. 
  • Cross-posting: Share content from one platform to another without manually copying and pasting. 
  • Auto-responders: Set up automatic responses to frequently asked questions or comments. 

Keep in mind that content personalization and engagement are key aspects of successful social media management. Be careful not to over-automate your accounts as you'll risk losing the human touch. 

Collaborating with team members

Collaborating on any social media campaign is a crucial management tip. It keeps everyone in the loop and ensures better communication across an organization. 

Here are a few ways how you can manage this collaboration: 

  1. Establish clear roles and responsibilities: Assign tasks to team members based on their strengths and expertise. For example, someone who is good at spotting and sharing user-generated content should be in charge of this vertical. 
  2. Centralize information: Utilize an all-in-one platform like Brandwatch where all team members can have access to and update relevant information. 
  3. Communicate regularly: Schedule regular meetings to discuss progress, challenges, and ideas. After all, it's as important to know how your team is feeling about a project, as it is to create a killer content calendar between each team member. 

Additional collaboration tools such as Asana, Trello, and Slack can help streamline your team's workflow. 

Social media advertising

Today's social media management involves staying up to date with the advertising industry. 

Your strategy might primarily focus on organic content, but paid ads could be the solution to revamping your social media profiles. 

To get the most out of your social media ads, it's essential to create targeted advertisements. Use analytics tools like Brandwatch to determine where to focus your ads. 

Here are some tips on achieving that: 

  1. Define your target audience: Identify the users you want to reach. Consider factors such as age, gender, location, interests, and online behavior. 
  2. Set clear objectives: Outline your goals for your ad campaign, whether it's brand awareness, lead generation, or sales. 
  3. Choose the right platform: Select the social media platform that aligns with your target audience's preferences and offers ad formats that suit your objectives. For instance, LinkedIn might be better for selling services, while a visual platform like Instagram is perfect for advertising products. 
  4. Create engaging content: Design ads that grab attention and resonate with your audience, turning them into loyal customers. Use high-quality images, compelling captions, and clear calls to action (CTAs). 
  5. Optimize for mobile: Everyone has a smartphone these days, so make sure your ads look great on various devices. This includes optimizing your ads for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where captions and music are just as important as the video content. 

Social media platforms like to deliver fast content that keeps users scrolling. As a content manager, you'll need to match the pace of each platform and stay on top of the latest trends. 

Fail to do this and your brand can swiftly appear obsolete or out of touch. 

Here are some tips on social media management to keep you updated with the latest trends: 

  1. Monitor social media with a listening tool like Brandwatch and see what's trending across multiple platforms. 
  2. Learn how users speak with each other and what makes content go viral. This will help you plan future content and also spot when in-vogue trends are beginning to fall into obscurity. 
  3. Stay updated on the latest influencers and how they are interacting with their followers. This could lead to valuable brand partnerships later down the line. 
  4. Conduct regular audience audits to determine whether your followers are still interested in what you're talking about or promoting. 
  5. Become a brand influencer yourself. Many social media managers are successful in pitching themselves as the go-to option through effective successful social media management that champions the brand and its products and services over rivals. 
  6. Keep a finger on the industry pulse and read up on tech updates and the latest software developments that might affect your social media strategy (for example, changing social media algorithms). 

Evaluating and adjusting strategies

A social media management tool not only helps you launch a strategy but also guides you through the evaluation process. 

This means you can adjust your course as you go and ensure your social media content calendar accurately points towards your end goals. 

To do this, you'll need to run a social media audit. 

Conducting a social media audit

Here are the steps to take when creating an effective, useful social media audit: 

  1. Analyze your profiles: Start by reviewing each of your social media profiles. Make sure they are up to date, consistent with your brand, and optimized for search. Check for broken links, outdated information, and missing profile images. Your social media profiles are the shop windows into your brand, so they need to be perfect. 
  2. Determine your KPIs: Identify the KPIs that matter most to your business, such as engagement rate, follower growth, and clicks to your website. Are you meeting these KPIs right now? And what other KPIs could you focus on too? 
  3. Run comparative analysis: Next, compare your results to the broader industry to understand how you stack up against your competitors. Are you achieving the same follower rates as them? What's your return on investment (ROI) per social media post? Analysis like this will provide you with valuable insights and help you identify areas for improvement. 
  4. Identify your top-performing content: Determine which types of content resonate most with your audience by analyzing engagement and reach metrics. Do you need to tweak your whole strategy to focus on this content? And what's going wrong with the content that's not getting any attention? 
  5. Review your posting frequency: Take note of your posting schedule and frequency to ensure you're not overwhelming or neglecting your audience. Adjust your upcoming social media posts to reflect your findings. 

These five steps are the starting point of an audit that may take time to fully create. 

One additional tip for those tasked with social media management is to use a platform like Brandwatch to help you complete all aspects of said audit. 

Managing multiple accounts and platforms

As a social media manager, you may be responsible for handling multiple social media accounts across various platforms. 

This can quickly become overwhelming and confusing, especially if there is little overlap between platforms (such as TikTok and LinkedIn). 

To make your job easier, it's essential to have a strategy in place to manage these diverse accounts efficiently. It all begins with pulling everything into one place. 

Centralizing social media management with tools

The first step in managing multiple social media accounts is to centralize your activity using social media management tools. 

Many of these tools allow you to connect and organize your brand's social media accounts in one place, making it easy to access, track, and engage with your audience across multiple platforms. 

Some popular tools include: 

  • Brandwatch: Create, manage, and schedule your social media posts and get immediate feedback in real time. Listen in to what users are saying about you and analyze your brand's performance across multiple social media channels at once. 
  • Buffer: Schedule posts, track performance, and manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. 
  • Sprout Social: Get started with basic social media scheduling, monitoring, reporting, and analytics. Use Sprout Social's CRM integration for managing customer relationships. 

Why centralizing social media efforts matters 

The above social media management tools are designed to help centralize your entire social media output. That means you can create and publish posts on one dashboard, connect fellow team members for smoother workflows, and generate reports to share with stakeholders. 

Gone are the days when you needed to log into Meta Business Suite to schedule Instagram and Facebook posts, Pro X to plan your X posting schedule, and LinkedIn to time your B2B content for 5pm on a Friday.

Now, you can do it all under one roof. 

Optimizing for growth and engagement

Building a strong, consistent social media presence is perhaps the No.1 goal of social media marketing. 

Consistency not only helps your brand gain visibility but also makes it easier for you to connect with prospective customers. 

Get it right, and you'll enjoy higher growth rates and more engagement with your posts. 

We suggest you use these simple yet effective tips for optimizing growth and engagement: 

Keep your content fresh and relevant 

Post regularly to keep your audience engaged but stay away from looking overly automated. Avoid, for example, scheduling posts bang on the hour, every hour. Users notice it after a while. 

Instead, share valuable, informative, and entertaining content catered to your target audience's interests at various times. Use a variety of content formats, such as images, videos, and articles, to keep things interesting. 

Be smart with hashtags 

Hashtags used to be the No.1 route to attracting attention on social media, but very few users actually click on hashtags these days. 

Instead, you can use hashtags to get your message across in a chatty way or jump on viral trends. 

Research popular and relevant hashtags and incorporate them into your posts. 

Remember, don't overdo it. Even two hashtags in a post can look needy on a platform like X. 

Interact with your audience 

Respond promptly to comments and messages from your followers. This can be hard if you are being criticized, but it's still better than remaining silent. 

Engage in authentic conversations, address people's concerns, and answer questions. 

This can help boost engagement and build trust between you and your audience. After all, you're not a faceless entity. 

Monitor your social media analytics 

Keep track of your social media performance through various platform analytics. It might be click-through rates, views per post, or purchase rates. 

This will help you understand which content resonates best with your audience. 

Adjust your content strategy to focus more on the content that delivers higher engagement and ROI. 

Here's a quick summary of the key takeaways to keep in mind: 

Implementing the above tips will significantly improve your social media engagement, leading to steady growth and a stronger social presence. Remember, consistency is key – it’s an ongoing effort that will pay off in the long run. 

Outsourcing social media management

Not everyone has the time, skills, or brain power to dedicate to social media management. Outsourcing is always an option and there are thousands of freelancers and agencies out there that can handle social media management fast. 

Whether you're a chief marketing officer for a global corporation or a lone trader seeking to boost a brand's social presence, outsourcing has its benefits and challenges. 

What to consider with social media management outsourcing services

It's not an easy decision to trust your social media management to external help. Before you start looking for additional aid, it's important to identify your objectives for entering into this relationship.  

Some services focus on content creation, while others excel in engagement or advertising. You might need someone to create a strategy that you then implement. Or perhaps you need a social media manager to conduct an audit and be honest about where you're failing. 

So, define what you're looking for, be it: 

  • Brand awareness 
  • Driving website traffic 
  • Generating leads 
  • Increasing sales 
  • Auditing your content 
  • Future strategy 
  • Save time posting 

Contacting social media marketing experts

No matter what you need, the process of contacting and sourcing external help is always the same. Lean on your contacts and see if there's anyone who could immediately fit the role you're looking to fill. If there isn't anyone, then look across the industry and use tools like LinkedIn to spot potential freelancers or agencies. 

If you're still falling short, then you could post job ads on platforms like Cision, or use social media itself to advertise for external help. 

Filter your options 

Once you have a list of possible external contributors, it's time to compare the types of services they offer and find a match. Analyze their skills and prices, ensuring that they fall within your budget. Here's a simple framework you can use: 

Consider experience and expertise in your niche. Look for reviews and testimonials to gauge how effectively they have managed campaigns for similar businesses. 

Throughout this process, engage in an open dialogue with potential providers, and don't be afraid to ask relevant questions. 

Eventually, you'll come to a point where you can accurately compare each candidate based on their skills and suitability for the role, as well as their price. 

Evaluate ROI 

Aside from comparing service providers, remember to evaluate the return on investment for outsourcing. 

Weigh the costs and benefits, looking at: 

  • Time savings 
  • Efficiency gains 
  • Improved results 
  • Reduction in mistakes 

Consider these aspects, and you'll find the right company, agency, or individual to support your social media efforts and achieve your objectives with a confident and knowledgeable approach.