Social media is neither a niche nor a fad – it’s an intrinsic part of our daily lives.
It’s used by everyone, everywhere – in all countries, across all demographics, on all devices – and occupies a significant share of brand marketing budgets and online ad spending in general.
As a result, social media is getting tougher. It’s becoming:
To emerge, grow, and generate value, brands need to be both efficient and effective at managing social media. They require processes, workflows, tools, and best practices – and that’s what this guide is all about.
Table of contents
Social media management is the process of managing a brand’s social media presence on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by creating, publishing, reviewing, and improving its content. It also includes engaging and interacting with fans and followers on each social network.
Social media management has become a crucial part of a brand’s marketing strategy and media mix.
Out of the total population of 7.8 billion, almost 4.57 billion people were active internet users as of July 2020, of which, 3.96 billion were active social media users:
Furthermore, the number of people using social media worldwide is projected to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025:
In the US, a large proportion of each generation is active on social media:
Facebook is the most popular social network, but it’s facing competition from YouTube and Instagram, with “many advertisers are planning to reduce their activity on Facebook in the future.”
Social media marketing has grown into one of the most popular and successful forms of digital marketing. According to a global survey, 94% of social media marketers used Facebook to promote their business, while 76% used Instagram.
Brands love social media because of its two-way communication, instantaneity, scalability, measurability, and innovation opportunities.
According to the CMO Survey, brands highlighted social media as a tool to accomplish their key strategic objectives:
Other benefits of social media marketing include:
As social media becomes more popular, more and more brands are using the marketing channel. For example:
However, despite the growth, not everything is straightforward for social media marketers when you consider:
Brands also have to weigh up the risks associated with social media, such as the fact that everyone is an influencer – think always-on, public-facing customer service, whistleblowers, reviews, and promoted complaints – which requires professional social media managers to build and protect their most important asset; i.e. their brand.
Let’s take a look at four brands that are successful on social media.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everyone and everything, including social media. Unfortunately, a lot of misinformation has been shared, so much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a “massive infodemic.”
While WHO can’t control what other people share, it can publish the correct information. WHO achieved this with clear and consistent branding across the different social media platforms. For example:
AirAsia always goes the extra mile to reply quickly to comments on their Facebook page, as seen with their “Very Responsive” rating:
With 12.5 million followers, that’s a lot to keep up with.
But as Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert, reported: “42% of consumers expect a response within 60 minutes and 32% expect a response within 30 minutes.”
AirAsia replies to inquiries with helpful links and friendly, personable advice so that they maintain a consistent tone:
PlayStation was the most-followed brand of 2019 and currently has almost 20 million followers:
According to UnMetric, it has grown its followers by 376%, adding 12 million between 2014 and 2019.
PlayStation posts a mix of content to engage fans, including new game trailers, gaming footage, and streaming events. In the wake of the coronavirus, PlayStation also offered two free games for fans to download – “Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection” and “Journey” – using the hashtag #PlayAtHome.
GoPro has a total of 17.4 million Instagram followers, 2.1 million Twitter followers, and over 10.8 million Facebook followers. It actively interacts with its audience on each social network. Plus, it also has a popular branded hashtag: #GoPro.
The brand shares various content across its chosen social media platforms and uses each one slightly differently to maximize its potential. For example:
Facebook is used to promote their brand, reach new customers, and connect with existing customers:
They use Instagram’s visual platform to showcase the quality of their cameras and promote user-generated posts:
On Twitter, they share product announcements and interact with their customers:
Even though the social media landscape is becoming more complex, it’s still possible for brands to use the platform successfully.
Follow this 4-part guide to help your brand crush it on social media:
A social media calendar, also referred to as an editorial calendar, helps you plan and publish high-quality social media content consistently, so you can keep your collaborators, clients, and audience happy.
You can build a social media calendar using a free online template or a professional, dedicated tool, such as Loomly.
But before we get into building a social media calendar, it’s important to remember the reasons why you’re using one:
This saves any last-minute panic and rushing around to find a topic and create content to publish. And as a result, well-planned content equals high-quality content.
We cannot stress enough that quality trumps quantity. It’s far better to publish one high-quality post a week than five mediocre posts a day. When you plan your schedule, allow enough time to create your content so you can publish regularly. Your audience will look forward to reading your regular posts rather than wondering when the next is going to appear.
When you practice the activities above, you’ll achieve this third outcome. Taking the time to plan, create, and publish high-quality content consistently will make your brand story more compelling:
“Building a brand and a community is more like running a marathon than a sprint, and consistency is the most important key success factor in the long run.”
OK, with those three essential things in place, let’s look at the five steps for building a social media calendar.
Before you start creating content, you need to define your publishing guidelines. Think of these as a content brief that you can always refer back to.
You can craft your editorial line by answering a few simple questions:
Decide which social networks you want to establish your brand on.
In general, more posts are better to keep your audience engaged. But, as mentioned earlier, we highly recommend focusing on how many high-quality posts you can commit to posting every week (or every month).
Social media calendars are typically set up on either a monthly or weekly cycle:
Choose the best one for your team.
Your social media workflow covers the process of reviewing and approving content before it’s published, to make sure the right post gets published at the right time, in the right place, by the right person.
With your publishing guidelines defined, you can move onto planning your calendar.
Follow these three steps to fill your calendar with post ideas:
Simply list events that matter to your brand and your audience, such as:
After you’ve added fixed dates, you need to consider the best days to publish your other content.
Based on proprietary research and third-party studies, and more importantly, your own experience, select the best publishing days per social media channel.
Finally, fill in the remaining gaps with evergreen ideas. For example, you could:
At this stage, you should have a clear plan of what you will publish, on what dates, and on which social networks.
Next, you’ll finalize the publishing time and create the content for each social network.
For each post, you now need to determine the best publishing time for each social network. You can base this on your previous publishing experience, plus other proprietary research and third-party studies.
Social media posts tend to be relatively short — compared to blog posts, for instance — and crafting the copy comes down to deciding on a few core components, including the words, links, hashtags, mentions, and emojis.
You’ll also need to customize the post to fit each social network’s technical limitations, community best practices, and audience expectations.
Finally, you’ll need to create your visual assets, such as:
All of these visual assets could be original material, user-generated content, or stock images. But either way, it’s a good idea to store them in a central repository for your team to access.
You’ve just transformed your list of post ideas into an actual content plan. And you might be tempted to go ahead and start publishing. But there’s a final step you need to take, and that’s to review, approve, and schedule your posts.
Here’s a quick overview:
Make sure reviewers have a clear preview of the post as it will appear on each social network.
As a rule of thumb, you want to check your posts for:
Ideally, you want an approval system that allows you to keep track of team feedback, save post changes, and make collaborators accountable for their actions.
Once your posts have been reviewed and approved, you can schedule them at the planned publishing date and time.
The final step is to review your published posts, so you can keep track of what your audience likes in your social media calendar and leverage those takeaways when creating new posts in your next publishing cycle.
Remember, a social media calendar helps you:
A social media workflow is a proven system that allows your team to schedule error-free social media posts consistently and efficiently.
It defines the roles and repeatable steps throughout the social media publishing process so that everyone knows when and what they are doing.
Here’s why you should consider using a social media workflow:
Social media management is not a one-person job. Social media managers collaborate with content crafters, like copywriters, designers, and photographers, and also submit work for approval.
The best brands work as cross-functional teams involving professionals from all departments in the company:
Publishing original content (not duplicated or reshared) that is high-quality (no typos, with great visuals), and on-brand (correct colors, tone) is vital.
Now you have a clearer understanding of what a social media workflow is and why you need one, let’s take a look at how you can implement one.
The first step is to get your team together and decide how the workflow is going to work. It’s essential to get everyone’s input at this stage so that nobody feels like tasks have been forced on them.
You’ll want to discuss:
If you’ve already defined your publishing guidelines, you may want to review them first to make sure everything is up-to-date.
If not, here’s what you need to consider:
The content you publish on each social media network will differ in terms of the wording, content length, assets, and hashtags, even if the core idea is the same.
So in this step, you need to define what those parameters are for each channel so that your approval team better understands the content and context of each post.
This decreases any friction in your workflow and improves the quality of your social media updates.
Team members need to preview your social media posts as they’ll appear on each network, so they can approve them accordingly.
That’s why a full preview like this:
Works better than a snapshot like this:
Brands often use a mix of organic and sponsored posts for their social media updates.
That’s why we highly recommend you create a separate approval process, so you can:
Workflows thrive on collaboration and constant evolution: our social media workflow doesn’t look anything like the first one we drew up, and we are all the better for it.
Make sure you set up regular review meetings to evaluate your social media workflow.
Using the right tool for the job makes life easier. Here are our recommendations:
If you want to get a feel for how a social media workflow should look and how the approval process looks in action, then you can try our free template.
It contains all of the major steps you should include in your workflow. But you can add, remove, or change any of them based on your team requirements:
The easiest way to implement a social media workflow is by using a well-designed, professional workflow tool.
Loomly was designed by social media managers for social media managers, to streamline the way your team works.
You can:
In short: A social media workflow helps you streamline the way your team works, reduces mistakes, saves money, and improves the overall quality of your content.
Note: All brands benefit from a review and approval process. But brands operating in regulated industries, like healthcare and financial services, and/or publicly-traded companies benefit more as they have to comply with regulations.
For example, the risk warning text in this banner ad would be non-compliant with the FCA because it’s too small in comparison to the surrounding promotion text:
Measuring your performance is an essential, but often overlooked, part of social media management.
Whether you’re building a social media calendar or implementing a social media workflow, you need to have some benchmarks to measure your performance.
Tracking performance metrics can help you identify what went well and what went wrong for every post, so you can create better content and engage with your audience next time.
There are a couple of ways to measure your performance.
Most social networks provide native analytics features that help you track how well each post performed. These tools are convenient because they don’t require additional charges or applications. But you’ll have to go to each social media platform to collect data and save everything manually into your social media reports.
Premium analytics features from dedicated social media management tools can provide insights across multiple social media platforms and streamline your analytics, reporting, and optimization process.
There are three categories of metrics you can measure:
Note: Names and terminology vary on each social network, but the following metrics cover most bases.
The primary data points you’ll want to track and measure are:
The primary data points you’ll want to track and measure are:
Keeping track of the above metrics at the end of each publishing cycle (weekly, monthly, or otherwise), or reporting cadence, will give you pointers about:
The bottom line:
Measure what content your audience likes (and dislikes) and leverage those insights when creating new content in your next publishing cycle.
Social media management is not a set-once-and-forget-it type of job.
The best social media managers practice continuous improvement through constant measuring, learning, and experimentation.
At the end of each campaign or publishing cycle, measure your results to see if you achieved your goals. Take the time to learn what went well and what didn’t so that you can make adjustments next time.
While it’s not mandatory to have a tool to crush it on social media, using the right tool for the job certainly gives you a competitive edge.
Here are some of the best social media management tools, ranked by users on G2 Crowd and Capterra.
According to G2 Crowd, the best social media management tools, ranked by user satisfaction, are:
Loomly is also a leader in the category according to G2 Crowd:
According to Capterra, the best social media management tools include:
Almost 50% of the world’s population is active on social media. On the one hand, that’s great for brands as they have a ready-made audience. But on the other, it means the social media market is fiercely competitive.
If you want your brand to emerge, grow, and generate value, you need to manage your social media marketing with reliable processes, workflows, tools, and best practices:
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.