How To Manage Social Media for Companies in 8 Steps

Please note that none of the companies mentioned in this article are affiliated with Indeed.

Social media management is an integral part of engaging with your brand's target audience. Learning the best practices to manage company social media accounts can help gain customers and establish a well-loved brand. Social media management requires strategy, an in-depth understanding of both the company and their target audience and developing engaging content consistently. In this article, we explain how to manage social media with steps and tips to ensure you run accounts effectively.

Why is managing social media important for a company?

Managing social media content helps monitor a company's online presence and shape their reputation. Managing social media accounts effectively offers many benefits to a company including:

• Cost effective: Social media is a low-cost method of interacting with existing customers and reaching new ones. There is no fee to join on most platforms, and many potential customers are already there.

• Reach: Social media also offers a global reach, which you may not achieve through other marketing mediums.

• Branding: An online presence helps establish a company brand through interactions with a target audience and clear messaging.

• Marketing tool: The inexpensive reach these platforms provide to a company make social media a desirable marketing tool. Social media generates leads and sales at a proven rate, and many platforms offer advertising tools and analytics.

Related: How To Become a Social Media Manager

How to manage social media for a company

Here are eight steps to manage social media for a company:

1. Understand your brand

A brand is the identity of your company, including your mission, core values, logo, name and customer experience. Understanding what your company stands for and how the public perceives your company is key to managing social media successfully.

2. Know your target audience

Knowing your target audience means you understand who the company is trying to reach with their service. Consider the target audience when crafting social media content to be sure they'll relate and engage with your posts.

When managing social media content, a target audience may not only be the group of people the company designed its services for. It can also include social media users who may be interested in your content. Reaching these people and your intended target audience can maximize the company's ROI for social media.

Consider these elements when determining who your target audience is:

• Demographics: The age, gender, race and socioeconomic information such as employment, marital status and education

• Interests: Hobbies, entertainment and topics that a person enjoys

• Challenges: Struggles your ideal customer faces. This is usually the problem the company's product or service solves.

Read more: Defining Your Target Audience: What It Is and Why It's Important

3. Set goals

Setting goals helps guide how you are managing social media accounts and provides a metric for success. Goals can help maintain your budget and hold you accountable. Use the SMART method to set better goals:

• Specific: Define your goal.

• Measurable: Use metrics to track your goal.

• Achievable: Be sure you have the resources to reach your goal.

• Realistic: Set a goal that is possible for you and the company.

• Time-sensitive: Give the goal a time-frame in which it needs to be reached.

Read more: How To Set and Achieve Goals

4. Create accounts on multiple platforms

Having an account on multiple platforms extends your reach. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube are among the most popular for business. Posting content on these platforms can diversify the type of content you share and ensure that you connect with existing and potential customers.

5. Engage with your audience

Engaging with your audience on social media is important to building a relationship with customers. Companies that do this provide a greater customer experience, which can increase revenue. Ways to engage your social media audience include:

• Answering their questions

• Asking them questions to get opinions

• Creating games they can play

• Organize contests

• Offer exclusive discounts and promotions

• Recognize customers specially

• Allow audience-generated content

• Be human in all your posts and interactions

6. Create quality content

Your target audience is more likely to engage with relatable, creative content that informs and entertains. Consider also creating content designed specially for each platform, for example: a video may perform best on YouTube and Facebook, while photos are best suited for Instagram. A way to ensure quality content is to place members responsible for each aspect of content generation. Here are roles to consider assigning:

• Content manager: Develops strategy for creating and publishing content

• Content creator: Produces video, text, info graphics and other medias for company

• Content editor: Evaluates content for accuracy, design and quality

7. Develop advertisements

Developing an advertisement strategy can help reach more social media users, engage the audience and provide a greater return on investment. Many social media platforms have built-in features to create and track ads, making it easier to develop advertisements for the company.

Related: What is a Good ROI and How to Calculate It

8. Analyze social media metrics

Analyzing social media metrics is an important step to determine how successful your social media usage has been. Here are the metrics to consider:

• Engagement: The number of interactions your content received from social media users

• Impressions: The number of times social media users could see your content on their timeline, feed or page

• Conversions: How many times a person made a purchase after clicking on your content

• Response rate: The time it took for the social media team to answer messages from the social media users

Tips for managing social media

A goal for managing a company's social media accounts is to engage as much of your audience as possible and achieve a larger return on your investment. To help ensure you are using social media most effectively, here are tips for managing your accounts:

• Use scheduling tools. Scheduling tools help organize and strategize your content. These tools make it possible to arrange specific times for content to be posted, save time spent managing content and help keep each account consistent with one another.

• Provide consistency. It is important that each social media account shares the same information and operates under the same values and principles. Consistency helps maintain the brand and builds trust with consumers.

• Follow trends. Know what is popular on social media and take part in the trends. This could include creating memes, making challenge videos and using hashtags.

• Recycle content. It's okay to reuse posts when the content is still relevant. Doing this may lessen the strain on social media content creators and give content a second chance to impact your audience or to be seen by new members of your audience.

• Make daily posts. Try to use your social media and engage with your audience regularly. A reliable content flow keeps social media users entertained and interested.

• Tell stories. Sharing company stories can help create relatable content, which engages your target audience.

• React to controversy. People appreciate socially responsible companies, so taking part in conversations and voicing support for causes helps establish a brand and builds a valuable emotional relationship with the audience.