How Social Media Strategy Planning Can Help You Achieve Business Objectives

Businesses are desperately trying to figure social media out for a reason: it’s exploding. In fact, studies show that two out of three American actively use social media. That’s almost three times as many users as there were in 2008!

Being able to engage with such a large audience is a huge boon for any business. According to Forbes below are some of the benefits social media strategy planning can bring:

• Improving your brand’s recognition and loyalty.
• Giving you more chances for conversions.
• Actually improving your conversion rate.
• Making you an industry authority.
• Driving more traffic to your website.
• Driving your overall marketing costs down.
• Providing better customer service.
• Gathering valuable data and insights.

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Clearly, planning a successful social media strategy is worth it. The biggest question, then, is how exactly do you get started with social media management? It’s easier than you think. Here’s everything you need to know about social media in business:

What Exactly is Social Media Management?

Social media management is everything involved in maintaining your business’ social media presence. It’s an enormous task. Social media management has a significant stake in a wide variety of organizational departments. Here’s how some of your departments have a vested interest in social media management:

• Sales and marketing. Your social media efforts can significantly increase key performance indicators like ROI, conversion rate, and web traffic.
• Public relations. Positive and negative social media feedback will have a significant effect on your company’s brand. Strong social media management can make public relations much easier.
• IT. Managing many different profiles, formatting posts, and getting them out on time may strain your IT department. Finding a way that makes this process easy will keep your IT department running smoothly.
• Customer service. Social media management gives your customer service department a new way to interact with your customers and serve them. Gathering and analyzing the correct data will let you nip potential issues in the bud.

Clearly, it’s important for all businesses to think about social media. There are plenty of benefits, and it helps your organization run as smoothly as possible. Now let’s take a look at what exactly social media management can include.

What Social Media Management Entails

Social media is a cycle. You listen to your audience, create engaging content, publish the content, and then listen to their reaction. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot to it. Here’s some of the specific tasks you’ll have to undertake:

• Creating content. To provide value, you need to share a steady stream of valuable content to your audience. You can share some valuable industry information, but you’ll need to create your own content, too. This can include blog posts, videos, articles, or eBooks.
• Market analysis. Social media provides an incredible wealth of information on how consumers interact with each other, your company, and competing brands. To tap into this potential, you have to know how to gather and analyze this data efficiently.
• Providing customer service. Your social media profiles are part of your company’s official voice. Customers are going to use this interactive platform to provide feedback, both good and bad. Reacting to issues quickly and effectively will greatly affect how your brand is viewed. You need to have the processes in place to quickly react to customer concerns, whether they’re posted, tweeted, or commented.
• Publishing content. If you aren’t posting anything, there’s no point in having social media profiles. It’s a bit more complicated than it seems. Formatting and posting content across multiple platforms is time-consuming. To make sure it’s effective, you have to post on a regular schedule. Missing a post or two can bring an entire campaign to a screeching halt.

Unmetric works in tandem with vendors that provide publishing and listening services

You also need to factor in the wide variety of social media platforms you’ll need to manage. Facebook and Twitter instantly spring to mind, but there’s a lot more. Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram are all incredibly popular as well. Depending on your specific niche, there might be even more networks you’ll want to check out.

Figure out which ones will benefit your business the most, and focus on them to start. Once you’ve built a strong initial presence, you can try to diversify a bit more.

Best Practices for Social Media Management

Managing all these tasks among several profiles is a hassle. To do it effectively, you need some help. Luckily, there are a great deal of social media tools that have been created to make your job easier. They generally fall into three categories: listening, publishing, and intelligence.

Publishing tools are the simplest. They allow you to easily post your content across all of your profiles. You can schedule your posts to make sure you’re constantly posting relevant content. HootSuite is an example of a strong publishing platform.

Listening platforms are a bit more in-depth. Listening platforms let you monitor a wide variety of social media platforms for consumers who are talking about you. You’ll be able to set-up automatic notifications whenever you receive message or notification. You’ll even be able to monitor whenever people are talking about your brand, whether they’re interacting on your profiles or not! Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly known as Radian6) is an example of a strong listening platform.

Finally, and most importantly, are intelligence platforms. Intelligence platforms will shape every aspect of your social media strategy and management. Intelligence platforms are able to analyze exactly how effective your efforts are. This gives you the information that’s necessary to continue to grow your social media presence.

Unmetric a social media intelligence platform. gives users access to the social media performance of over 30,000 brands across 30 different industries.

Best of all, intelligence platforms let you analyze your competition’s content, too. You’ll be able to figure out what works and what doesn’t work before you lift a finger. Features like “Inspire” which acts a social media content search engine and “Campaign Intelligence” gives marketers an edge and more insight into the social media performance of brands across the world. You can even find holes in your competition’s strategies, and develop a niche they haven’t ever considered.

All campaigns along with the engagement they received are neatly organized in chart form.

Taking the Critical First Step

Your business needs to take advantage of social media. Taking the time to seek information and read this article was the first step to becoming proficient in social media management. The next step is partnering up with an experienced social media management company. Luckily, you can give Unmetric a try for free!

Simply click here to receive your free 3-day trial. If you’d rather take a guided tour, you may opt for a free 20-minute demo instead.

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