5 Best Ways To Manage Your Social Media Accounts

5 best ways to manage your social media accounts

1. Define your social media marketing goals

It's easy to open accounts on a bunch of social media platforms. But not knowing what exactly you are truly looking for in social media—can cause you time and money.

Having a solid idea of your business goals can make your social media efforts more effective.

To define your social media goals, you need three pieces of information in hand:

1. Business purpose

While you may think you already know what your brand is about, it doesn’t hurt to define your business's purpose on paper.

Start by asking yourself questions like:

1. Why does my business exist?

2. What problems does my business solve?

3. What long-term objectives am I trying to achieve?

Answering these questions will make sure you don’t get lost in a sea of ideas during the goal-setting process, as you will only focus on goals that obey the core principles of your brand.

2.Target Audience Research

No matter how much information you collect about your business, setting accurate goals depends on identifying and knowing your target audience. After all, everything is made for customers.

Take some time to figure out customer needs and preferences. A great place to start would be by answering the 5 following questions:

1. Who are they?

Example: You can take note of their age, gender, education level, profession, income, location, hobbies, interests, beliefs, and life goals.

Pro Tip: In identifying the target audience, narrow down the selection to those who are mostly likely to be engaged and entertained by your brand's digital efforts.

2. Where do they usually hang out online?

Example: Instagram and TikTok for visual content, LinkedIn for professional networking, or Reddit for in-depth discussions.

3. What problems can you help them overcome?

Example: Focus on specific challenges your audience is facing day-to-day, like trouble sleeping due to an uncomfortable pillow.

4. What type of content do they prefer?

Example: You can say they prefer short, informative videos on Instagram, infographics on LinkedIn, or how-to videos on YouTube.

5. When they are most likely to be around to see it.

Example: Early morning, lunch breaks, after office hours, weekends, etc.

The Internet is a great place to get all this information. Tools like Google Analytics, Instagram insights, and any national or international statistical organisations can help you find and collect the correct data.

You can then use the information to identify your customer demographic, psychographic, and shopping tendencies.

3. Choose Your Platforms

Up next, select the platforms for your social media marketing. For this, look into your business goals as well as the target audience research you did earlier.

You can ask yourself questions like:

• Which platform is popular in the industry?

• What is my competition doing?

• Where do my target audience spend most of their time?

• Which type of content do they prefer?

• Will the selected platform allow me to deliver the kind of content my audience wants?

Keep in mind: Take only the number of platforms you can manage. If you are an individual or small business owner, you can start with one channel and add more as you grow.

Set Smart Goals

Once you have gathered all the information mentioned above, it’s time to set your goals through the SMART technique.

The SMART technique revolves around making your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This technique acts as a guiding theme and helps you set goals that will actually work—both for yourself and your business.

Here is what it might look like for your social media marketing plans.

Specific: Be specific on what you are trying to achieve in social media.

For example, this can be about raising brand awareness, getting more sales, increasing social media engagements, building community, etc.

Measurable: How will you know whether you have achieved the goal or not? What metrics or tools will you be using to track your progress?

For example, you can say I’ll know I’ve achieved my goals when I see an increase in subscribers, likes, click-through rates, and positive mentions. And I will use tools like Mevrik Social, Instagram Insights, and Hootsuite Analytics to keep track of them.

Achievable: Is your goal realistic and can be completed?

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When you are just starting off, don’t aim too high. You always have the risk of feeling deflated if you don’t hit your projected goal. 

Remember: Delivering excellent social media content takes time. So, start slow but steady.

Relevant: Are your goals in line with your company's mission, vision, and values?

Example: You can say that you aim to raise your LinkedIn engagement by 15% in the next three months, so you can build a community of people who are well-informed about your product, i.e., increase in brand awareness.

Time Bound: What is our deadline to complete this goal?

Example: This can be monthly, quarterly, or annually.

2. Put Together A Social Media Calendar

As a social media marketer, you might produce multiple content daily. But, before you know it, your desk is filled with unorganised content.

One of the simplest ways to avoid getting lost in the sea of content is to create a social media calendar.

A social media calendar organises all your social content in one location. You can also visualise when, where, and at what point each piece of content will go live on social media.

To create a social media calendar, you can use a digital calendar, a basic spreadsheet, or interactive tools.

Keep in mind: your social media calendar does not need to be overly aesthetic to begin with. You can simply start with a paper that has a necessary column to track down all your content—as long as a calendar exists.

For your calendar, incorporate fields that reflect all the data you have available. This might include

• Social media network
• Account name
• Social post (images, videos, gifs, etc.)
• Social post caption (including links and hashtags)
• Deadline
• Post type
• Post Status
• Geotags (if available)
• Scheduled date and time
• KPIs to track
• Column for providing feedback

3. Use Social Media Management Tools

This one feels like the most obvious one to say, but social media management tools are so incredibly efficient that it's hard not to mention them.

Growing and maintaining social media channels across various platforms takes a lot of work. A social media management platform saves you time, helps you stay flexible, and lets you plan your social media strategy down to the last minute.

You can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite that allow you to manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. Within these platforms, you have the option to

• Interact with customers
• Track customer engagement across channels
• Bulk upload a week's content
• Schedule content in advance. This helps you publish content 24/7, regardless of whether you are asleep, at work, on vacation, etc.
• Well-integrated CRM system to analyse customer data.

Another perk of using SMM tools is that it can help you build a long-term social media strategy. The scheduling feature let's

You post your evergreen posts—like tips and advice, case studies, and industry definitions—multiple times, quarterly, and annually, for repeat exposure.

4. Repurpose And Reshare Content

The sheer number of social media posts you need to create for building a brand image can be overwhelming—but you don’t need to create from scratch all the time.

Repurposing content is basically using the content you already have and making it appropriate—both tone and layout wise—for every channel. This way you can create more social media content without losing time on coming up with fresh ideas.

For example, you can split up a how-to guide blog into a LinkedIn carousel or turn it into a video for YouTube.

There are several tools you can use to repurpose your content, including:

• Canva: With its magic switch tool, you can adapt your designs for multiple channels.
• Semrush Video Marketing Automator: If you’re repurposing blog content, Semrush can turn your text into YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram videos.
• 2short.ai: This platform uses AI to identify the most engaging moments of your long videos and edit them into short clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

Remember: You don't want your customer to feel repetitive. Having the same content on every platform is good on occasions, but having the same content every time can be an issue.

5. Automate Social Media Posting

Timing is essential in social media marketing. You want your content to be posted in hours where your audience is most active and engaging.

However, as a marketer, making sure your content goes live at the right time and to every channel can be a daunting task. 

That's where automating posts comes in handy. 

Not only does it help you automatically post content at the right time, but it also reduces the time you’d spend on social media posting.

There are two ways to automate your social media content: social media management softwares and native scheduling features.

Many platforms, like Meta and LinkedIn, come with built-in scheduling that let you plan and schedule content directly from the platform.

Since these features are designed by the platform's developers, the navigation is quite smooth, and there is no steep learning curve.

Social media management softwares comes with scheduling features that lets you send out posts to all the channels without manually logging each time. Within these platforms, you can choose specific days and times to publish your content—for optimal reach.

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While in-built features are a great way to start scheduling your posts, as you advance, it's a good choice to invest in a social media management platform. It keeps everything— scheduling, calendar view, analytics—in a single place for everyone to be on board with.

3 Best Tools to Manage Your Social Media Accounts

1. Mevrik

If there is an essential tool to monitor all your social media channels, it is Mevrik. 

With this platform, you can know when and where your customer made certain mentions. And the best part is that you can interact with the person who mentions you without leaving the platform.

In addition to real-time oversight on social mentions, Mevrik also offers a Generative AI tool that allows you to generate personalised and grammatically accurate responses. It can also curate conversation summaries, which are extremely handy for supporting your customers in the future.

2. Hootsuite

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Hootsuite is often considered the most feature-complete social media management platform in the market. This all-encompassing tool is suitable for large businesses who are looking for a solution that goes beyond basic scheduling. 

With Hootsuite, you can manage messages, mentions and comments across channels - all from a single dashboard. This helps you keep an eye on the conversations in various social networks and avoid the constant switching between browsers or tools.

You also won't have to worry about the performance of your post —there are a range of advanced analytics tools that can monitor the impressions, link clicks, number of comments, saves, video views and more.

3.Buffer

If you are looking for an option particularly suitable for beginners, Buffer is your best ally. This platform offers a free version that allows you to connect up to three profiles.

Along with everything a social media manager offers—like post scheduling, analytics, a photo editor — Buffers provides a unique feature called Slots, where you can set up a series of time slots in advance to automatically post content.

Whenever you want to share a post, simply upload the content to the dashboard or use an extension to add external content. Buffer will automatically place it in the next available time slot according to your plan.

Conclusion

When it comes to social media management, work smarter, not harder.

Strategies like using a social media platform, scheduling posts in advance and repurposing content for every channel, can help you speed up the publishing process and make the most of social media platforms.

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