Social Media Management

Social media has become the preferred go-to platform for people to voice opinions, seek information, express joy, or vent frustration. Worldwide, more than 2.8 billion people are on social media that is 37% of the world’s population.That is massive power to make or break your brand, proving it tough for businesses to overlook it. 

Social media provides an excellent opportunity for brands to take their stories to a wider audience. What is required is to publish the content that resonates well with the users and inspires them to share, like, or comment.
But that is not it; social media users do not appreciate being ignored. They like an active brand that engages with them day in and day out. Hence second important pillar for social media management is your interaction with users. Social engagement has the power to touch people emotionally. Leveraged effectively, it can help you gain user’s trust and build lasting and mutually beneficial relationships.
 

What is social media engagement

The term social media engagement might include a broad range of actions across different social platforms. For example – 

• Likes and Favorites
• Comments 
• Direct messages and Replies
• Shares and Retweets
• Clicks
• Mentions

However, it is not just about likes or comments. It’s about establishing effective communication with users – exciting them with content, making them proud with the association, understanding their concerns, answering their questions – all of it. 
 

Each social media platform requires a different approach. For example, Facebook is ideal for targeting the masses and spark more informal discussions. Whereas LinkedIn is a platform for building professional connections and spreading business awareness. Your social media strategy, content, and engagement should cater to the needs of your social audience in a particular channel. 
Your engagement should also reflect the sensitivity of the conversation. E.g., a user expressing interest in a specific product vs. a customer expressing dissatisfaction with the brand may need different engagement tactics.
Another crucial thing is to continuously analyze your social media engagement to measure if your strategy and your content are working as per your expectations. The insights can tell you about the success of your content. The engagement rate, reach, the share of voice are all critical KPIs and can help you further tune your publishing and engagement strategy.
 

Why should you care

The power of social media publishing and engagement is well understood, but how does it assist you in your business?

Boosts brand awareness – Building a good brand image can go a long way in establishing a successful business. A larger community of followers might mean more people becoming aware of your brand story. When they interact with the content, the message spreads to their own follower, leading to more visibility and an even bigger audience pool for you.

Build Trust  – If new users visit your page for the first time and witness a vast fan base of a happy audience, they feel more confidents about the product. Engagement helps you building a community of satisfied users boosting trust in your brand. 

Widen user base – One of your objectives is to widen your user base –  not just with anybody but with people interested in your product and  brand. Social media is a perfect platform for this and can attract viewers interested in your brand and story, leading to widening the user base.
 

Create Global Reach – Social media makes it super easy to reach prospects residing in a different part of the world. With the right social engagement approach, a brand could engage with the global user – showcase products, answer queries and convert more users to customers. 

Save Cost– Organic social media is a free platform. That means it doesn’t cost a thing to make your message reach your followers and their network (follower’s follower).  Thus a single person retweeting or sharing the content could get to thousands of people virtually with no cost.  

Tools to make your job easy

As easy as it may sound, social media engagement comes with its own set of challenges.  Managing so many different social media channels, topics, messages, user activities can get overwhelming, especially if you have a significant fan base. But there are tools loaded with capabilities to simplify your job.  Tools such as Social Pilot, Hootsuite, Buffer Help you streamline your operations.  Read on to know how these tools help.

Stay on top of topics – Cross Channel Dashboard
You don’t want to miss out on any important trending event that is related to your business. These events can be an excellent opportunity to make your stand known,  propagate your brand values,  build a user base, or even convert users to customers. 
But how do you keep a tab on what is happening across different social channels? One option is to manually keep scouting for topics of your interest by flipping the social channel. Another easy way out is to leverage tools that provide you the capability to monitor trends through a single dashboard — simplifying your job of engaging with the users.

Ensure timely response to all incoming message – Single Inbox
Answering numerous queries coming through many different social media channels can be a daunting task. Responding to each of them through the individual social interface can be tiring. How about having a single inbox to get to know all the incoming messages in one interface?
The single inbox feature can help you keep a tab on messages, respond quickly to select messages, and ensure that you don’t miss any critical user communication. 

.Allocate work and tap expertise – Team Collaboration
How do you distribute the social engagement workload to your teams? Who manages what channel? Who responds to what comment? Many tools come with collaboration features, making distribution of workload easy, be it single channel or multiple channels. It also allows you to loop in the right team member to respond to an inquiry, ensuring your user’s queries are answered promptly and satisfactorily.

Leverage Automation  – Chatbots
Chatbots can be a great way to manage the workload of routine communication and inquiries, freeing your valuable time. These chatbots are equipped to or hand over the contact to a social cell executive for an in-person response, ensuring you do not lose personal touch for valuable engagement opportunities.