It is always best practice to hire a professional social media manager to manage your business’s social media accounts. These people live and breathe social media, are highly skilled in what they do and know all the best practices for the various platforms.
Social media managers know what works and what doesn’t and they know how to fully engage your target audience with the correct content. Professional social media managers follow strategies and participate in social listening. They know how to brand and optimise your accounts and keep them consistently active. They also know how to build trust and loyalty with your audience, increasing followers, customers and ultimately, business growth.
With the results that professional social media managers achieve, you can be certain that they will be worth your investment.
Manage Your Own Social Media Accounts
You’ve weighed up all of your options and for whatever reason, you have decided to go it alone and manage your business’s social media accounts yourself. Here are the most important steps you should follow to manage them correctly and effectively:
- You will need to create a social media Strategy
You will need a Social Media Strategy that aligns with your overall business goals, to guide you in your online activities. It is your plan of action, designed to achieve your overall aim.
- Identify Your Ideal Client Avatar (ICA)
You will need to know what your ideal client looks like to be able to target them in your social media efforts.
- Consistent Accounts
All of your social media accounts need to be consistently branded and easily recognisable. Make sure your profile pictures are the same throughout and your descriptions/bios are similar, if not exact.
- SEO Optimised
Each platform prefers particular sized images, be sure you to use the correct sizes for each one. Use keywords that are relevant to your business industry in your text and use relevant hashtags where necessary. Certain platforms favour hashtags while others are not so keen, so again, be sure to follow each platforms best procedure. Also use keywords in the file names of your images and videos.
- Post Consistently
Consistency is key. It doesn’t matter if you post once per day or twice per week. What matters is that you post useful, informative and valuable content that is relevant to your industry and audience, and that you post it consistently.
- The 20/80 Rule
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make on social media is trying to sell repeatedly, without giving anything in return. You should never use social media just to try and sell.
Every business should follow the 80/20 Rule. 80% of your posts should inform, educate and entertain. Only 20% of your content should directly promote your business.
- Social Media Links
You should make sure you display links to all of your social media accounts on your business website and that your accounts provide links to each other.
Also include links to your social media accounts in your email signature.
- Analyse Your Results
Analysing your results is crucial so it’s extremely important that you take time to learn about them. You need to be able to analyse your results to track your progress and adjust accordingly.
Each platform provides their own analytics/insights tab with all business accounts. Some are more in-depth than others. You can also invest in various analytic tools that provide you with more options and features and allow you to analyse all of your accounts in one place. Some of the most popular ones being Google Analytics, Hootsuite and Buffer.
Final Thoughts
The best option for any business will always be to employ a professional social media manager to run your social media accounts effectively. They make it easy for potential and existing customers to find you and they establish your relevance and credibility as a business. They also give you back valuable time to get on with running your business, while they tell the world all about it.
If for whatever reason you still want or need to manage your own social media accounts, following these steps will help to set you up for success.