Managing ones’ social media presence – especially if there are multiple accounts involved or multiple team members – can present a lot of issues, from time management to proving ROI. So, how do you overcome these challenges? How can you get results without panicking on a daily basis that you tweeted the wrong thing, didn’t post enough updates or weren’t there to respond to a comment?
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the main challenges of managing your social media presence – and show you how to overcome them.
Challenge no. 1: Social media is a full-time job
And by full-time, I don’t mean 8 hours a day, 40 days a week; rather, it’s around the clock work. Of course, this depends a lot on your audience; but generally, you’re likely to have followers and audience members from all over the world and with all kinds of browsing habits – from early morning risers to night owls.
And if it’s just one person managing an account – or several, for that matter – it’s impossible to be awake and ready to engage at any moment, especially if your audience is also using your social platforms for customer service issues.
But, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty that you can do; here’s how to overcome this challenge:
How to overcome this challenge
The first step is to create a strategy and build your social media calendar ahead of time.
Think of what you want to achieve and of who you’re targeting and come up with at least a weeks’ worth of content ahead of time and schedule it.
That means you won’t have to create new content on a daily basis and that you can schedule your updates for maximum impact, which in turn gives you a lot more time to actually engage with people.
And use tools to help; social media scheduling has evolved a lot in recent years, and it’s not just a case of scheduling one-off updates anymore. You can now automatically share new content at optimum times without scheduling each one in turn and you can also easily re-share evergreen content automatically, as well as promote events, product launches, and other time-sensitive events automatically, without scheduling each promotional update.
Challenge no. 2: Collaborating
Often times when managing social media marketing – especially several accounts – even if it’s just one person managing, you’ll still need input and collaboration with others. It can be because you need approval before posting content, or because you’re working as part of a team, but whatever the case may be, it’s easy to create confusion and panic when you don’t have a clear system in place.
For example, if you have to gain approval before publishing anything on social media, it can cost you a lot of time and stress to get your content ready in time and get it approved, too. Not to mention, you want to have your bases covered – if someone complains about an update that was posted, you need to be able to demonstrate that it followed the right workflow and was approved by the right person.
How to overcome this challenge:
The easiest way to avoid any issues with collaborating on social media is to use a single tool that allows you to set up a social media workflow so you can assign tasks and see what everyone is doing at any given time.
Problems usually arise when you have to use multiple channels to collaborate – messaging, Skype, email, and so on. It makes it difficult to find the information you need and it’s also highly unproductive, as you’re likely to lose time using
Challenge no. 2: Calculating your social media ROI
Another common struggle is the ability to measure social media ROI – and show the value of your work.
While you can get plenty of social media analytics to demonstrate shares, likes, and overall engagement, it’s not as easy to actually demonstrate ROI and show how exactly social media marketing has helped the business grow.
How to overcome this challenge:
The first step is to set yourself clear objectives for your social media marketing, approved by the whole team. That’s how you demonstrate ROI – by establishing clear objectives and measuring your results to see whether you’ve achieved these goals or not.
When setting up goals, be very specific about what exactly you want to achieve and by when. For example, if you want to get more traffic from social media a proper objective will sound something like “generate 10% more traffic from Twitter in 30 days” – rather than a vague objective like “generate more traffic from social media”
The clearer and more specific you are when setting objectives, the easier they will be to measure.
When you set your goals, take the time to also establish exactly how you’re going to measure them; if your goal can’t be accurately measured, it might be worth looking into setting different objectives.
Useful tools that make social media management much easier:
Agorapulse
Works with: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that is perfect for those who work as part of a team, as well as for those who have a lot of different accounts to manage.
How does it help overcome social media management challenges?
For one, it allows you to fully manage all of your different accounts from one place – including monitoring your mentions and comments and publishing and scheduling updates.
Plus, you have access to a social media calendar where you can plan and visualize your social media strategy:
As well as several time-saving features, like setting up ‘common replies’ so you can reply to comments and mentions with one click, bulk uploading of updates from CSV files or from a website’s URL (to pull all of their latest content and schedule them), and queue categories which allow you to create multiple categories of content with their own time slot so that you can automatically share (and re-share) your updates.
In terms of collaboration features, you’ll be able to add multiple people to your plan so that you can assign tasks and mentions (and get assigned too), see at a glance what content needs approval, as well as see what actions were taken on any post, simply by hovering over the update.
ContentCal
Works with: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram
While the other 2 tools in this list are social media management tools, ContentCal is all about the planning and the collaborating.
How does it help overcome social media management challenges?
While ContentCal is a social media scheduling tool at first glance, it’s actually quite a bit more than what you usually get with regular scheduling tools.
The biggest appeal is that it’s great for planning and collaborating – scheduling is just an extra bonus.
You can set up multiple social media calendars to get started:
Then, simply start planning your content, save it as a draft to be approved later on, add it as placeholder to save it for later, or schedule it directly.
You can also add people to your account and easily set up a workflow; this way, everyone on the team knows exactly what they need to do and what they can’t do (they’ll be restricted to take certain actions based on their assigned role). Alternatively, you can even make it so only one person can approve and actually schedule posts – this way, you can avoid any issues as it’s very clear who is responsible for the updates posted on your social accounts.
Plus, you can also leave comments on each post and easily collaborate and discuss, all in the same place, so as to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
Sprout Social
Works with: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+
Sprout Social, like Agorapulse, is a full-suite social media management tool that allows you to fully manage your social media presence from one place, as well as collaborate with others.
How does it help overcome social media management challenges?
Like with any social media management tool, one of the biggest benefits is that it helps you save a lot of time managing your accounts – you won’t have to log in and out of several accounts every day, multiple times a day, but rather you can use the same dashboard to manage them all from one place.
Beyond managing your mentions and comments, you can also publish and schedule updates (and there is an evergreen queue as well for automating your updates – although no categories!) and easily find curated content to share with your audience quickly:
You’ll also be able to add other people to help manage your accounts; this way, you’ll be able to track tasks more easily and efficiently and see exactly how your teammates performed.
Conclusion
Social media management can present a lot of challenges – but they are easily overcome if you take the time to create a strategy and use the right tools to help.
What challenges have you faced with managing social media? What are your favourite tools to help and why?
