11 Popular Social Media Management Tips for 2020

Owing to the constant developments in the technological field, the world is now connected through a plethora of devices. Almost every type and size of business use social media marketing on a daily basis. Although the initial process—inclusive of signing up creating accounts, and so on—may seem easy, the detailed structure that needs to be followed can be quite complicated. 

As per a study by Ambassador, around 71% of consumers who have had a good social media experience with a brand’s service are likely to recommend it to others. This helps prove how having a responsive and engaging social media profile can enhance the marketing structure for your company and drive up the traffic to your website.

In this article, we list some of the popular social media management strategies for 2020 that can help your company perform increasingly well in today’s competitive market.

What is social media management?

Social media management includes the process of creating, scheduling, and analyzing content to be published on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Companies should ensure to create an engaging environment for their followers and work towards generating newer leads and increasing the number of customers who interact with your brand. You can hire the services of a social media manager or a social media management agency to go about this process and help enhance or improve your brand’s image and reach. 

Social media management requires time and investment. Carefully analyzing industry-specific trends and creating content that would reach out to your audience and help showcase your products and services to a larger group. There are some tips to help in your social media management efforts that you can follow in order to help you save time and improve the overall marketing results.

Tips and strategies to help manage social media

Establish campaign goals: When creating a social media marketing strategy, managers have to establish their campaign goals and what their success would mean for their brand. For effective social media management, you must ensure to take the time to lay down your goals and be as specific as possible and determine the ways through which these goals will be achieved.

Basically, your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and be quite timely. The more you work towards letting your plans follow these factors, the more likely you will be to acquire better results. Some common examples of good and bad campaign goals that could enhance or hamper your campaign efforts:

• Good example: Increase website traffic by around 20% within a quarter/Bad example: To drive website traffic without any set goals.
• Good example: Increase customer engagement by 30% in around 2 months/Bad example: Be more socially involved.

The above-cited examples help you understand that setting vague campaign goals will not provide a direction but will hinder any processes as there are no specific goals or a timeline set.

Have a plan of action: Your social media management strategy, as with everything else, should include a detailed plan of action. Moreover, establishing certain parameters including how often you plan to post per day and how should your brand’s voice be perceived by existing and new customers.

Your content marketing plan should be determined by the trending keywords and your target audience’s needs. You should ensure to check the type of content that is in demand and gets multiple click conversions; however, if you are experimenting with a certain type of content and are unable to achieve the desired results, you plan of action should include immediate solutions that can help repair any lost time.

Moreover, you should ensure to engage with your audience and create conversations rather than indulging in self-promotion as the latter may make your brand seem more braggy and may not persuade customers to engage with your website. Therefore, it is important to determine what content you will add to your website and the way you will approach it. When you provide a personal touch to your audience, they would prefer interacting with your brand and even market for you through shares and word-of-mouth.

When you create a social media-friendly culture within your company by designing an internal strategy, your entire social team will be motivated to help promote your brand image and increase conversations. This will help enhance your social media management strategies manifold.

Know the channels that your audience prefers: There are many social media platforms available on the Internet. And, in order to properly manage your time and effectively create a reliable campaign, you should identify and choose the platforms on which your ideal and existing customers use the most. 

You can start by using pre-existing analytics, conducting research, performing surveys, and monitor online conversations. Social media management tools allow you to do all of this and much more as per your needs. You will be able to make an informed decision using data-driven analytics which will help you understand which platforms to focus on and identify the type of content that will be beneficial for your audience.

Focus on quality output: It is always important to have a constant output of different types of content. However, it is important to have quality posts on your websites. Moreover, just to fulfill your content expectations, it is important not to publish any low-quality or unreliable articles. An unreliable article would have the potential to instantly hamper your brand’s image. You should ensure to post content that is good enough to be liked and shared across colleagues and industries. Although this may just be easier said than done, with a few tips, using the right tools, and with effective management of your social media platforms, you will be able to give your audience what they need. 

It is important to note that all types of content will not get the same amount of reach and may not provide the same number of traffic to your website. Some may trend on search engine rank pages (SERPs) for only a week or so and disappear, while others may last for weeks on end. This makes it essential to continuously keep checking trends and monitor any future changes in order to effectively produce content that will be relevant and promote efficient social media management. For example, if you have recently started up a cleaning service in the UAE and are trying to acquire a name for your brand, you can use efficient tools and focus on pay-per-click or PPC advertisements or other methods to show up on relevant pages. 

When it comes to quality, you can consider this example—if someone writes a post with incorrect grammar, many typos, and no sources or interactive formats, would you prefer to interact or even click on it? Allowing such a post to go up online could instantly spread negative ratings about the credibility of your brand.

Analyze data to find the right quantity
Quantity is just as important as quality. You must ensure staying and in the present and working to fulfill the needs of your target audience to stay updated in the everchanging world of social media. This is especially true for websites such as Twitter. It has been found that the customer engagement rate increased by around 46% every week after a company published around 30 more tweets than the prior week. This is beneficial in a variety of ways and helps increase the website traffic by around 30% with around 60% more clicks.

Nowadays, with organic reach continuing to decrease, posting more often is one popular way to help get your website to get more clicks. Depending on the demand and the trending topics, reposting your content about different types of blog posts will help gain the attention your website will need. You can post your opinions and posts based on the trending keywords for the day. This will help you increase your website’s engagement rate and help generate more followers. However, you should ensure to not spam people as this will work negatively for you.

Be polite and charming: What goes around, comes back around. And even though the Justin Timberlake hit may be playing in your head right now, but it holds true for every situation both online and in real life. You may have come across instances of both companies being polite to their customer reviews or comments and even with them being rude. The former only helps enhance a company’s reputation and increase the number of followers, while the latter is of no use at all and can cost companies time and money to help rebuild their image. Therefore, you must ensure to engage with people politely and they will engage back.

Polite engagement will increase the instances of people liking and sharing your posts and even recommending your business to others. Sometimes, one of the biggest challenges could be finding content to post and tweet about. One efficient way to get past this is by using social media management tools that will send alerts to your inbox whenever a keyword that you have selected is posted online. This can help you comment or personally thank the user or agency who has helped promote your keywords online. This will help promote efficient social media management.

Another great resource would be websites that will provide regular feeds so you can access your favorite blogs in one specific space. Moreover, there are also other websites that can suggest original content that has not been viewed by your audience yet.

Provide a personal experience: People have a higher tendency to follow accounts of businesses that help provide a personal experience for their customers. Any queries or grievances that customers may have, replying using a personal touch will help them feel that they are being heard and are not being dealt with an automated bot. A social media manager can even start by finding any disgruntled customers and resolving their issues.

According to Adobe’s 2020 Digital Trends, around 86% of buyers will pay more for better customer experience. This puts emphasis on the need to invest more in enhancing customer experience. You can use various ways when interacting with customers; but, it is important to reply politely even if the customer is extremely dissatisfied. Having an interactive experience with social media platforms will help increase traffic to your website greatly.

Use content scheduling tools: It can be intensely difficult to manually conduct social media management. It can be tiresome to manually post more than 20 times per day. If you’re unsure when to post articles and the time that can generate the most engagement, social media management tools are here to the rescue! 

Some of the benefits of using social media management tools, besides helping you save time, include the ability to auto-schedule your content posts when your account is most likely to see higher levels of customer engagement. This can be a great help for your social media management team. You can various tools such as Hootsuite, Hubspot, Buffer, and so on, that can help you achieve the desired results.

Using content scheduling tools for social media management can fulfill your content requirements and meet the needs of your audience. This can help your website increase its rankings on SERPs (search engine ranking pages) and drive up the traffic.

Automate tasks with IFTTT: The If This, Then That, or IFTTT, can help you set up simple commands that will link different applications to automatically perform certain actions if required. For example, if the weather app notifies that there will be a high UV index or a dust storm, then a reminder to put on sunscreen or use appropriate protective equipment will be triggered. As for your social platforms, if your blog publishes new content, then a post could be sent to your followers on different websites. 

Such platforms can be leveraged to the fullest in order to automate repetitive tasks and can help you save time performing mundane tasks.

Use social media analytic tools: Social media analytic tools are quite important for effective social media management. These tools provide accurate data including how many people are seeing your posts and engaging with your websites. This can help you take timely decisions to help create a creation and publishing calendar. There are many social media metrics available in the market today. These social media management tools can help you analyze various factors that will help you enhance or make changes to your current social media management plans that will, in turn, aid in engaging with followers and increasing your follower count. Using analytic tools for social media management is beneficial in a variety of ways and one of them is creating efficient marketing campaigns.

Similar to traditional marketing, social media management should be undertaken with a keen eye on data analysis. Popular social media platforms—such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest—offer analytics that show the increase in follower count, engagement levels, popular posts, and more. Moreover, websites such as Google Analytics show you sources of your website traffic, inclusive of organic and social traffic, This is extremely useful in identifying the platforms that will help your content perform well. Advanced marketing software, such as HubSpot, combine such features and help you create a holistic marketing campaign for your business. Using such tools and tracking your data will not only allow you to check your progress but also help you identify if there are any weaknesses and strengths in your social media management plan.

Know when to outsource your social media management: Social media management is a full-time job that can often require the services of more than one person depending on the size of your business. In order to ensure that you manage your accounts effectively, hiring the services of a social media management agency will be beneficial in the long run. An agency can provide the services of an entire social media team—including content strategies, graphic designers, copywriters, content curators, and even traffic specialists—that will cost considerably less than hiring a single full-time employee. 

Before you finalize an agency to manage your social media, it is important to determine the goals and requirements you have and now where your brand could require any improvements. This will help the social media management agency, that you choose, to understand your needs. Whether it is not enough posts or audience engagement or generating sales leads, a social media management agency will help you overcome these hurdles.

These social media management tips can help you focus on enhancing your marketing strategies. In the following, we mention some social media management trends that you can expect to see in 2020.

Social media trends to focus in 2020

Ephemeral content will dominate: With time, the way people consume content changes. One popular type that is increasingly dominating the social sphere is ephemeral content (content that is available for a limited time—Instagram or Snapchat Stories). Despite its limited time, social media users love it. The combination of short length and engaging content makes an addictive mix that let people scroll through such stories for hours. According to a recent report by Hootsuite, around 64% of marketers either already use or intend to start using Instagram Stories in the future. If you have not invested in using ephemeral content, you can consider using it now.

Video content will be highly preferred: According to a study by Cisco, by 2022, about 82% of all online content will be video-based. This helps provide an insight into the importance of video for your social media strategy. People are lesser inclined to read texts as compared to video content. From long-form videos on YouTube to short and engaging videos that are popular on Stories and TikTok, you can choose the one that fits the needs of your business best. Incorporating them into your social media management strategy can help you gain an advantage over your competitors who do not use video-based content.

Social listening: In today’s technologically-advanced world, social media gives companies a platform to create a presence for people to follow. You can reach out to your audiences and even acquire new leads through social listening. This process involves tracking any mentions of your brand and any keywords or topics related to your business and engaging with customers who are part of the discussion. If you find any mentions by disgruntled customers or customers with queries, you can proactively resolve their issues and build a better brand image.

Instagram will get rid of likes: Instagram is looking to eliminate the Likes feature in the future. The company has stated that they are choosing to take this step to help promote better mental health and use of the social platform. This is expected to have an effect on businesses that heavily rely on influencer marketing as the removal of likes will not allow businesses to track their return on investment. This will make marketers look for other ways to promote their brands.

Niche platforms will continue to gain popularity: For the longest time, social media giants such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have dominated the world of social media. However, in recent times, niche social media platforms are gaining popularity. These applications do not always try and compete with the social giants but offer unique features to attract a niche group of audience. A few examples include TikTok (which is largely popular among the youth), Twitch (which is popular among gamers), and LinkedIn (which is popular among the business community). This trend is likely to gain popularity among a wider range of audiences. 

Enhance your marketing strategy

Your social media management strategy should focus on tips, like the ones mentioned in this article, to be able to leverage all resources to the fullest. Your ultimate goal should be providing your brand with the reach it needs and keep engaging with your existing community and work towards growing your follower base. Doing a consistent analysis of your data from reliable social management tools and focusing on the present and future trends can help you in the long-term. If you are unsure about where to start, availing the services of a social media management agency can also be highly beneficial.