10 Social Media Management Tips for Success
A strong social media strategy is a natural part of a content marketing strategy — but social media management can be an elaborate process without the right tools, strategies and processes in place. With online users spending approximately 151 minutes on social media in 2023, social is a prime opportunity to generate brand awareness, engagement and drive traffic.
What’s more, managing social media can look different depending on your organization and brands. Depending on a slew of factors from buyer personas and broader marketing goals to everything else, your social team might have different needs to achieve their goals. However, there are in fact some basic social media management tips that every team should know, whether they plan to implement them or not.
This blog explores:
- What is social media management?
- Why is social media management important?
- Why are social media management tools important?
- Social media management tips.
- Best social media management tools.
- Most popular Dash Hudson social media marketing management tools.
What Is Social Media Management?
Broadly, social media management is the act of strategizing, planning, producing and reporting on social media content on various social platforms. Some more common, specific actions of social media management include:
- Community management: Responding to comments and queries on social and escalating when necessary.
- Brand reputation management: Using strategic actions to shape and maintain their brand, and build a positive reputation.
- Paid strategy: Producing paid ads across social channels.
- Content creation: Designing, ideating, writing and creating content to share on social.
What Is a Social Media Management Tool For?
The beauty of a social media management tool is that it doesn’t have one specific purpose. Any suitable tool will have a wide array of products and features that you can utilize for exactly what your brand’s social channels need. Typically, most social media planning software will provide some variation of a link-in-bio feature, aid in scheduling content, gather analytics on post performance and act as an organizational tool for valuable assets. Tools that go above and beyond will take your insights one step further with features that measure ROI, campaign performance and use visual AI to predict how your audience may receive content.
The most important aspect of a social network management tool is that it offers an easy-to-use solution to the problems your social channels may be facing.
Why Are Social Media Management Tools Important?
Social media has become one of the most powerful marketing tools a brand can have. Because of this, it’s important to have software that supports and empowers brand owners with the right kinds of data to help measure ROI and increase revenue. Without a social media management tool, brands only have access to the very limited capabilities and analytics that live within the native social media platform. While these analytics are helpful, they are also very basic. A social community management tool can help add context to insights, instead of just supplying data with no actionable takeaways.
10 Social Media Management Tips
Whether you’re just starting your social media management strategy or are already entrenched in your plan, these tips will help you refine and perfect your management strategy.
1. Set SMART Goals
If you’ve ever read any resource on social media management, you’re likely familiar with SMART goals — but it’s worth repeating. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Yes, it would be nice to set a goal to earn 1 million followers in your week of a new account, but this is likely not attainable and will only result in disappointment. If your goal is to increase your engagement by 10%, you’ll likely want to tailor your management strategy to tactics that support engagement, and tools with features that specifically speak to engagement.
Your goals will inform your entire management strategy, so it’s important to define these in order to finalize the rest of your plan.
2. Find Your Target Audience
Determining your target demographic is extremely helpful when it comes to crafting your strategy. For example, if you plan to target 19-25-year-olds, it won’t make sense to focus all your efforts on Facebook. While it can be easy to want to target everyone, this doesn’t make for an effective or strategic plan. Having a solid idea of your target demographic — and going a step further to create a persona — will help you create the right content, target the right trends and more.
Here are some key questions to consider when determining your target audience:
- Who’s your current audience and which demographics do they fall into?
- What content do they engage most with?
- Use a Social Listening tool to discover what this demographic says about your brand — and competitors.
3. Determine Responsibilities
While it might sound like common sense, determining who owns and is responsible for different aspects of your social plan results in a smoother process and less confusion and noise down the road. Keep a chart or list in your social strategy or planning documents that details who will support specific actions in the social management process. You’ll want to predetermine who’s responsible for:
- Creating and updating a content calendar — bonus points for figuring out how early you want to map out content.
- Developing creative assets.
- Writing and approving copy.
- Managing community — who replies to comments, direct messages and more.
- Who’s responsible for implementing a crisis communication plan if necessary, and any relevant stakeholders that should be included in the process.
4. Create a Content Calendar
An essential social management tool is a social media content calendar. This allows you to map out content early, and visualize when content is scheduled for different campaigns, product launches, events and more. This is a great tool to align your whole team and keep your content on track — plus, it’s perfect to quickly assess everything you have going out on social in one centralized location.
5. Incorporate Social Into Your Crisis Communication Plan
It’s quite possible your organization already has a crisis communication plan — and if you don’t, you should. What’s more, social media should absolutely be included in your plan. A social response plan will determine what messaging or tone you’d like to use for different events (for example, how you’ll approach a product recall or issue with a brand ambassador), who should be included in relevant discussions and which team members are responsible for sharing internal or external information. Determining this early prevents you from scrambling if a crisis does rear its head.
6. Schedule Content Early
Using a Scheduler to plan your content ahead of time lets you share content during the best times to post, which is great if your audience is active during your off-hours or live in different time zones. Scheduling content also gives you more space to be agile — whether this is reposting UGC, sharing a trending meme or any other in-the-moment content, you and your team can fill in the gaps without scrambling to reorganize your calendar.
7. Incorporate UGC and Repurposed Content
Scheduling your content gives you more time to focus on other things — like pulling from your best user-generated content. If it’s the right fit for your brand voice and feed, don’t be afraid to go beyond liking and commenting on great UGC — share it to your account. UGC that performs well can also be a great indication of a potential influencer or creator partnership for your brand.
Free People Movement (@fpmovement) is a great example of a brand that incorporates UGC into their TikTok strategy by partnering with a plethora of brand ambassadors and creators to show their products in action.
8. Revisit Strategy Periodically
It’s important to revisit your strategy periodically. This doesn’t mean jumping whenever a single piece of content doesn’t perform to your expectations — however, if you notice a certain format of Reels doesn’t perform well over a month, for example, you might want to re-strategize your Reels format, or even A/B test this format with another style.
What’s more, you should revisit your content marketing strategy at a cadence that makes sense for your organization and team. Aside from product launches and campaigns, it’s good to look at current trends, emerging mediums and your buyer personas quarterly or biannually to ensure your visual content doesn’t become stale and resonates with your audience. For example, perhaps your target demographic has become more active on TikTok since you last looked at your buyer personas — revisiting your strategy ensures you never miss a content opportunity.
9. Source The Right Social Media Management Tools
There’s a wide range of social media management tools on the market, but it’s important to select a tool that works for your organization, goals and team. Some non-negotiables usually include built-in analytics, a scheduling tool and a content calendar — and it’s important that these tools work for the social channels you plan to use in your social strategy. If your social strategy involves developing a new creative style, you might want to select a tool like Vision AI that predicts what visuals from your content library have the best chance to successfully perform.
10. Don’t Set It and Forget It
Don’t just plan and disseminate content without revisiting it — dive into your analytics to figure out which content performs best, when content gets the most engagement, which platforms drive the most conversions and any other performance metrics that pertain to your goals. Without refining your strategy as time goes on, you’re producing work that might not be fruitful when it comes to reaching your goals.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Business
Dash Hudson is a social entertainment marketing software for the world’s most important brands. Beyond intuitive tools and solutions for the most popular social channels in the world, Dash Hudson is also known for providing a best-in-class experience to all users. No matter their size and scope. Here is a breakdown of what you can expect in your experience with Dash Hudson:
Dash Hudson Plans and Pricing
A great social network management tool is not one size fits all. Because of this, Dash Hudson pricing and packages have been developed for different types of brands and their hyper-specific needs:
Grow
The Grow Plan by Dash Hudson is essential for growing brands. Access the most necessary tools like link-in-bio for Instagram and TikTok, scheduling and publishing, multi-channel analytics, and trending sounds for TikTok.
Engage
In addition to the features within the Grow Plan, the Engage Plan is a suite a multi-channel tools that connects brands to their community. Sentiment analysis, community management and content segmentation boards are just a few of the features brands will have access to with this package.
Advance
The Advance Plan does exactly what it says: advances your social strategy with powerful insights and tools. Brands will have access to all of the features within the Engage Plan, while additionally receiving visual trends, reports and dashboards, CX integrations and UGC capabilities.
Enterprise
The Enterprise Plan is an exclusive, customizable solution for Enterprise brands. Exclusive landscape and industry benchmark insights, custom roadmap for top qualified customers and dedicated support are just a few of the unique features brands receive on top of the features within the Advance Plan.
And that isn’t all. There are additional solutions like Social Listening and Premium Analytics that brands can use to customize their plan even further.
If you’re not sure which plan is right for you, request a demo with the Dash Hudson team to find the perfect fit.
Supported Social Channels
Dash Hudson prides itself on working with the most popular social media platforms in the world. Brands who use Dash Hudson can expect to gain in-depth analytics and insights for the following channels:
Most Popular Features
What helps a social media management software tool stand out from the rest is by providing two things:
1. First-class versions of standard features.
2. Unique products that cannot be easily duplicated anywhere else.
Dash Hudson is known for providing best-in-class solutions for both such as:
LikeShop
LikeShop is a link-in-bio solution that bridges the gap between your social media channels and your site. No longer do users have to wonder how to find or buy your products. With LikeShop, you can choose and track the customer journey from post to purchase in a few easy clicks.
Vision
This AI-powered feature collects and analyzes your brand’s library of content to identify top-performing posts and give real-time feedback on which photos or videos to use in future posts for the best results. Vision takes the guessing game out of post performance by telling you exactly what resonates with your audience.
Multi-Channel Scheduler
A multi-channel scheduler grants teams full transparency in their content planning process. Within Scheduler, users can see all their scheduled assets in one place, and tag team members on individual posts. This streamlines content creation by giving teams the ability to write copy, schedule posts and gain approval from leadership all from inside the tool.
And to take your posts to the next level, Vision is fully integrated into Scheduler, meaning users will be able to see predictions of post performance right within their content calendar.
Campaign Reporting
Campaign reporting is a solution that helps uncover valuable data from within your cross-channel campaigns. Track insights, and see which creative is driving success. Understanding the ROI on channels, creative and relationships have never been this simple. This is an all-encompassing feature that unlocks the ability to leverage specific insights to drive revenue.
Additional Products
Beyond the useful features mentioned above, Dash Hudson also offers social analytics and monitoring, community, boards, dashboards, relationships, and embeddable media galleries. Each of these products provides the solutions to unique problems that brands face when it comes to navigating their social networks.
FAQs
How much does Dash Hudson cost?
Dash Hudson pricing starts as low as $249/month for growing brands with the opportunity to expand to larger packages costing $749/month, $1,249/month and $2,499/month. Additional Premium Solutions are also available for an additional cost.
What are the best social media management tools?
This is also dependent on what you’re looking for. The fun thing about social media management software tools is that each one usually has a specialty that they excel in providing to brands and customers. Dash Hudson offers a unique feature called Vision, that predicts future post-performance based on previous data and similar posts. A social network management tool like Buffer is known for excellent scheduling capabilities, while Later boasts an impressive Link in bio feature. Sprout Social is another social media management tool and it offers social listening as a special feature.
The best social media management tool for business is always going to be the one that best satisfies your brand’s needs.
Does Google have a social media management tool?
No. While Google does not offer a social network management tool, they do offer multiple integrations like Google My Business (GMB), Google Analytics and Google Drive that can be connected to multiple platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Are social media management tools worth it?
In short, yes. If you want to truly have the ability to track even the most minute details of your social media, a social media management software tool is a must.
How do free social media management tools differ from paid tools?
While there’s a slew of great free social media management tools, paid tools typically contain fewer restrictions, more customization and freedom to post on as many social channels as the tool supports. For example, many free social media management tools restrict how many posts you can schedule, or which channels you can post to — they also often have limited analytics. While these free tools can be useful to schedule a small number of posts, a robust strategy — and a larger organization require a tool with full functionality to properly measure and report on success in a timely manner.
