Managing Social Media

For Immediate Release:

Wilmington, NC – The web design experts at webworks89 recently dug deeper into the importance of social media profiles for businesses and the different ways to properly manage content.

Our modern flow of news and information makes for a frenetic tempo and it’s vital for your business to keep up with the steady beat of this drum. By properly utilizing social media profiles, your company can establish a rhythm and begin to tap into markets with customers that may have been previously unreachable or disinterested. Rather than giving the spiel of why a social presence is critical, this article aims to teach businesses how to manage these profiles with accuracy.

These social media platforms dominate the culture in which we live today. Many older, more traditional forms of marketing, such as newspapers or phonebooks, have become outdated. As a result business owners have turned their attentions to building their brands via social media. The ways to take advantages of these outlets are endless and the results can be perpetual.

To properly manage a social media page, a manager must know how to reflect a company’s brand so that they may connect with their target audience. By pinpointing a target demographic you can post more effectively and cater to consumer appetites. The more profiles a business has, the more likely it is to reach a larger audience. However, there are various differences among these social media channels to take into consideration.

Let’s start with the granddaddy of social media, Facebook. Facebook is a free marketing tool that can give your business a voice. It should contain your company’s website, location and all other contact information. Each Facebook page is indexed by Google and by loading your description with key words that reflect your company’s brand, your page will be more discoverable via Google searches. Facebook should be a fun, informative environment. Anything relevant that might capture the attention of your target audience should be posted. You’ll want to include fun posts that promote dialogue and ideally get shared by other users, extending the reach of your page. Facebook offers a Boost and Promote feature that gives managers the option to disseminate a post. This enhances the chance of your post appearing on a user’s news feed. Managers can pinpoint demographic features like age, gender as well as users interests to ensure that their post gets to where it needs to be. This is a paid feature and accordingly, the more you pay, the more people your post will reach.

Twitter is the other old-timer in the social media realm. This Titan has challenged Facebook and created a healthy competition by presenting a new angle of attack for users. Twitter limits the amount of characters to 140 per post, making for a sphere of declarative sentences. The Hash-tag was an innovative idea that really excelled Twitter going forward during a time that Facebook seemingly had a monopoly on social media. This feature allows for any users tweet to trend and be discoverable through searches of that hash-tag. Now businesses can create a tweet, insert a hash-tag and reach any user that is interested in that conversation. This promotional feature is free and should be utilized as much as possible, especially due to the short life span of tweets. About 92% of engagement will happen within the first hour of the tweet.  This gives page managers the ability to post more often without having an overkill of posts. Knowing when to tweet is also another factor for these managers to weigh in on. A study by @DanZarrella discovered that the best time of the week is Wednesday around 5 pm, but given the short lifespan, any week day is a good day to tweet.

These two trailblazers cleared the path for new social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Linked-In, Tumblr just to name a few. Sometimes it can be difficult in deciding if adding these platforms to your business is necessary and beneficial. The simple answer is yes. Someone out there is always interested and though it may seem futile, these pages can still be productive no matter how striking your product may or may not be.

Due to the rise in variations of social media profiles, more companies have begun to hire designated social media strategists. This decision can ease the pressure off of business owners who may not have the time or the savviness to properly manage these accounts.

A good social media manager is someone who thinks outside the box. You’ll want them to be able to write and post creatively so that your brand is reflected in a unique way. These managers should be attentive to growing trends and current events so that your page adapts to what’s relevant. By being able to provide real-time responses, these managers can make your business more devoted to the community. This is especially crucial for smaller businesses that advertise local events, keeping the public engaged through your page. Large companies that receive a lot of traffic will likely require of team of social media strategists that can focus on the different aspects of all pages and profiles. Scheduled posts can be administered to simplify the process for operators of these busy pages.

For smaller businesses with stretched budgets, deciding if it’s worth hiring this position can seem like a big leap.

About 71% of social media managers have between 1-4 years of experience, 62% are female and the average salary range lies between $34,000 and $56,000. Given this
data, many of these candidates are young and eager to prove themselves. If you decide to hire someone, make sure they understand how you want your brand reflected. Lay out guidelines of their duties and what you expect from them. It may take some time to build a profile and that’s okay. Too much too quick is not the solution for building a following. Having said that, you want your page active in order to cast a net out and reel in more followers. Over time you can track your page results as each platform you use has its own analytics in place to track the effectiveness of your profile. Important factors to track on your page or post are- reach, views, likes (favorites), shares (retweets) and added friends or followers. By having fiscal results presented to you, it becomes easier to determine whether it makes sense financially for you to employ this position going forward.

Whether you decide to work social media yourself or hire someone else, your company should have a tenacious social presence. With new species of platforms constantly arising, there is no point in putting your company at risk for social extinction.

Written by, Ryan Shearer

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