It can be difficult to keep track of messages across all social media platforms, especially if you have multiple accounts. The complexity of social media is increasing as user expectations rise. Users are increasingly relying on social media as a customer support channel and are expecting brands to respond quickly.
For people who manage social media for multiple clients across different platforms, it can be hard to keep track of messages, comments, and brand mentions. Additionally, social media managers need to adapt their language and messaging to the brands they are managing and the social media platform being used. This can become an incredibly complex balancing act.
Social media can be a powerful tool for driving conversions, especially during marketing campaigns. If you don’t respond to messages on social media in a way that furthers the conversation, you could be missing out on opportunities to connect with people or make sales. Therefore it pays (literally) to do it right.
Even if social media is usually seen as a relaxed way to communicate, customer service on social media should be the same as it is on any other channel, for example email, phone, or writing a letter.
Social networks can be a key point of contact for brands and help funnel customers to conversion. Here are some tips on how to effectively manage your social media presence and messages.
Why is Managing Your Social Media Messages So Important?
It is important to effectively manage your social media presence. This is often referred to as community management. These days are gone when companies only received one social media query per week. Customers now prefer to contact them through social media instead of other means.
Small businesses are able to receive a lot of queries and even if they don’t yet, the queries they do receive could be important. People who are already using social networks are often ready to be converted. Around one third of people who are thinking about making a purchase use social media to ask questions first, so it can be beneficial to provide support through these channels.
Customer expectations for brands are very high. People expect companies to be responsive on social media, providing customer service that is both fast and professional.
A positive social media brand experience can lead to a lot of good things. Most consumers who have had a positive interaction with a brand on social media are more likely to recommend that brand to others.
Don’t forget to also consider your other customer service channels when making your decision. Social media should be treated no differently. If you have a social media channel that’s not being used or you rarely get messages, this next part is for you!
Social Media Analytics Tool Options and what you Get
Popular analytics tools include tools like Fan Page Karma, and Quintly on the less expensive end, offer simplified free versions, with paid versions that start at about $130 per month. Some tools that cost around $500 per month are Simply Measured, Unmetric, Nuvi, and Hootsuite UberVu. As you add more users, capabilities, and features, the tools you use become more sophisticated. There are many other companies in this field, we can’t list them all.
Reason 1: Competitive Benchmarking
Competitor analysis is essential for any business looking to succeed in the digital age. Being able to see what your competitors are doing on social media gives you a big advantage. This text discusses how you can discover strategic information about a company by analyzing the messaging they use. You can view client responses and interactions to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. This means that you can use the information to improve your product or service in comparison to others on the market, take advantage of opportunities where there are gaps in service, or target specific groups of people who would be interested in your brand.
Reason 2: Centralized Analytics
When all your analytics are in the same place, you’ll save both time and money. This statement is obvious, but its potential impact is huge. By looking at analytics for social media accounts and Google Analytics, someone would spend an hour and 10 minutes a week. Having all the data you need in one place can help you complete a review in half the time. The tools can save you a lot of time, depending on the size of your brand and community. They are the most effective way to monitor your brand.
Reason 3: Optimize your Content Plan
Investing in social media analytics tools helps you optimize your content. This something that can be done on a spreadsheet, but most people don’t because it would take too much time. If you want to do it manually, you need to keep track of when you post, what kind of posts you make, and then look at the platform’s analytics to see how far your posts reach, how often they’re shared or liked, and how many comments they get. This means that you would have to complete this process for each individual social media platform and then examine all of the data that you have gathered.
Some social media managers who don’t have access to analytics tools insist that they can still determine what their audience likes and what content is successful or not. Although it is easy to see what content is most popular and what gets no engagement, it is more difficult to see more nuanced patterns. The content may not be successful because it is not good. although it might be good content, it might have been posted at the wrong time or on the wrong network.
By tracking and charting content metrics, you can gain insights into which topics or types of content generate the most engagement.
Reason 5: Better Reporting
If you’re a social media manager, you’ll find that a lot of people will ask for reports, and a lot of those requests will end up on your to-do list. Most social media analytics software have reporting capabilities built in, which is a major advantage.
How to decide when to invest in dedicated social media tools
Much of the information gathered by social media analytics tools can also be obtained by exporting or documenting information from each social media network’s analytics pages. Tasks that are more complex can be done by hand. It just takes time. An organization may choose to invest in analytics tools for a variety of reasons. Here are a few:
- If managers have asked for data backed reports but your social media team has difficulty collecting the data, charting it, or complains that doing that manual analysis and preparing the reports takes too much time.
- If your social media team used to provide good data backed analysis and reports, but, since hitting a certain number of followers, social networks, or content pieces published has been unable to keep up.
- If the social media team provides good data for each social media network individually, but has difficulty providing cross channel analysis.
- If managers have questions about reach, engagement, conversation share, or other fairly common social media metrics that the current social media reports don’t answer.
- If the social media team has trouble connecting the dots between social media activities and web site traffic and activities.
- If the social media team is unable to provide real data and numbers to show social media Return on Investment (ROI) and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
Every organization has different needs and must make their own decision. When you think it might be time to invest in dedicated social media analtyics tools follow this process:
- Define problems you want the tools to solve
- Select multiple tools in your budget range that can monitor social media networks critical to your business
- Use free trials to evaluate different tools and see which one works best
How to Manage Social Media Messages – Even on Multiple Platforms
When you have systems that run smoothly, your work will flow more smoothly and you can be sure that you won’t miss any important questions or comments from users, especially during a big marketing campaign. It’s also critical in crisis situations. Although things may be going well at the moment, what will happen when a social media post causes a negative press story, one of your influencers does something bad, or there is a problem with one of your products? There are bound to be a few issues that come up in the future, even if they’re not major. You will want to have processes in place to manage them effectively when they do. Here’s how.
1. Create Social Media Marketing Guidelines
If there are multiple people managing your social media accounts, it is beneficial to create a set of guidelines for community interaction. This will ensure that your team is responding to customers in a consistent manner.
2. Create Automated Responses
It’s not always possible to respond to users immediately on social media. But there are ways to make things easier. Many brands have started using automation because of the recent increase in social media users. Many brands are using AI chatbots to help them keep up with the increasing number of messages and comments they’re getting on messenger apps.
What is a chatbot, you ask? A chatbot is essentially just a robot that chats! A chatbot can reply to a user’s message on a social network with a greeting and a series of questions. The chatbot can also provide the user with information. This can reduce the time your team spends on community management.
Why? Even if you aren’t getting a lot of messages, you should still respond to them promptly and professionally. Answering questions sporadically can take up a lot of your time. Chatbots give you the ability to present a professional image to your users, while still being able to respond to them in a timely manner.
3. Respond Promptly to All Messages and Comments
We know that social media messages are important and need to be managed. This means that you should respond to all messages, comments, and queries as soon as possible. It’s not worth responding to a product inquiry a customer sends you days later. By the time the customer is interested in your product, they will have either bought it elsewhere or contacted you in another way.
Ideally, you should respond to messages within 24 hours, especially if they are work-related. Monday is a good day to spend extra time catching up on any messages you may have received over the weekend.
For comments, consider the context of a comment. You should aim to respond to:
People often tag their friends and family in the comments section of posts. You don’t need to respond to every message directed to others unless it’s relevant to your brand or you’d like to engage with your followers.
You will need to take action to hide comments, report, or block users that are spamming, behaving inappropriately, or being offensive.
4. Invest In The Best Social Media Management Tools
Community management can be difficult because there are so many rules to follow. There are many marketing tools that can help. There are many social media management platforms that can improve your response times and make you a community management expert.
A marketing tool that schedules content can save you several hours every week. with the Canva scheduling tool, you can create a posting schedule, export your Canva images and videos, and schedule your content all in one place.
The best social media management software usually requires a monthly payment, but many marketing tools let you try their service before committing to a long-term paid plan.
Over to You
Do you have any tools that you use specifically for social media analytics? If so, let me know your thoughts on them in the comments section below.
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