Social media marketing has become indispensable to running a successful business in the digital age. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide unparalleled opportunities to engage customers, promote brands, and drive leads and sales. However, the sheer volume of content needing to be consistently created and published across multiple networks is an enormous undertaking for most business owners and marketing teams. This is where comprehensive social posting platforms come into play to remove friction from workflows.
Current Social Media Landscape
Today’s top social networks are visual content-centric, with Instagram and its short-form video platform Reels representing a significant share of usage and engagement. Facebook still retains vital importance due to its sheer user base size and advertising capabilities. Twitter and YouTube hold relevance for certain industries more aligned with timely commentary, long-form video, and influencer engagement. Keeping pace with algorithm changes and the launch of new features on these core platforms is a constant requirement to remain visible.
This is in addition to the need for unified publishing of blog content and email newsletters that seamlessly integrate with social efforts. The many moving parts to balance make presenting a consistent brand image and messaging complicated. With the right tools, organizations have team members save countless hours copy-pasting content between apps. Valuable employee time and advertising budget allocated to social media are significantly at risk of being utilized sub-optimally.
Challenges of Managing Social Media
While no marketer debates the immense importance of social media marketing, most are still trying to understand the high effort and diverse skills needed to properly maintain multiple active profiles. Without adequate tools and processes, employees waste countless hours or outsource various vendors to keep pace. Some specific hurdles faced include:
- Time Required for Content Creation: Between writing posts, designing graphics, and clicking photos, daily social media management is extremely time-consuming. The thought diversity needed across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn also makes assembly-line production of posts near impossible.
- Resource Bandwidth for Community Management: Assigning resources to monitor relevant hashtags, respond to customer queries, and engage is often an afterthought. Without constantly listening on social channels, opportunities or crises can be easily missed, costing organizations heavily.
- Consistency Across Different Accounts: Maintaining unified branding and communication style across networks is tough when left to individual employees or departments. Ad-hoc updates often showcase completely different personalities to audiences.
- Coordination with Influencer Marketing: Reaching out to and managing partnerships with influencers, especially nano and micro ones, needs dedicated experience. From campaign management to sponsorship deals, a lack of structure leads to sub-optimal ROI.
- Gathering Cross-Platform Analytics: Actionable insights come from analyzing network performance metrics and trends. Managing this manually means critical data is often missed, making optimization hit and miss.
- Juggling Paid Ad Campaigns: Running effective promotions across different advertising platforms requires understanding the nuances of audience segmentation for each distinctly. Restrictions around content type, formats, and placement need to be rounded off with manual efforts.
- Keeping Up with Algorithm Changes: Consistent visibility comes from adapting to frequent algorithm changes and new features launched across platforms. For example, Instagram’s shift to a video-first Explore page and TikTok-style short videos.
- Integrations with CRM & Automation: Connecting social data to the website, customer relationship management, and marketing automation systems are critical to lead generation. But APIs and interfaces between myriad point platforms demand technical resources.
Mitigating these social media headaches to deliver tangible business growth metrics is only possible for some customer-facing teams with the right tools. Building expertise across these interconnected requirements is neither viable nor optimal from a resource utilization perspective.
Benefits of a Social Media Management Platform
This is where cloud-based tools prove invaluable through features specially built for social media marketers’ workflows –
- Centralized Content Publishing: Creating, uploading, and scheduling posts to multiple accounts ensures brand consistency with no repetitive manual efforts
- Cross-Channel Analytics: Actionable insights into content performance across networks help optimize strategy
- Account / User Permissioning: Collaborate with team members by allowing restricted access as per roles
- Audience Analysis: Identify top engaging followers and fan demographics through data integrations
- Competitor Benchmarking: Track essential metrics and trends by analyzing competitors’ social profiles
- Ad Campaign Management: Unified reporting and budget allocation on paid promotions across networks
- Engagement & Monitoring: Monitoring relevant mentions and hashtags to identify opportunities and crisis management
Evaluating Platforms on Business Needs
While the above capabilities sound great on paper, the real-world application depends significantly on tailoring technology to specific business contexts. When analyzing alternate options, critical considerations for suitability include –
Retail Companies—For storefronts and e-commerce businesses, platforms offer deep integration with existing product catalogs. This enables easier creation of eye-catching social advertisements and shoppable posts showcasing inventory. CRM data connectivity also helps retarget high-intent shoppers from website visits with personalized communication.
Service-Based Businesses – Professional service providers like marketing agencies have unique needs that require them to demonstrate thought leadership, project case studies, and team culture. Capabilities like employee advocacy, influencer marketing, and lead generation integrate natively with the rest of the workflow in platforms built for such users.
Publishers & Media—The ever-growing need for content creation is best supported by inbuilt access to licensed image libraries, freelancer networks, and the aggregation of trending topics. These allow online publications to tap into viral opportunities early through data-driven approaches.
Non-Profits—For NGOs and charitable organizations, community building and cause-based marketing require highly customized branding and communication unmatched by generic SMM software. The ability to collect donor information, send email newsletters, and accept fundraising pledges also merits close evaluation.
Getting Started with New SMM Tools
While social posting capabilities might appear easy to set up, new tools often involve a learning curve to utilize advanced functionalities. Investing effort into cleanly structuring accounts, permissions, and processes in the initial setup avoids headaches. Below are some best practices to adopt –
- Take stock of all existing social media assets and clean up haphazard naming conventions
- Map out concrete responsibilities for team members based on current workload
- Analyze critical metrics and past campaign performances to set realistic goals
- Leverage integrations with website, storefront, and email databases already in use
- Allocate enough time for testing to avoid last-minute go-live bugs and issues
- Plan an editorial calendar aligned with business objectives rather than creating ad-hoc posts
- Build sign-off workflows for large organizations needing multi-level content approvals
Conclusion
There has never been a greater need for centralized social media management than today, with user bases across platforms numbering in billions. Tools enable the creation of higher-performing content faster through data-driven automation. The key is selecting software tailored to business niches based on unique needs and challenges. With the proper foundation, however, streaming social media marketing opens up tremendous opportunities for brands to engage digitally native customers. Time and effort savings also empower the focus of energy on devising innovative growth strategies rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
