This module, How to Manage Company Social Media Accounts, will teach you how to: Social media management pdf Best social media for small business Facebook Marketing Set up and run a good social media account Use your social media as a tool Social media goals How to manage company’s social media accounts
Managing company social media accounts can seem like a daunting task. The average business owner or social media expert has many different accounts to keep track of, and tends to rush through the process – spending more time searching for information than actually managing the accounts. First, analyze your existing social media accounts. Do you have multiple accounts? What is the content like? If there is some valuable information on the account but you are unsure about the future of your participation, post a remark asking someone to contact you about taking over that account. Use your resources to clean up old videos, photos and blogs. Focus on posts that make your company look professional and modern. Once you are able to identify what tasks are important for you to handle personally, delegate as many of your other company accounts as possible.
Why is managing social media important for a company?
Managing social media content helps monitor a company’s online presence and shape their reputation. Managing social media accounts effectively offers many benefits to a company including:
- Cost effective: Social media is a low-cost method of interacting with existing customers and reaching new ones. There is no fee to join on most platforms, and many potential customers are already there.
- Reach: Social media also offers a global reach, which you may not achieve through other marketing mediums.
- Branding: An online presence helps establish a company brand through interactions with a target audience and clear messaging.
- Marketing tool: The inexpensive reach these platforms provide to a company make social media a desirable marketing tool. Social media generates leads and sales at a proven rate, and many platforms offer advertising tools and analytics.
How to manage social media for a company
Here are eight steps to manage social media for a company:
1. Understand your brand
A brand is the identity of your company, including your mission, core values, logo, name and customer experience. Understanding what your company stands for and how the public perceives your company is key to managing social media successfully.
2. Know your target audience
Knowing your target audience means you understand who the company is trying to reach with their service. Consider the target audience when crafting social media content to be sure they’ll relate and engage with your posts.
When managing social media content, a target audience may not only be the group of people the company designed its services for. It can also include social media users who may be interested in your content. Reaching these people and your intended target audience can maximize the company’s ROI for social media.
Consider these elements when determining who your target audience is:
- Demographics: The age, gender, race and socioeconomic information such as employment, marital status and education
- Interests: Hobbies, entertainment and topics that a person enjoys
- Challenges: Struggles your ideal customer faces. This is usually the problem the company’s product or service solves.
3. Set goals
Setting goals helps guide how you are managing social media accounts and provides a metric for success. Goals can help maintain your budget and hold you accountable. Use the SMART method to set better goals:
- Specific: Define your goal.
- Measurable: Use metrics to track your goal.
- Achievable: Be sure you have the resources to reach your goal.
- Realistic: Set a goal that is possible for you and the company.
- Time-sensitive: Give the goal a time-frame in which it needs to be reached.
4. Create accounts on multiple platforms
Having an account on multiple platforms extends your reach. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube are among the most popular for business. Posting content on these platforms can diversify the type of content you share and ensure that you connect with existing and potential customers.
5. Engage with your audience
Engaging with your audience on social media is important to building a relationship with customers. Companies that do this provide a greater customer experience, which can increase revenue. Ways to engage your social media audience include:
- Answering their questions
- Asking them questions to get opinions
- Creating games they can play
- Organize contests
- Offer exclusive discounts and promotions
- Recognize customers specially
- Allow audience-generated content
- Be human in all your posts and interactions
6. Create quality content
Your target audience is more likely to engage with relatable, creative content that informs and entertains. Consider also creating content designed specially for each platform, for example: a video may perform best on YouTube and Facebook, while photos are best suited for Instagram. A way to ensure quality content is to place members responsible for each aspect of content generation. Here are roles to consider assigning:
- Content manager: Develops strategy for creating and publishing content
- Content creator: Produces video, text, info graphics and other medias for company
- Content editor: Evaluates content for accuracy, design and quality
7. Develop advertisements
Developing an advertisement strategy can help reach more social media users, engage the audience and provide a greater return on investment. Many social media platforms have built-in features to create and track ads, making it easier to develop advertisements for the company.
8. Analyze social media metrics
Analyzing social media metrics is an important step to determine how successful your social media usage has been. Here are the metrics to consider:
- Engagement: The number of interactions your content received from social media users
- Impressions: The number of times social media users could see your content on their timeline, feed or page
- Conversions: How many times a person made a purchase after clicking on your content
- Response rate: The time it took for the social media team to answer messages from the social media users
Who Owns Your Company’s Social Media Accounts?
If you haven’t thought about how your social media accounts operate and about who owns them, it’s time to wake up before you have a nightmare.
According to one of several court rulings, the owner is the person whose name appears as the administrator on the account. EEK! That’s scary. Does your company have anything in writing that says otherwise? Do you know whose name (or names) is listed as the administrator on your company’s social media accounts?
Your social networks should be viewed as company assets. If you have employees managing them without a signed ownership policy, your organization could be in danger.
How can you protect your business? Create a social media ownership policy, and include the following fundamental elements. Always be sure to consult with an attorney or HR professional when creating compay policies.
Ownership of Social Media Usernames
This is a no-brainer. Your company’s name is part of your brand. It should not be used in any other way by anyone who is not part of, or affiliated with, your company. Your ownership policy should specifically outline all your company’s usernames, and state clearly that you own the rights to each name. It should also say that no new company usernames may be created at any time without express permission from company leadership.
Ownership of Social Media Content
Employees should agree that any content they create and post on your company’s social networking sites is under a work for hire agreement and is the sole property of your company. Work for hire means the content employees create is part of their job. Even if they have not specifically signed a work-for-hire agreement, work for hire is automatically implemented when someone becomes an employee of your company.
Also include language about content an employee may not consider to be work for hire. This is to cover yourself if there is any disagreement. Employees must agree to assign your company all rights, titles and interests to the content that is not deemed to be work for hire.
What happens if an employee who creates and posts social media content leaves? You’ll need an extra line item in your policy. It should say that any content the employee created on or for your company’s social networking sites, or that relates in any way to your company, may not be used under any circumstance after employment.
Ownership Rights to Access and Control Company Social Media Accounts
Any employees given administrative rights to company social media accounts must agree to provide access to all passwords and usernames. They must agree to provide access to any online groups they create under your company’s name. And they must transfer all management rights and authorizations of those groups to the company upon request, or at termination. All company social media accounts should be registered using a company email address, if possible, to avoid confusion.
Ownership of Company’s Social Media Fans and Followers
Your company owns the rights to the fans and followers of all social media accounts it has established. This includes Facebook, LinkedIn, company Twitter account followers, Instagram account followers and others. Your company also owns the rights to any contact lists, Twitter lists, Facebook custom audience lists and all other fan and follower lists employees created while they were an employee or under a specific work-for-hire agreement.
Don’t overstep the boundaries, however. Your company does not own your employees’ personal account logins. This includes Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections (not the same as LinkedIn fans following your LinkedIn company page) and personal Twitter account followers. The same is true of other personal accounts belonging to your employees that are not affiliated with your company and were not set up under a work-for-hire agreement.
Just because a prospective employee has scores of great connections doesn’t mean they suddenly belong to your company when you hire that person. You own your company accounts; employees own their personal accounts.
Once you’ve created your social media ownership policy, it’s important for all employees to review it and have the opportunity to ask questions. Ownership of your company’s social media accounts should not be negotiable. If you get pushback from someone on any of the four policy elements outlined here, that’s a good indication that person shouldn’t be managing a social media business account.
Include Consultants and Outside Agencies in the Policy
Don’t forget consultants and agencies who are hired to manage your social media on an outsourced basis. They often take over administrative rights, which means they could kick you off your own social networks at any time. It’s critical to have a signed contract that says your company owns everything, regardless of the work these consultants do on your behalf.
The last thing you want is a contractor running off with full control of your company’s Facebook page after you’ve worked so hard to earn a good reputation and a lot of supportive fans. It’s your responsibility to protect those fans, as well as your company’s reputation. Social media ownership policies and contracts give you more power and could possibly save you the hassle and expense of a lawsuit.
Signs it’s time to change your prices or your pricing model
No matter how long you’ve been in business, these are the warning signs:
- You have an influx of work that you can’t handle
- You can’t keep up with all of your leads
- Everyone who reaches out to you is a “yes” — none of your leads say “no”
- You feel resentful and burnt out
- You can’t hit your financial goals (such as saving a certain percentage for retirement or expenses and investments that will likely help you grow your business)
Any one of these signs might mean you need to raise your prices or change your business model. It might be time to stop charging hourly and start charging a monthly fee for a predetermined service. It might be time to contract work out to others and grow your team, in which case you might need to raise your rates to protect your profit margin.
Conclusion
Growing a presence on social media is no easy task. It’s a constant balancing act, monitoring your clients’ various accounts and responding accordingly. This ebook will help you learn to audit and evaluate the current position of your and your client’s social media accounts by providing the essential tips and tools needed; allowing you to be efficient in managing multiple clients’ social media needs.