Essential social media management hacks

Social media and digital marketing is changing constantly. The playing field is shifting all the time. Companies and people are constantly creating new strategies in an attempt to stay ahead of the competition.

Social media management is a skill and a competitive field so to stay successful you need to stay on top of the game. There are thousands of apps, websites and social media management companies out there all promising to help take your company to the next level. You feel like you need to invest a ton of money in order to stay current. Well, it is not that bad. You can use these apps and methods on a very tight budget.

Still feel like you need to invest? Check out my website, The Social Media Lab, for articles, checklists and examples on how to build a social media management strategy on a tight budget.

Okay, enough of my sales pitch. Let’s get down to business. I am going to run through a few basics. Some of these are harder than others.

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Table of Contents

Establish your goals
Set your objectives
Make sure your goals will benefit your business
Plan your strategy
Create a Social Media Management Plan
Implement your plan

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Establish your goals

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One of the most important things to do first is establish your goals. Do you have one? Do you want to increase your business revenue? Do you want to gain more customers? Whatever your goals are, you need to focus on them and then put in place your social media strategy.

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Set your objectives

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An objective is a SMART goal. The acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. If you have SMART goals then you have set out your expectations. If you do not know what they are, it is even more important that you set them out.

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Make sure your goals will benefit your business

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If you set a goal to do something, then it needs to be beneficial to your business. If it is beneficial to your business then you will be more likely to achieve it. Of course, goals are only part of what you want to achieve. So once you have your goals and objectives you need to plan your strategy.

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Plan your strategy

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In order to plan a strategy you need to know what you are up against. Have a look at the competition and try to figure out what they are up to. If you are on LinkedIn then you need to look at your competitors’ groups. What is being discussed? How are people interacting? You can do this on the major social media platforms.

A good place to start is to set up a Google Alert.

This way you will receive an email every time a new post is shared by one of your competitors. It is a free and simple tool and will provide you with some great information.

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Create a Social Media Management Plan

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Having a social media management plan is a pretty good way of getting an idea of what social media can bring to the table. A social media management plan will give you more direction on your social media efforts.

The Social Media Lab offers a lot of different templates which you can download.

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Implement your plan

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It will then be reporting on your progress to keep you updated.

Make sure you set yourself benchmarks and make sure that you constantly measure your progress. This way you can ensure that what you are doing is actually getting you closer to your goals.

Okay, that is it. You got this.