How to get started with managing your social media presence

You know the definition of social media management and what social media management for businesses typically focuses on — now, learn where to begin when it comes to managing your social media marketing campaign.

Check out these steps to ensure you start off on the right foot:

1. Audit your existing social media strategy
2. Research your target audience
3. Choose your social media platforms
4. Create your social media strategy
5. Develop your social media ads
6. Build your social media content calendar
7. Create platform-specific content
8. Monitor your social media performance

1. Audit your existing social media strategy

If you already have an existing strategy, you’ll want to take some time to audit it to find out what’s working and what’s not. You can analyze your social media metrics to spot trends, scope out your competitors’ social media pages, and more.

2. Research your target audience

Know who your audience is, and you’ll know where to find them on social media. Use existing data from your website visitors, marketing campaigns, and customers to determine your target audience so you can reach them on their favorite social media networks.

3. Choose your social media platforms

There are a variety of platforms to choose from, including Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and much more. Creating a profile for every single platform can be time-consuming, so make sure you choose the platforms where your target audience spends most of their time.

4. Create your social media strategy

Now it’s time to build your strategy. In most cases, you’ll focus on building a strategy for each platform due to the different roles and uses of X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

5. Develop your social media ads

Depending on your budget and strategy, you may want to launch social media ads. These targeted advertisements enable you to create posts that will appear in your target audience’s newsfeed as they scroll through their updates even if they aren’t currently following your page.

6. Build your social media content calendar

You’ll need to keep your page active to engage your audience on social media. Create a content calendar to plan out what content you will post and how often to keep yourself organized.

7. Create platform-specific content

Not only will you need to create a content calendar, but you’ll also need to create the content itself. Depending on your platform, you can create a variety of social media content types, including videos, images, text-only posts, and more.

7. Monitor your social media performance

A critical part of social media management is monitoring the performance of your efforts. You’ll want to track the performance of your ads, as well as creative content, and analyze those results to spot any trends that can inform your strategy moving forward.