HOW TO MANAGE MY OWN SOCIAL ACCOUNTS!
So, you want to manage your social media accounts yourself. Due to budget, lack of need, or a range of other reasons, you may not want to hire somebody to run your social accounts.
Below are a few ways to make managing your social pages manageable and less overwhelming.
First, let's take a look into what managing your social pages requires.
BASIC MANAGEMENT WOULD INVOLVE THE FOLLOWING:
-Brand and trend research
-Bio/profile picture updates
-Creating content and campaigns
-Create and maintain a posting schedule
-Engagement and community building
-Responding to Dm's and comments
-Metric tracking
-Monthly reporting
and much much more- so how can you manage all of that on your own?
1) Pay for content! Hiring a freelance photographer or graphic designer to create high-quality photos and graphics can help ensure your social pages still look professional while not costing nearly as much as a social media manager.
2) Set goals, so you understand what you're tracking! Keeping track of metrics and doing monthly reports can be overwhelming if you don't know what you're aiming for. Set monthly goals, then you know what metrics to watch.
3) Automate post! Using a scheduler such as Planoly or Later helps take a lot of the work out of posting! They let you preview your feed and automatically post to Instagram, so you don't have to log on every time you want to post.
4) Post less. Seriously, I've noticed so many of my social clients want to post every day, multiple times a day. Not only is this not necessary for most brands, its extra work! For every post is another hour of engagement. Time spent responding to comments and sharing the content can quickly add up. Posting twice a day can easily take 4 hours (and if it doesn't, your content and copy might not be that high quality).
Posting 3-4 times a week is usually plenty! Just make sure you're still doing engagement on days that you don't post!
5) Plan ahead. Like, a month early. It's October now, and you should have some idea of what you'll be posting in November. Last-minute campaigns will always take more work than planned ones! Taking the extra time to plan ahead will allow you time to create high-quality content, research hashtags, automate the post, and then just let the content do its thing.
BONUS TIP!
6) Hire somebody to manage your social accounts! Just hear me out.
Social media management is a wide range of services, and many social media managers will offer services a la carte!
You've got the content handled, but you need somebody to manage the day to day of the account, hire somebody for community building.
They'll log in and respond to comments, DMS, follow accounts, and basically curate the audience.
Or maybe you just need a one-time brand refresh on social: new content, new copy, just a slight facelift for the brand's position on social channels.
Whatever your brand needs, theirs likely a social media manager somewhere who can help! You don't have to hire somebody to run everything. Just be specific about what you want and what you need.