Your business’ social media accounts are the most direct way your customers interact with your company. Depending on your marketing strategy and media mix, they may also be your brand’s most visible public face. This is why good social media management is crucial, whether you have a team of a dozen people handling your accounts or one designated social lead. Here are some strategies that will help keep this task on track.

Quality is Better Than Quantity

A critical concept in social media management is a basic understanding of the major platforms’ algorithms. This doesn’t mean that you must understand the coding and back-end functions used to populate feeds, but you do need to know what will be more likely to rise to the top. In some cases, posting too often will actually hurt you. At the very least, you risk “stepping on” your previous posts and not achieving the reach you need. Even worse, if the quantity means each post gets less engagement, the platforms will prioritize them lower in your audience’s feeds. Focus on putting out posts with useful content that includes images and videos whenever possible.

Keep it Conversational

Consumers hate advertising. They would prefer to interact with someone rather than have someone talking at them to sell them something. Social media provides a clear channel for a two-way conversation between a business and its customers. Effective social media management requires skilled writing that maintains your brand voice while engaging with customers in casual tone.

Scheduling Tools are Your Friends

Like any other advertising strategy, a calendar and schedule of planned posts is an important organizational tool. Going a step further, once you’ve planned out the days, times, and rough content goals for your week or month’s post, you can schedule them to go live automatically. Depending on which platforms you use, you may either schedule them in the channel’s ad manager, or to take advantage of third-party programs that will handle multi-platform post scheduling.

So are Analytics!

Finally, recognize that the back-end analytics the major social media platforms provide can give you incredible insight into the efficacy of your approach. You can see how many people viewed your ad, how many clicked-through, and in the case of video, how many watched it all the way through. There are even more deeper data points available as well. This is information that marketers could only dream of 20 years ago, so take advantage of it!

Managing social accounts for businesses can seem overwhelming and stressful. These tips should help simplify the workload considerably.