Best tools for improving corporate social network management
How to optimize your social network management? Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube - which ones should you use to communicate about your company? Which messages and channels should you choose to reach your targets? Which tools should you use?
Whatever the size of your company, your sector of activity or your internal organization, effective management of your activity on social media has become essential: the number of users is growing, and the trend is accelerating. Being present on the networks is already a good start, but developing your presence and animating your community by making the most of each social platform is even better!
Whether you're a marketer, community manager or communicator, here's a look at how you can improve your brand's presence on social networks and keep alive the close ties you've created with your customers.
The different social networks
It might be a good idea to start by looking at social network usage in 2019. The chart below is based on a survey conducted by Harris Interactive during February 2019 on 2,001 French Internet users aged 15 and over:
blogdumoderateur.com
With so many different platforms to choose from, it's tempting to want to be present everywhere to boost your company's visibility.
However, it may not be appropriate for your brand to aim for exhaustiveness. The risk: doing things by halves, because that involves time, and therefore money. It's better to identify the networks that are best suited to your business, and to maintain them with regularity and assiduity, in order to grow your reputation.
Let's take a look at some of the most popular and widely used social media in France.
LinkedIn: a must-have
Having a company page on a professional social network such as LinkedIn, or Viadeo - its French counterpart - is a minimum requirement. Beyond the institutional aspect, it gives your business status. You and your colleagues can inform your employer about your personal profiles. Your respective networks will see this, and the word-of-mouth or snowball effect will come into play, particularly through reviews and recommendations. In this way, you can enhance your employer brand.
Facebook is a must
The flagship social network is Facebook, with 33 million active users in France in 2018 (source: Blog du Modérateur). It's easy to create an account there, or simply appear as a listing: with address, contact details, opening hours... It all depends on whether you plan to post content there regularly or not. If your last post dates back to 2013, it discredits you and suggests that your activity has ceased. In that case, it's best not to have an account.
Twitter or the sense of directness
Tweets are limited in number of characters, making them short and to the point. Popular for news, Twitter is also used for politics, events and more. Why not insert yourself into the stream for your announcement effects?
Instagram on the rise
Here, visuals take center stage: photos, videos and animated gifs. Filters are available to enhance visuals. With its exponential success since 2012, following the takeover by Facebook, it's the ideal network for the fashion or tourism sectors. What's more, the platform allows you to capitalize on storytelling, which, with its playful dimension, encourages the engagement of your followers.
Snapchat for the instantaneous
A different concept: visual, but limited in time. You post a photo and your followers can see it for 10 seconds. A constraint that encourages you to play on the element of surprise and temporary buzz.
Google+ as an aside
Google's social network is not very fluid. Shunned in France, it's still useful for linking to other apps, such as Google maps, or for moving up in the search engine rankings.
YouTube for videos
Exclusively for video, YouTube now works with Google. More than just a video-sharing platform, YouTube is now asserting its place as a social medium in its own right: you can create a channel, add videos, liking, commenting, posting your videos, etc. Video is an increasingly popular content format that every brand should exploit for its virality as an effective marketing lever.
Pinterest inspiring version
Photos only, with the principle of pinning them to a moodboard. A mine of inspiration, it's the reign of beauty.
Social network management: what objectives?
Why use social networks? A social media strategy has many aims.
Your company's online presence
There are many different types of social media. As a company, you need to ensure your presence on the web and multiply your points of contact with your target audience. But where? It all depends on your business sector, your market positioning and your communications strategy.
What's more, each network has its own characteristics, advantages, type of content and users, and responds to different needs when it comes to your brand's e-reputation. It's up to you to find out where your customers, prospects or partners are likely to be.
By working on your visibility, you'll make sure you get noticed, promote your brand and be a source of influence in your sector. Social networks are an excellent complement to the website for expanding your audience.
Animating your communities
Managing a company account on a social network means taking charge of a number of aspects, including
- publications: news and communications posted by the brand for its network, choosing content with viral potential;
- responding to comments: this involves interacting with your fans, by moderating and responding to messages left by Internet users on your content;
- rallying your community around your brand: animating a community means acquiring fans, meeting your audience directly, creating engagement, and developing a sense of belonging to this community.
The ultimate goal of well-crafted community management is to generate traffic by referring leads to your website and, ultimately, to boost sales.
Gathering key information
Even more than a dynamic presence on the web, good management of your network accounts enables you to benefit from a wealth of information relating directly or indirectly to your business. After all, your competitors are communicating too. News specific to your sector or geographic region appears. This is your chance to keep abreast of the latest trends, news and innovations.
Networks as monitoring tools also enable you to track the behavior of your targets, and ultimately get to know your customers better, their habits, tastes and needs. All this helps to build customer loyalty.
Studying the impact
... for better targeting! By making the most of the data from your networks, you'll be better able to observe which actions are working and which aren't. The content you offer can be adapted to your customers' needs. The content you propose can be refined and personalized to reach your core target and not the masses.
Your customers are the ones who will be interested in your products or services: you win their support by addressing them directly and showing how your solution directly addresses the problems they face. To do this, define relevant actions based on reports and metrics, which can be generated by dedicated tools, as we'll see below.
Use dedicated tools to manage social networks
Social networking tools let you benefit from all their resources, and quickly become indispensable!
Benefit no. 1: time and efficiency savings
With a network management tool, you get an overview of all your accounts, so you can monitor activity as a whole.
For example, Buffer software reduces the time you spend on social networks by providing centralized management of message flows, as well as an overview of overall activity on the various networks via tracking dashboards. From a single interface, you can publish, schedule, view notifications and reply to messages. How convenient!
Benefit no. 2: Relevant, targeted intelligence
Some network management tools support you in your monitoring and suggest interesting content to share with your community. With a content suggestion tool, for example, you can find relevant articles based on keywords.
You can also subscribe to news feeds. This is one of the principles of hashtags for certain networks: preceded by a hash, they act as filters. If you subscribe to #EntrepriseX, for example, you'll receive a notification as soon as a post mentions your company. If you're more interested in a specific geographical location, you can enter it to be notified as soon as a post is identified there. This keeps you informed of what the public is saying about your brand or any other topic of interest to you.
Similarly, there are tools to keep you in touch with communications and feeds in your areas of interest. Tweetdeck lends itself perfectly to optimizing your marketing intelligence on the Twitter social network, allowing you not to miss a single tweet and to react directly from the application.
Benefit no. 3: in-depth knowledge of your target audience
A tool designed for social networks helps you observe clicks, the number of views of your videos, the stories consulted, etc. to better understand the behaviors and track the preferences of your customers. Thanks to this profiling, you get to know your persona in depth and are better able to respond to their needs.
Among your subscribers, you can also identify opinion leaders or important customers for your company, those who will have an influence on your community or prospects. With a tool like Digimind, for example, you can stay in touch with all your communities and analyze activity in real time across all networks.
Benefit no. 4: easier interaction
A dedicated solution meets the need for immediacy in the management of your messages and comments: with users constantly connected, it's essential to be able to moderate, filter and respond to messages from your audience in a fluid and instantaneous way.
Many tools enable you to handle these requests in just a few clicks from a single interface. Hootsuite, for example, which connects to over 25 networks, is a powerful and efficient tool that makes it easy to engage your audience.
To create even more dynamic interactions, don't hesitate to use network game creation functions, such as instant wins, quizzes and contests to animate your communities.
Advantage no. 5: rigorously scheduled content publication
A key advantage of a tool dedicated to social networking is the management and scheduling of publications. While content must always be fresh, certain types of posts can be designed and scheduled in advance. Some tools offer a content calendar, to make it easier for you to plan ahead, ensure regular content publication, avoid missing any highlights, and so on. It's essential to set up a editorial calendar to ensure that your content strategy matches your digital strategy.
With this in mind, the eClincher solution is ideal: it makes it easy to create queues and intelligent publication flows. An interactive editorial calendar visually displays the messages you have planned, and publications can be automated, for example via RSS feeds.
Benefit no. 6: Reactive, personalized after-sales service
The use of social media as a channel for responding to customer queries or handling complaints is becoming more and more widespread; it's all about being able to respond instantly to a request, no matter where your customer is. With a tool that facilitates communication on the various networks, you can lighten your community manager's workload.
Sprout Social software, for example, enables you to increase the responsiveness of your interactions with your community. It also enables you to create a chatbot to improve the quality of your customer service, and thereby increase customer loyalty.
Advantage no. 7: organized ad management
Certain tools are designed to manage the distribution of ads on social networks. For example, the dedicated Ads Manager software lets you manage your advertising campaigns, from budget to audience, including precise times of distribution, on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. You also benefit from reports to monitor and improve the performance of your campaigns.
Advantage no. 8: a well-controlled e-reputation
On the networks, life goes on after working hours. If a comment comes in during the night, you'll have to wait until morning to moderate it, which can be risky. To avoid this kind of inconvenience and simplify the community manager's task, software exists. The aim is to manage all accounts from a single administration console. Some offer settings to define moderation rules, so your image is under control at all times.
What's more, for better crisis management (or even anticipation), software features limited access to accounts with secure access rights.
Benefit no. 9: precise metrics analysis
When it comes to streamlining your social network management, analytical tools are invaluable allies. Managing networks to get the most out of them means analyzing the impact of your actions through a variety of metrics, and ultimately refining your strategy.
By compiling and analyzing reports, you can obtain information on :
- which hashtag has the best reach
- the best time to publish,
- the most active followers in your network.
The comprehensive Agorapulse software lets you monitor and report on various networks:
- Facebook reporting and performance: automatic monitoring of mentions of your company page,
- Twitter reporting: automatic search by keywords and hashtags,
- Instagram reporting: hashtag and geolocation tracking, etc.
Benefit no. 10: Employee commitment
To further expand your prospecting horizons, you'd be well advised to turn your employees into brand ambassadors: they can relay your values and share your corporate culture with their respective networks.
With the help of certain tools, you can create pre-validated messages to control republication of your content and take no risks when distributing it.
Strategy and the right tools: the keys to efficiency
Social networks offer an infinite number of possibilities, which are renewing webmarketing strategies. To seize these opportunities, you need to match your communication efforts to the impact they generate. Taking advantage of social media for your brand is not something you can improvise. You need to think ahead and equip yourself with effective tools, such as the ones we've presented, so that you can make the most of your social networks rather than just endure them.
The icing on the cake: with the acquisition of a social network management tool, assistance is often available. A dedicated, expert team is on hand to train you, guide you in the use of your tool and support you in the pursuit of your objectives. Now all you have to do is choose from your favorite tools!
What do you want to do today to manage your social networks effectively?
Updated article, originally published August 2016.
Article translated from French