Social Media Management 101
Social Media Management isn’t ROCKET science 🚀, it’s actually FOOD science. With the right cook, the right ingredients, and the right recipe, your Social media content can be YUMMY-LICIOUS too.
With cooking, we never start with the final dish. The entire process starts with small steps — making a list of all the ingredients, deciding how much time it takes to cook, a mental map of what utensils we might need. Cooking starts out one block a time with the image of the final dish in our minds.
Social Media Management is just like that too. We KNOW what we want the final outcome to be but we never start off with it. Social media management also works one block at a time and here’s a recipe to cook that scrumptious content.
Step 1: Pick the right recipe
We can throw a bunch of random ingredients together and hope for a miracle. And while this may work (Rarely), it’s a game of crossing fingers and that’s not the aim. Picking out what exactly we want to do, envisioning the larger goal, and then picking out the right steps for it are essential.
Your goal can be anything — reaching 5000 followers or just increasing engagement on your posts or leaving a digital footprint in all 7 continents. Envisioning that final target in your mind makes the process easier.
Once we know what we want, we can decide HOW to go about it. Which social media platforms do we use? What type of content should we make?
If we want to make a pie, we need to decide if it’s sweet or savory. What fruits and vegetables we want to use and what occasion it’s for. Know the dish, pick the recipe.
Step 2: Buy those ingredients (But first, MAKE A LIST)
Now we know we want to make some apple pie. Do we just run to the grocery store and buy everything that screams APPLE and PIE? No.
We open up our recipe, quickly jot down everything we need before making a trip to the store.
With Social Media Management too, the story is the same. We know what platforms we want to build on. We know the target audience and we have the image in our heads and a recipe. Now, we make a list and run to the store (in this case, a resource pool).
Do we need content creators? How many? What can we use to make the Content? Photoshop, Canva, Video editors. One can never have enough resources to make their content wholesome. But wholesome content also needs manpower.
How many hours do we put in? What brand colors do we go for? What messages can we convey? All these are important and pertinent questions to ask before making your list. Now that you know what you want, run to the store, make a few calls, subscribe to all those important tools, and get moving!
WAIT. Don’t just go to any store. QUALITY is key here. Go to the most elite of sources. The quality of ingredients is detrimental to the final dish.
Step 3: Choose the right utensils (we don’t want a pie too big or too small)
Now we have our recipe or a roadmap. We have our team and a few trustworthy tools. But before we start cooking, we need the right utensil.
Pick the right medium for your communications. Organize your thoughts cleverly so everyone in your team can know what you want to do. Start those excels, use that mindmap or visual-storyboarding and just build, build, build.
And when you’re done with the mapping, you can start with the sizing. Decide how many posts you want to put up, decide the pattern of making the content. Decide the genre you want it to fall into. Keep bucketing your ideas and choose the right pot to throw them into.
Remember, we don’t want to do TOO MUCH but at the same time, the efforts shouldn’t be too little either.
Step 4: Cook, cook, cook (But not too many)
They say too many cooks spoil the broth. But hey, we’re making pie here, we can have a couple of cooks.
Having a lot of people to jam with sure helps the brain tick. Have multiple brainstorming sessions with your team. Everyone is different and that’s precisely why you need to jam with everyone.
With all those ideas floating around, you can just pick up the best one to use and implement. Brainstorming sessions are so important to ensure you’re generating the BEST ideas to use for your brand.
You can never have too many ideas but you can have too many cooks. The important thing to know here is to streamline the ideas. Know which ones to keep and which to dismiss.
We can have a lot of sous chefs but only one(Okay, maybe two)head chef(s) can bake the pie.
Step 5: Check the temperature of the oven
We mean this literally for apple pie but for social media management, the platform itself is your oven. And the number of people online and engaging with you is the temperature.
Knowing when it’s a good time to post (when the oven is warmest) helps you plan your posting cycle. Just having GREAT content but with no one to see it is pointless.
It’s not enough to just make the filling and the pie, if it isn’t warm enough, it’s simply not going to cook.
Step 6: TIME TO EAT
Probably the best part of baking a pie — EATING IT. And that’s the same for social media too. (Yes, we know you can’t eat content but shhh.)
The best part of social media management is, the results are visible instantaneously. You can marvel in those comments, likes and reshares. When your content is good, it will show. And if it isn’t good, you just know you need to pick a better recipe next time.
As they say, no recipe is perfect. They all have a whole lot of improvising. It’s only when you start cooking do you know what needs to be added and what needs to be removed.
Tweak those ratios, add a little more sugar or maybe take it off. Next time maybe try some other pie.
Whatever it is you decide to do, just try. ’Cause if you don’t, you’ll never know how much tasty food your kitchen can actually put out.
