The best tools for improving management of corporate social networks
How can you optimise your social network management? Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube - which ones should you use to communicate about your business? What messages should you send and which 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 organisation, effective management of your activity on social media has become essential: more and more people are using them, and the trend is accelerating. Having a presence 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, find out how you can improve your brand's presence on social networks and keep alive the close relationship you've created with your customers.
The different social networks
It might be interesting to start by looking at the use of social networks in 2019. The graph below is based on a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in 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 raise your company's profile.
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 regularly and assiduously in order to raise your profile.
Here's a quick 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. Apart from 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 it, 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 to appear as a listing: with address, contact details, opening hours... It all depends on whether you intend 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 better not to have an account.
Twitter or the sense of directness
Tweets have a limited number of characters, making them short and to the point. Popular for news, Twitter is also used for politics, events and so on. So why not get in on the action too?
Instagram on the rise
Here, visuals take centre stage: photos, videos and animated gifs. Filters are available to enhance visuals. With its exponential success since 2012, following the takeover by Facebook, it is the ideal network for the fashion and tourism sectors. What's more, the platform allows you to capitalise on storytelling, which, with its playful dimension, encourages the engagement of your followers.
Snapchat for the instantaneous
Another 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 a sideline
Google's social network is not very fluid. Shunned in France, it is still useful for linking to other applications 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, like, comment, post your videos, etc. Video is an increasingly popular content format that every brand needs to 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.
Managing social networks: what are your 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 increase the number of points of contact with your target audience. But where? It all depends on your sector of activity, your market positioning and your communication strategy.
What's more, each network has its own characteristics, its own advantages, its own type of content, its own 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 can ensure that you are known, 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.
Managing your communities
Managing a company account on a social network means taking charge of various aspects, including
- publications: news and communications posted by the brand for its network, choosing content with viral potential;
- replying to comments: this involves interacting with your fans, and it involves moderating and replying to messages that people leave about your content;
- rallying your community around your brand: running a community means acquiring fans, meeting your audience directly, creating engagement and developing a sense of belonging to that community.
The ultimate aim of well-crafted community management is to generate traffic by sending leads back to your website and, ultimately, to boost sales.
Gathering key information
Even more than a dynamic presence on the web, good management of your accounts on the networks gives you access to a wealth of information relating in one way or another to your business. Your competitors are also communicating. News specific to the sector or your geographical region appears. This is your chance to keep abreast of the latest trends, news and innovations.
As monitoring tools, the networks also enable you to track the behaviour of your targets, and ultimately to get to know your customers, their habits, tastes and needs better. All this helps to build customer loyalty.
Studying spin-offs
... for better targeting! By making good use of the data from your networks, you are better able to observe which actions are working and which are not. The content you propose can be refined and personalised to reach your core target and not the masses.
They 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 provides a direct response to the problems they face. To do this, define relevant actions based on reports and metrics, which can be generated using dedicated tools, as we will see below.
Using dedicated tools to manage social networks
Social networking tools allow you to benefit from all their resources and quickly become indispensable!
Benefit no. 1: time savings and greater efficiency
With a network management tool, you get an overview of all your accounts and can monitor activity as a whole.
Buffer software reduces the amount of time spent on social networks by providing centralised management of message flows and an overview of overall activity on the various networks thanks to monitoring dashboards. From a single interface, you can publish, schedule, check notifications and reply to messages. It's so practical!
Advantage no. 2: relevant, targeted monitoring
Some network management tools can help you monitor your network 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 sign, they act as filters. By subscribing to #EntrepriseX, you'll receive a notification as soon as a post mentions your company, for example. If you're more interested in a particular geographical location, you can indicate this to find out as soon as a publication is identified there. This keeps you informed of what the public is saying about your company or any other subject of interest to you.
There are also tools to help you stay in touch with communications and feeds in your areas of interest. Tweetdeck lends itself perfectly to optimising 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 to observe clicks, the number of views of your videos, the stories consulted, etc. to better understand the behaviour and 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 your prospects. With a tool like Digimind, for example, you can stay in touch with all your communities and analyse 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 connected all the time, it's essential to be able to moderate, filter and respond to messages from your audience fluidly and instantly.
Numerous tools allow you to deal with these requests in just a few clicks from a single interface. Hootsuite, which connects to more than 25 networks, is a powerful and effective tool that makes it easy to engage your audience.
To create even more dynamic interaction, don't hesitate to use the features for creating games on the networks, such as instant wins, quizzes and competitions to get your communities going.
Advantage no. 5: rigorously planned content publication
A key advantage of a tool dedicated to social networks is the management and scheduling of publications. While content should always be very recent, certain types of post can be designed in advance and scheduled. Some tools offer a content calendar, to make it easier for you to plan ahead, ensure that content is published regularly, avoid missing any highlights, etc. You need to set up an editorial calendar to ensure that your content strategy and your digital strategy coincide.
This is where the eClincher solution comes into its own: 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: responsive, personalised after-sales service
The use of social media as a channel for responding to customer queries or handling complaints is becoming increasingly widespread; the aim is to be 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, allows you to increase the responsiveness of your interactions with your community. It also allows you to create a chatbot to improve the quality of your customer service and, by the same token, build customer loyalty.
Advantage no. 7: Organised ad management
Some 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 the precise times of distribution, on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. You can also use 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 is made during the night, you'll have to wait until the morning to moderate it, which can be risky. To avoid this kind of inconvenience and simplify the task of the community manager, software exists. The aim is to manage all accounts from a single administration console. Some offer parameters for defining moderation rules, so that your image is under control at all times.
What's more, for better crisis management (or even anticipation), the software includes limited access to accounts with secure access rights.
Advantage no. 9: a precise study of metrics
Analytical tools can be invaluable allies in streamlining your social network management. Managing networks to get the most out of them means analysing the impact of your actions using a range of metrics, so that you can fine-tune your strategy.
By compiling reports and analysing them, you can obtain information on :
- the hashtag with the best reach
- the best time to publish,
- the most active followers in your network.
The comprehensive Agorapulse software enables you to monitor and produce reports on various networks:
- Facebook reporting and Facebook performance: automatic monitoring of mentions of your company page,
- Twitter reporting: automatic search by keywords and hashtags,
- Instagram reporting: tracking of hashtags and geolocations, etc.
Benefit no. 10: employee commitment
To broaden your prospecting horizons even further, you would be well advised to make your employees ambassadors for your brand: they can relay your values and share your corporate culture with their respective networks.
Using certain tools, you can create pre-validated messages so that you can control the republication of your content and take no risks when distributing it.
Strategy and the right tools: the keys to effectiveness
Social networks offer an infinite number of possibilities, which are renewing web marketing strategies. To seize these opportunities, you need to match your communication efforts to the impact they generate. Making the most of social media for your brand cannot be improvised. You need to think ahead and equip yourself with effective tools, such as those we have 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 through the use of your tool and support you as you pursue your objectives. All you have to do is choose from your favourite tools!
And you, what do you decide to put in place today to manage your social networks effectively?
Updated article, originally published in August 2016.
Article translated from French