Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to modern businesses.
With a strong social media presence, brands can achieve a wide range of key objectives, from driving awareness to changing consumer perceptions and amplifying product launches.
But how you can ensure that you’re unlocking the full potential of social media to engage audiences, increase consideration, and boost sales?
The answer is social media management.
Social media management is all about creating high-performing social media strategies that deliver consistent results. However, the day-to-day responsibilities of social media managers vary wildly, from content creation to campaign measurement.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about social media management, including the key responsibilities you’ll need to cover – and how you can leverage social channels to grow your brand.
What is social media management, exactly?
Social media management is a broad term that encompasses a lot of different roles and responsibilities.
However, below are some of the fundamental aspects of social media management:
- Building a social media content strategy
- Growing (and managing) online communities
- Launching paid social media campaigns
- Protecting a brand’s reputation on social networks
- Delivering customer service through social channels
The world of social media marketing is complex, and social media managers require expertise in a range of different areas to be successful. However, if you can maintain effective social media management and maximise the potential of key platforms, the rewards can be enormous for your brand.
What are the key qualities of a social media manager?
While social media managers often need to be jack-of-all-trades, there are some core qualities that are important for all managers to possess.
Organisation
If you want to manage multiple social platforms, marketing campaigns, team members, and workstreams, then you need to be organised. It’s as simple as that.
Organisation is absolutely crucial for social media managers, as it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed when you’re handling several projects at the same time. A manager might be overseeing content creation in the morning and presenting in-depth performance reports in the afternoon, so the ability to coordinate moving parts and hit urgent deadlines is key.
Creativity
Creativity is very important for brands looking to capture the attention of their target audience, so social media managers will need to consistently bring fresh ideas to the table.
Social media managers will be charged with testing different content types, experimenting with new creative messages, and capitalising on emerging platform trends. Not only do they need to be creative, but they also require the ability to execute innovative ideas – and measure their impact.
Collaboration
Social media management is a collaborative process, and social media managers will regularly need to coordinate various team members to achieve optimal results.
For example, a social media manager will often need to work closely alongside graphic designers, marketing experts, influencers, and clients to deliver against their objectives. This means that clear communication is essential, and social media managers will require a solid understanding of different processes to get the best out of their colleagues.
How to master social media management for your brand
While you may have particular specialisms in digital marketing, as a social media manager, you’ll need to cover a wide range of tasks to effectively build social strategies and optimise performance.
We’ve outlined some of the core responsibilities you’ll need to handle as a social media manager, so you can start to accelerate brand growth and improve marketing performance.
1. Auditing existing social media channels
One of the most important aspects of social media management is conducting thorough social media audits.
Although your business may already be active on social media, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re taking full advantage of your chosen platforms.
For example, you may have inconsistent visual branding across social channels, or content that feels disjointed and poorly planned. By conducting an in-depth social media audit, you’ll be able to align your marketing strategy across social networks and resolve pressing issues to improve performance.
This type of social media audit doesn’t just need to occur once, either.
As a social media manager, it’s a good idea to perform regular check-ups to understand how follower growth, content engagement, and brand reach is developing across your platforms. Using these insights, you can develop new tactics for underperforming channels – or even remove them from your strategy entirely.
2. Setting (and tracking) marketing goals
As a social media manager, you’ll also be responsible for establishing (and monitoring) key goals for your brand. Not only will this help to align your business and rally teams behind a single objective, but it will also make reporting and measurement infinitely easier.
For instance, you may decide that follower growth is a core objective for your brand on social media.
From here, you can develop a social media strategy designed to achieve this goal, often leveraging multiple platforms simultaneously. Over time, you’ll need to track the performance of these various channels, tactics, and formats to understand how they’re contributing towards this main objective – and optimise accordingly.
However, in order to set and track marketing goals, you’ll also need a solid understanding of analytics tools on different platforms. Your business will need crystal-clear reporting data to inform marketing plans and guide strategic decisions, and as a social media manager, you’ll need to supply it.
3. Optimising social media strategies – and testing new ideas
Social media management isn’t all about just setting marketing objectives, either. As a social media manager, you’ll also be expected to optimise campaigns (and test new ideas) in order to achieve these marketing goals.
This could involve launching fresh brand messages, trying out different video types (e.g. UGC reviews vs product tutorials) or testing activity on new platforms. Identifying high-performing tactics (and removing inefficient ones) is a hugely important part of social media management, so you’ll need to actively seek out new opportunities for your brand.
However, social media management is also about combining creativity with data-led decision-making.
While you may be keen to experiment with a new content style or social format, you’ll need to support your choices with clear data and engagement analytics. If you can successfully blend innovative ideas with objective-focused optimisations, you’ll be able to make a huge impact on your business and unlock the full potential of social media marketing.
4. Identifying key audience segments
If you want to succeed on social media, you’ll need a clear understanding of your target audience. However, this is often easier said than done – there are millions of social media users across a number of platforms, and homing in on profitable audiences can be tricky.
This is where your expertise in social media marketing plays a vital role.
As a social media manager, you can help your business to identify, reach, and engage high-value audiences by:
Analysing existing customer data
Regularly gathering data about your existing customers will help you to craft high-performing, data-driven social media strategies. For instance, you might look at popular demographics to inform creative messaging or assess if certain products are resonating with particular customer groups.
Evaluating current followers
By deep-diving into your brand’s social media followers, you can also collect valuable insights to optimise marketing activity. Businesses frequently have a preconceived idea about their core audience, but real follower data can throw up some surprising results.
Don’t be afraid to rock the boat and follow what the data is telling you!
Building and testing new audiences
Audience research isn’t just key for organic content, either. You can also utilise audience data to inform paid ads targeting, focusing on specific demographics, interests, or behaviours. You can even import first-party customer data into social platforms to build custom audiences, which are often incredibly efficient and profitable.
Once you’ve identified high-value audiences for your brand, it becomes much easier to engage them with compelling social content and convert them with targeted ads.
This is one of the most crucial aspects of social media management, as the right data insights can help businesses to paint a much clearer picture of their core audiences.
5. Creating highly effective social content
High-quality content is the foundation of organic social media marketing.
Without engaging social content, marketers will struggle to capture the attention of their target audience and build a recognisable brand presence. But when brands are equipped with a compelling content strategy, they can quickly nurture a loyal following and increase engagement – which is crucial for generating revenue in the long run.
If you want to master social media management, then you’ll need to understand how to plan, produce, and optimise top-tier content.
As a social media manager, you’ll be responsible for delivering fresh creative ideas, analysing competitor activity, harvesting User Generated Content, and conducting audience research to understand which content resonates with your followers.
To maintain consistency, you should aim to build a detailed content calendar, planning out individual posts and content themes to keep your brand active on social media. It’s also a good idea to schedule posts based on real engagement data, as this will allow you to maximise performance and capitalise on audience behaviours.
The power of creative content should never be underestimated on social media. Social media management platform Hootsuite, for example, attracted 11.8k followers in just 10 months by focusing on quality organic TikTok content.
By developing content that revolved around platform trends and audience behaviours, Hootsuite achieved a huge increase in user engagement, proving the importance of smart content strategies within social media management.
6. Maintaining community engagement (and protecting brand reputation)
Social media provides your brand with the opportunity to directly engage target audiences and build a loyal following.
However, your customer relationships need to be handled carefully. While brands can benefit massively from positive customer exchanges, negative interactions can be damaging to a business’s reputation.
Once again, this is where diligent social media management is crucial.
While managing your social media profiles, you’ll essentially be playing the role of brand guardian. You’ll be responsible for delivering customer service, engaging with consumers, and maintaining a sterling reputation for your business online.
The more responsive a business is on social media, the more likely they are to retain loyal customers and build a positive brand image. However, research shows that while 79% of consumers expect brands to respond within a day of reaching out over social media, the average response rate is less than 25% across all industries.
By placing a strong emphasis on community engagement and effective social media management, you can get ahead of the competition and strengthen customer trust.
7. Launching paid advertising campaigns
Beyond organic content production and community engagement, social media managers are also responsible for another vital task – launching paid advertising campaigns.
While organic activity is key for engaging existing customers, you’ll also need to utilise paid marketing campaigns to reach hot prospects and generate cost-efficient conversions.
As part of your role as a social media manager, you’ll be tasked with:
- Setting up paid social campaigns on different platforms
- Identifying profitable audiences for targeting
- Monitoring ad delivery (and implementing optimisations)
- Launching A/B tests to improve performance
- Creating paid assets across multiple social channels
Well-managed paid social campaigns can lead to consistent engagement across the sales funnel, increased conversions, and a superior ROI for your business. As a result, you’ll need to understand how to leverage paid ads across a broad range of networks.
With a combination of effective organic marketing and data-driven paid advertising, you can achieve amazing results for your brand on social media.
Which tools are important for social media management?
To maintain effective social media management, you’ll need a strong grasp of basic platform tools.
That means understanding how to post regular content, measure engagement analytics, set up paid ad campaigns, and implement optimisations.
Here are a list of top 5 social media management tools:
1. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is first on the list because it’s the social media management tool of choice here at JeffBullas.com. For its price, it is far and away the most feature-packed option on the market.
Agorapulse lets you schedule content for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all in one place. It also has dynamic reports on four social networks and bonus features such as running social promotions and managing your social media inbox.
Why Agorapulse wins the social media management race:
- The pricing is reasonable given the rich list of features, starting as low as $99 a month.
- The content publishing features are the best in the market, with beautiful visual previews of all content, and a robust evergreen content publishing system that will save you tons of time.
- The social media inbox lets you quickly go through incoming messages across any of your social accounts, check them off, and keep the mess out of your email inbox.
- The reporting is easy to customize, it looks awesome, and you can export reports as a PowerPoint presentation, which is especially good for agencies and in-house reporting requirements.
Let’s take a quick look at some of these benefits in action.
Visual previews of all social media messages
A robust evergreen content publishing system
This powerful feature enables you to create a library full of evergreen content and re-publish it based on a predetermined schedule.
It’s as easy as creating categories for your content:
And then choosing timeslots during the day for this content to be published:
This feature alone will save you hours and hours every week, not to mention it has the potential to increase your followers and dramatically increase traffic back to your website by re-sharing evergreen content over time.
Social media inbox
Agorapulse’s social media inbox allows you to filter all of your mentions and messages from integrated social accounts, quickly review and like the ones that don’t require attention, or assign the response to people in your team if necessary.
Easy and beautiful reporting
The analytics reporting with Agorapulse is simple enough for any social media manager to make sense of in no time, but it also provides enough meaning to articulate the value of social media to key stakeholders. Here is a look at the metrics overview and followers graph:
These are just a few of the many powerful features Agorapulse has to offer. Add to this ads monitoring, competitor analysis, social listening, a social media calendar, a Chrome extension, and team workflows, and you are left with one behemoth of a social media management tool. It’s quite amazing that its pricing is so competitive. Unlike like the other tools on this list, Agorapulse is an all-in-one solution and you won’t need to patch together 3 or 4 different social tools to achieve the same outcomes.
It sounds too good to be true, are there any cons to using Agorapulse?
The only (minor) downfall of Agorapulse is the same reason it is such a powerful option, and that is its lengthy feature list. For a first-time social media marketer, the extensive feature list may be too much to come to grips with initially.
There is a bit of a learning curve to extract all of the possible value from this tool. So if you’re new to social, it might not be the best starting point.
But if you’re ready to take your social media game to the next level and want to save a bunch of time in the process, sign up for Agorapulse and give it a whirl.
2. Social Report
Social Report is another super awesome social media management suite, offering an incredibly wide range of scheduling, reporting, and monitoring features that are powerful enough for established marketing teams and agencies, but also user-friendly enough for small businesses and social media managers just getting off the ground.
Overall, here are a few reasons social media managers, agencies, and enterprises are falling in love with Social Report:
- Social Report’s plans are incredibly well-priced for the number of features you get (starting at $49/mo) and they include a 30-day free trial with all plans.
- These guys crush it with their scheduling features and being the first tool to introduce new features (they were the first social media management tool ever to offer direct video scheduling to Instagram).
- Social Report also includes a ton of free features that you’d typically have to pay for with other tools (like evergreen content scheduling, Instagram post previews, grid planner, and more).
- Their reporting tool is certified awesome and includes probably one of the most robust analytics pages that we’ve ever seen in one dashboard (allowing you to show your clients how your social media marketing and management skills generate actual ROI).
Here’s a more in-depth look at all the goodness Social Report brings to the table for its users:
Supercharged post scheduling (especially for Instagram)
On the scheduling side, Social Report allows you to directly schedule photos, videos, and other posts to networks like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Users have access to over 2000+ emojis, stock imagery, and an in-app photo editor.
As an Instagram Marketing Partner, the tool also offers direct post scheduling to Instagram (for both videos and photos). Additionally, they offer some pretty neat post previews and an Instagram grid preview that you can use to see new Instagram posts (and other social posts) as they’ll appear in your feed and on your grid before you actually click post.
Tip: For your video editing, use the pre-made templates in InVideo to create stunning professional-level videos in minutes.
A full-featured social media inbox
No social media management tool in 2019 is complete without an all-in-one social media inbox. Social Report comes equipped with a Smart Social Inbox that lets you view incoming comments, @replies, and DMs across all of your social media accounts.
You can also sort these engagements by type (you can even create custom filters) and reply to them directly from the inbox – no native posting required.
Unrivaled reporting and analytics
In all honesty, their reporting and analytics are superb for what’s on the market. Social Report has both single and cross-channel reports that track your growth and engagement.
You can then easily one-click export these reports to presentation-ready PDFs as well as automatically email them to clients or superiors on a scheduled basis (you also have the option to export all of your reports as raw data into Excel – if you want to crunch your own numbers).
The greatest pro of all
Perhaps the greatest pro of Social Report is that it offers everything you need without breaking the bank. In fact, it has a super competitive pricing structure compared to most tools its size.
Plans range from $49 to $199 per month (max), with each plan including a varying number of social accounts and addable team-members. Their strongest plan – the Pro Plan – even includes full white-labeling with a zero-cost setup fee.
Test drive any of Social Report’s plans for a full 30-days, 100% free.
3. Hopper HQ
Hopper HQ is a brilliant tool if you’re a social media manager or small business who needs to save time growing your engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
It is designed primarily for scheduling Instagram posts, so if Instagram is your thing, look no further!
Why does Hopper HQ stand out from the crowd?
- It automatically posts everything for you, including video and multiple-image posts
- It schedules and automatically posts your first comment together with the post
- You can bulk upload and edit content
- It has a grid and calendar planner
- It has an extremely easy to use, visual, drag and drop design
If we had to choose one reason we love Hopper HQ, it’s the simple auto posting which lets you set and forget. Unlike other Instagram schedulers, you won’t need a mobile app and won’t get reminder notifications to publish videos or multiple-image posts at the scheduled time.
First comment, #Hashtag suggestions, multiple accounts & more
First comments, #hashtag suggestions, @mentions, account tagging, and location tagging are all key features to increase your engagement and gain more followers on Instagram. Hopper HQ has them all!
You can also create a single post then schedule it to multiple accounts, including Facebook and Twitter, which is a huge time saver,
Plan your calendar
Hopper HQ’s visual drag and drop calendar tool makes it easy to plan your content in advance.
You can also set your default posting times for each day of the week to save even more time scheduling content – especially if you want to bulk upload images and videos then schedule them all at once.
Grid planner
Instagram users often scroll through your grid when checking you out for the first time and deciding whether to follow you. Rearranging your posts with the drag and drop grid planner on Hopper HQ means you can perfect the look of your Instagram feed.
Summary
If Instagram is your focus, and you also post to Facebook and Twitter, then Hopper HQ is the easiest, most time-saving scheduling tool for you to use.
It’s great value for money because you only pay for the number of Instagram accounts you use ($19 each) and it gets even cheaper the more you have.
You can try it out with their free 14-day trial before you decide to pay.
4. SEMrush
You’re probably familiar with SEMrush as an SEO tool. But they also offer a range of social media features that make them a worthy addition to this list.
With SEMrush’s social media toolkit, you can:
- Schedule posts.
- Find the best time to post.
- Analyze your content.
- Discover more about your audience.
- Conduct competitor analysis.
- And more…
Start using SEMrush for free here.
5. Social Oomph
SocialOomph helps you re-post content on Facebook and Twitter on an automated schedule. It’s one of the most powerful social media management tools on the market, but its interface is a little clunky and old-school. If all you are looking for is a time-saving tool to repost content for you, then Oomph is worth a look. But if you want something more extensive that is easy to use, and encompasses your entire social strategy, than I’d recommend looking elsewhere.
Now, if you want to track the progress of your social media management, here are the top 5 social media analytics apps:
1. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is one of the best social media tools to analyze and show how your website content is performing on different social media platforms. For example, Buzzsumo lets you know how many shares your blog have received on Twitter and Facebook.
You can easily grab attention from your targeted audience via social media channels. Hence, it is necessary to understand what most of your customers expect. Buzzsumo helps you get insights into the number of shares every piece of content gets and the type of content that performs best on each platform. This depends on the content type, length, and the publish date.
2. Google Analytics
Technically, Google Analytics is not a social media tool. But it’s still one of the best tools to measure social ROI and track social media campaigns. You might already have Google Analytics set up on your website for monitoring and analyzing traffic, you can also create and access reports that will be specifically related to social media tracking.
For example, you should be able to see how much traffic is coming to your websitefrom social networks or can use UTM parameters for tracking particular social media campaigns.
3. Quintly
Quintly uses social data for providing effective solutions to agencies, brands, and media. It allows businesses to validate their social media efforts with powerful analytics tools.
On average, Quintly offers 350 social media analytics metrics. As a business, you can leverage these statistics or even customize them to measure your goals effectively. Additionally, with Quintly, you can arrange all the relevant social media KPIs on a pre-existing or a customized dashboard.
Moreover, you have an option to observe all your channels and compare them with one another to have comparative insights.
4. Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you track all the underlying data of your boards. With the help of this tool, you can monitor the number of followers, likes, pins, and repins. It provides data in the form of a spreadsheet which makes sorting easy for you.
Viralwoot enables you to track the SEO level of your social media board in order to improve its search rankings. Moreover, it also provides you with trending keywords for Pinterest. With this tool, you can analyze your content as well, such as which is your most pinned piece of content.
5. SproutSocial
SproutSocial offers social media management software to help businesses implement effective social media strategies and accomplish desired goals. It includes a robust social media management tool that incorporates social analytics in detail.
With SproutSocial, you can access all the analytics related to various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter from a single platform.
SproutSocial shares multiple reports of your social media accounts. It includes an engagement report on your Facebook page to your task performance report.
Final thoughts
Social media management is much more than posting regularly or simply responding to comments—it’s a strategic balancing act. You’re constantly adapting to new algorithms, engaging with your audience, and maintaining a consistent brand voice across multiple platforms. And with the rise of management apps like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social, you’ve got the tools to stay organized, streamline your processes, and track your performance all in one place.
But here’s the thing—while tools make it easier, the heart of social media management lies in understanding your audience and delivering content that resonates. It’s about being intentional with every post, keeping up with trends, and using data to refine your approach. And don’t forget the human touch. Genuine engagement and interaction are what keep people coming back, not just slick automation.
At the end of the day, social media management is an ongoing effort that combines creativity, strategy, and the right tech. It’s an art and a science, but when done right, it’s one of the most powerful ways to build a lasting connection with your audience and grow your brand in today’s digital landscape. Keep learning, experimenting, and optimizing—because the world of social media never stands still, and neither should you.
Guest Author: Jordan Bucknell is the founder and CEO of [Upbeat], a London-based digital marketing and social media agency. We help companies to drive sales, generate leads and grow their brand using forward-thinking creative and the latest media buying techniques.