What do our social media managers do? Expert showcase with Jacinda Love
At Get Ahead, our great strength is our team of virtual experts. Every member of our team is an expert in at least one area of business support. This month, we meet Jacinda Love, one of our newest virtual experts. Jacinda is an experienced marketing manager whose work covers writing and editing, branding, strategy, social media and more. She believes passionately in “joining the dots” – feeding every piece of marketing into an overall strategy to get the best results for Get Ahead’s clients.
In this blog, Jacinda takes us through her approach to the social media aspect of her role.
What do joined-up dots look like?
When a client has a detailed marketing strategy and the client is sticking to it, it will be effective. The dots will be joined up and the picture will be complete.
Social media might sound like a straightforward task that business owners could do by themselves. Most business owners are doing a great job with their core business, but don’t have time or the right depth of knowledge to create an effective social media strategy. In fact, every step needs the right kind of input to be effective.
What is the right kind of input?
“Right” is an important word. For instance, for social media to be effective, you have to focus your efforts on the right goals. For example, I believe that it’s worth investing time in background work. This might be looking at what the competition are doing and examining how much engagement different types of posts are getting. Who is interacting with your posts – is it new people whom you’re hoping to convert, or is it staff within your organisation who automatically “like” every post?
Timings are also important. I always analyse social media data and consider when the best time is to post. I look at the times when potential clients are online and likely to have time to interact. I keep an eye out for changes too: for example, during the pandemic, more people checked their social media first thing in the morning because they weren’t running for a train. I noticed this trend and adjusted the times I posted accordingly, so my clients continued to get good traction. Other trends change, like the type of post that people respond to – the last year has been a rollercoaster!
Once the groundwork is done, the posts have to be created and scheduled. Of course, the posts have to follow your business’s branding and tone, as well as being interesting to the people who are going to read them. It’s not as simple as just loading a life quote into Hootsuite!
Scheduled posts can usually be left alone, but sometimes it’s important to check back, particularly if the climate has changed. For example, in the first week of lockdown last year, I spotted a tweet from a London business suggesting everyone visit the Natural History Museum – whoever was doing their social media had clearly dropped the ball.
That sounds like a lot of work!
Well, it is! But I do it every day so it’s second nature, and because social media management is one of my specialisms, I’m not trying to run a business in a different industry at the same time. I know where to find the social media stats so I can develop the right strategy, and I have lots of great software to make post creation run smoothly.
Many thanks to Jacinda for sharing some of her expertise with us! You can find out more by visiting her page here.
