10 Reasons Why Your Marketing Agency Needs A Social Media Management Platform
Over the past six years, we have served more than 191,000 social media managers, marketing agencies, and global brands. This experience has helped us gain valuable insights into the challenges faced by those who work in this industry.
Here are the top 10 lessons we have learned:
1. Never store the client's social media credentials in plain text
Once, during a screen-sharing call with a customer, they accidentally displayed a spreadsheet containing their clients' social media login information. We could have easily taken control of their Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts with just one screenshot.
Fortunately, most major social networks now offer the option to grant different platform access levels without disclosing passwords. Regardless of whether a client is not tech-savvy or prefers conventional methods, it's crucial to refrain from using this as a justification, as the responsibility ultimately lies with you.
To streamline the process for both parties, various social media management platforms enable clients to grant you access to all their social accounts with just a few clicks and without any risk:
This is what the invitation page from Publer looks like.
Once the client accepts the invitation, they can connect all their social accounts, allowing you to access them automatically.
If you handle several brands, you can make a separate workspace for each client while only signing in to a single account.
2. Using spreadsheets to plan social media content is outdated
Excel and Google Sheets are great at handling data, calculations, and analytics, but they are not suitable for planning social posts.
Social media should be enjoyable, imaginative, and visually appealing. Please avoid making it dull.
Nearly every major social media management platform provides an interactive calendar, allowing you to plan and see all your posts at once:
Just like calendars for meetings and calls, you need one for social media as well.
If you have a posting strategy (which you should), you can easily visualize it. Your clients will love this consistency.
3. There are better ways to brainstorm ideas than group chats
You can get lost in messages and fall out of context if the social media post is out of sight. Wouldn't it be better if you could comment right on a planned social media post?
Up until now, we have only found two social media management platforms that enable you to add notes to scheduled posts:
The note can be intended for your future self, any other team member, or even the client.
4. Resources for design should not be wasted on mockups of social media posts
Customers like to preview posts before they go live on social media. It's understandable, but this necessity causes significant challenges for agencies.
While it's feasible to develop social media templates that allow for simple content insertion, this method is still labor-intensive and error-prone.
The optimal solution would be to have the ability to preview your posts as you type them, which is a feature provided by the following social media management platforms:
In case you didn't know, LinkedIn displays the "see more" breakpoint after three lines when there is a media attachment and after five lines for a status update.
5. Eliminate the need for constant email exchanges with clients for approval
How many emails are needed for your client to approve a post? How many times have you missed a deadline because your client did not pay attention to your email? How often have you had to change the content due to miscommunications?
It is essential to include clients in your social media approval workflow, and using social media management platforms can make this process more efficient:
An approval workflow can also be employed internally to prevent interns or new team members from making public errors.
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6. Scheduling your posts in advance is now the norm
During a recent Live Q&A,?Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, verified that utilizing a 3rd party app will only decrease the reach of your Reel if it has a watermark.
This rule applies to all social networks; otherwise, social media management platforms would not exist.
Start scheduling your clients' posts beforehand and use the time saved from manual posting to interact with the audience. Keep in mind that social media management involves more than just posting.
Below are our top 3 suggested social media scheduling tools:
No reminders. Just peace of mind.
7. Stop copying & pasting the content into each social platform
Businesses often make the mistake of posting identical content across all social networks. As if manually logging in to each platform one by one wasn't enough.
Each social media has its characteristics, technicalities, and user base. What works for Facebook may not work for Twitter, so you must curate your online content, even if the main idea is the same.
Many social media management platforms allow you to customize the post for each network that you're posting to, including:
When posting to multiple networks, we recommend creating the base post and then tweaking it for each social profile.
If you only want to alter the words, AI makes it extremely easy to rephrase the text.
And if you want to crop the image based on social media specifications, Publer & Co. have built-in photo editors.
8. You don't need to monitor the performance of every post manually
There are over ten social networks, and monitoring their performance is a nightmare if you're active on all of them.
Many platforms for managing social media have their own analytical tools that let you see how many likes you got on LinkedIn, how many times people saw your Instagram posts, or how many people watched your YouTube videos all in one place:
Tip: Always monitor the best posts to know what your audience likes.
9. Automatically generate reports to send to the client
Ask any marketing agency about their most hectic period, and they will mention the end of the month. This is when they create client reports, typically by hand.
Social media management platforms come to the rescue:
This is an analytics PDF report generated?by Publer?for our Instagram account. This report is automatically delivered to us via email on the first day of each month.
10. Let the computer calculate the best times to post
If there's one thing that computers do fast, it is calculations and analysis.
Social media management platforms have enough data to conclude the best times to post based on your audience, the performance of your posts, and your competitors:
Focus on the creative part of the process. When to post should be just a click away.
Did you find this article helpful?
Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below, especially if we missed anything.
Oh, and if you have read this far, you deserve a?30-day free trial for Publer for your agency!