The Future of Work — Social Media Management vs. Marketing

Social media management and social media marketing are often used interchangeably but they are not the same.

Social media marketing involves content creation, understanding the client/audience, and understanding how to create content to speak to a specific group of people.

Social media management involves not only sharing content but also doing engagement and follow-up.

This is what I call the Sonic VA way — combining the best and most important aspects of social media marketing and social media management.

The 4 phases of social media management (inclusive of social media marketing) are:

1. Content creation

An example of the content my team creates is for one of my businesses, Mastermind Ph, where both business owners and employees can collaborate or mastermind together. It’s about finding the right tools or technologies that would allow people to work together even though they are not in the same location. At Mastermind Ph, we create a combination of static posts, graphics and short videos geared toward educating the group members. A lot of the posts are evergreen, which makes it crucial to have good images and good captions.

2. Posting

Social media posting is more than just scheduling the posts across different platforms. There has to be a strategy and this is where the difference between social media marketing and social media management comes in. When is the optimal time to post? To know this, you need to know your audience well to identify when they are usually online so that when your post becomes live they will see it. Are you tracking the likes, shares, and comments? These are indicators of the kind of content your audience wants to see and understanding the data will help you plan the kind of content to create in the future so there will be better engagement.

3. Engagement

The next phase is engagement, which is how you respond to likes, shares, and comments. If you don’t have time to respond to your followers, you can hire a VA. As long as you have a script for the commonly asked questions, your VA can respond on your behalf. The goal is for you, as the business owner, to free up your time from having to do social media management so you can focus on growing your business.

At Sonic VA, the engagement phase is where we apply the 333 method, which is:

• Day 1 — Compliment — When someone likes a post, you or your VA can visit their page, like one of their posts, and leave a genuine and meaningful compliment.
• Day 2 — Comment — This is taking the complimenting stage a bit farther by commenting on their page, tagging them in a relevant post, and essentially creating a more interactive environment. It’s important not to come off as too sale-sy at this point because that could turn the person off and drive them away.
• Day 3 — DM — Send the person a direct message with your call to action (CTA). It could be to join your group, sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, or any action that you want them to perform. If they respond to your CTA, that’s an indicator that you have a hot lead. If they don’t, do not spend any more effort in converting them at this time.

4. Follow up

This is the point where you follow up on the leads that you did not convert in the previous phase. Not all leads can be converted but have a system in place that will help you determine which ones are worth following up with. You should follow up several times within a period ranging anywhere between two weeks and two months, depending on your business. Have a script and a plan on how you will identify which leads to follow-up and when. Again, this is where a VA’s help is invaluable.

Having a plan and a strategy that cover all these four phases will result in social media mastery, which is what we teach our virtual staff at Sonic VA.

Have you subscribed to my YouTube channel yet?

Click the link for more video content about the future of work, virtual staffing, data analytics, and more — https://www.youtube.com/c/DanMeyerVirtualStaffingExpert

#thefutureofwork #virtualstaffing #virtualassistant #socialmediamanagement #socialmediamarketing #sonicva #mastermindph

Dan Meyer Sonic VA, which specializes in matching Filipino Virtual Assistants with American Small Business clients and has been a leader in the outsourcing industry since 2011.

Dan is also one of the top experts in Virtual Staffing and has personally trained over 10,000 Filipinos in areas such as virtual assistance, data analytics, business process outsourcing and social media marketing & management.