Keeping on top of best practices for your organisation’s social media can be a job that you don’t have the time or expertise for. Bringing in an external social media manager or digital agency is a great way of ensuring that you’re on the right channels for your audience, sticking to budget, staying on top of marketing trends, and optimising all the way.
We’ve put together some tips to help you when using an agency for your social media management, so you can trust your digital strategy is perfect for your needs.
1. Set up an admin email
First things first: set up a generic admin email for your social media logins. It’s handy in the event of a member of your team moving on and their firstname@company.com email address becomes null and void. Make sure your social media manager – internal or external – uses this admin email for all dealings related to your social media. Ensure the password is known by at least two people so the email and its contents are accessible when your social media manager is on leave.
2. Ensure your permissions are up to date
With staff and agency changeovers, social channel permissions can be easily overlooked. The user permissions on your Meta or LinkedIn business page dictate who can make updates to a page, assign new permissions and manage ads. It’s important to stay up to date on this not only for security, but also for ease of access. If a page admin with permissions to assign new roles leaves the business, then their access to your business pages should be revoked during their handover period, and new admins assigned to avoid being locked out of your page completely.
3. Don’t put all your eggs in one marketing basket
You may think that because your audience hangs out mostly on Instagram directing all your digital marketing budget there is a good idea. However, if you’re only targeting one channel you are inevitably going to run into problems, plus there is so much more to social media marketing that your agency should be exploring.
Believe it or not, it is scarily easy to have your account blocked or restricted even when posting ads with content within the guidelines. Trying to have these decisions reviewed or reversed can be a time-consuming, stressful experience. Every day you can’t access your account to upload or optimise is costly in so many ways. It’s important to take a multi-channel approach to social media so that if you encounter issues on one channel, you’ve still got a brand presence on others.
Further to this, an effective marketing strategy should include channels beyond social media. While social media is important for brand awareness and lead generation, campaigns should align with EDMs, blogs, traditional media coverage, webinars and more. Your audience is going to be active on some channels more than others, so it’s important to create a marketing ecosystem that captures as much engagement and conversions as possible.
4. Two (factor authentication) is better than one
As data hacks and leaks become more hostile and damaging it is important to have adequate security provisions in place to protect your organisation. Gold standard for social media managers (and for any logins, for that matter) is to have multi-factor authentication (MFA) in place to prevent unauthorised access. The Australian Cyber Security Centre says MFA offers more powerful security and protection against criminals than simply using passwords. They advise using a combination of emails, PINs, SMS or authenticator apps to gain access to accounts.
Check that your social media manager is up to date with digital security and is clear about the steps to take if your account is compromised.
5. Build your email lists
Great social media managers know that, while channels are important marketing tools of their own, social media is a great way to help boost your external customer database, too. Separate database lists are valuable assets that every single company should be actively maintaining, not only for retargeting in paid ad campaigns, but also to still be able to reach your customers in case you find you can’t access a social channel, or your activity is restricted (it can happen!).
Email marketing has been revealed time and time again to have more value than just about any other method of digital marketing – in fact, according to Campaign Monitor, for every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return. Email marketing is effective as you are directly targeting visitors to your site, or customers. These are the people who want to know more about your goods or services, and you have a foolproof way of telling them all they want to know. Ensure your social media manager is continuing to update and refine these lists after campaigns, and make sure those are easily accessible on a shared drive – just in case they leave (it happens!).
I'm keen to work with an agency to help manage my social media. Where do I start?
There are countless digital marketing agencies out there and many promise the world, but how can you be sure they are the right fit for your business? Organising an interview and asking questions is the best way to gauge how they work, and more importantly, how they will solve the problems your business has. Questions to ask include:
- How will you enhance and protect our organisation’s online reputation?
- As social media manager, what steps do you take to protect data across digital channels?
- What is your paid ads strategy across different channels?
Check out our digital agency checklist here for more examples of questions to ask.
