What is Social Media Management?

July 27, 2011 | By Ilfusion Team

So, you’ve created one or more social media accounts for your business. You’re on Facebook, you’re on Twitter, now all you have to do is sit back and watch your numbers grow, right? Wrong. Social media involves much more than just having an account. Think of it as being similar to baking a cake…you might have the ingredients but if you don’t take action, it will never become a cake.

Now that you have your ingredients (social media accounts) it’s time to start mixing them because let’s face it, we’re not in Harry Potter’s world and we know they aren’t going to mix themselves. With social media, this includes being active on your accounts by maintaining a current profile and posting valid status updates frequently. This may take some planning and even creating a schedule – afterall, the instructions on a recipe have an order to be followed.

Next, we want to “heat up the oven” by interacting with others on your social media account. This step includes liking other pages, commenting on others’ photos and status updates and sometimes even posting on their wall. If we don’t turn on the heat, the “cake” will just sit there and nothing will happen. So now that we’ve mixed the ingredients, put the cake in the oven and turned on the heat, we have to wait for a little while for it to bake. This is symbolic to getting followers and fans – it takes a little time to build them up.

After some time has passed, the cake has baked and is ready to be taken out of the oven. Be careful not to overcook or burn it. With social media, this might mean that if you post too many times a day or the content you post is not relevant and interesting, you will actually damage your social reputation and following because your fans will not want to filter through an overload of content or content that doesn’t pertain to them. This will lead them to delete, block or hide you, rendering your social media presence useless.

Now that your cake (and social media presence) has been made, it’s time to decorate it! Make it your own, make it fun, not boring, set it apart from every other “cake” out there!

We understand this might be too time consuming for your schedule, in which case, we would suggest hiring your own chef (AKA Social Media Specialist) to do the “baking” for you. That way you can have your cake and eat it too!