Remember those long-gone days when marketing teams would be wrapping up a productive meeting – maybe checking their Blackberries for IMs or tapping a couple closing notes into their palm pilots – when the plucky new intern would say, ‘Hey, what about this social media stuff?’
You know, sites like Myspace.
Back then, social media was a little like a shaken can of Pepsi. Maybe it’s going to blow up, maybe it’ll just tsss a little, and nothing else will happen. Most of us made a couple personal accounts, updated our Facebook status a few times, and tweeted a few updates before, all of a sudden, everything changed. Suddenly, social media was the very definition of ‘ubiquitous’, and most of us just couldn’t (and still can’t) get enough of it.
The best part? The growth of social media created endless possibilities for businesses to grow into themselves, into new audiences, and onto bigger, better things. It meant meeting customers on their own turf, rather than waiting for them to come across your website or your bricks-and-mortar storefront. As of 2023, as many as 93.79% of businesses use social media, with 82% of marketers now stating that social media marketing is at the core of their business operations. What’s more, due to the number of avenues that social media allows businesses to explore, 73% of them say that it has been either “effective” or “very effective” – emphasis on the “very”!
The downside? Good social media publishing – the kind that turns your social channels into the high-ROI powerhouses they could be – takes a lot of time and resources – and scaling your social media ROI takes even more.
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These Tools Aren’t Just for Volume, but Consistency too
We should mention that, yes, 93.79% of businesses use social media, but not all of them are successful. Something that all the most successful social media accounts have in common? They post consistently. Some will post multiple times a day, some will post once or twice a week – some will always have a string of stories live, while others will focus more on creating very detailed, thought-providing think-posts on LinkedIn. But, in all cases, they’ll stick with that social posting model like glue.
This is mainly because, due to the new digitized age that we find ourselves in, social media is not just a luxury for marketers, it’s a necessity. Recent research has shown that consumers find brands with an active social media – either posting multiple times a day or a couple of posts a week – more trustworthy than brands who do not stay active. Visibility, then, has become the difference for companies seeking success, customer attention and customer loyalty.
For this reason, however, marketing teams are always working around the clock. When you haven’t got the right resources to support you, it can feel like you’re constantly playing catch-up – always working deadlines, instead of working with the space to maximize quality.
The right social media management suite will get you scheduling social media posts and approving content in advance, so that those deadlines can be met without resistance. It will make real-time social listening automatic (more on that below), alerting you to trends, which means no more trawling keywords and tags for inspiration.
These Tools Will be Vital for Scaling
Social media is complicated, but it’s driven by a few rules that happen to be pretty simple:
- The more you give, the more you get
- The only constant is change
- Quality beats quantity
- It’s better to plan social media posts than fight fires later
With social media management tools, you can give more to get more. A thriving social media presence doesn’t depend on a massive marketing team. For instance, there are plenty of small businesses out there, with teams ranging from one to five people, who have seen their businesses soar simply because they had great social media skills. Sure, they were probably twenty-or-something-year-olds, but that’s beside the point! Anyone can do it. All that is involved is a shrewd use of the right tools, and plenty of creativity and adaptability to keep up with the changes, and ensure quality always takes precedence.
You Can’t Manage a Real-Time Social Listening Strategy Without Them
Social listening is the glue that holds everything together. It gives you an instant edge over your competitors, since it enables you to know as and when a new trend arises, and to gauge exactly what it is your audience wants to see and read from you (or your competition) on social media.
But social listening is like meteorology. It needs to be done constantly, and in real-time. There’s no use reporting that a storm was building yesterday, just as there’s no value in discovering that a trend was big last month.
With the right social listening tools, you can monitor keywords, brand mentions, and other key moments on social media round-the-clock, without it taking over your marketing team’s lives. AI and automation are what put the ‘real-time’ into social listening possible and, for brands that structure their social media strategies around social listening, they are transformative.
Manually Pulling All Those Invaluable Insights/Metrics is a Time-Drain
To get the most out of your social channels, you’ll want to be reviewing insights generated by every single post that goes live. Reach, interactions, clicks, comments…everything that happens after you press ‘Post’ paints a priceless picture of your impact on social media – what you’re doing right, and what needs to be tweaked.
Consider the value of always knowing how your channels and individual posts are performing in terms of:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Conversions
- Share of voice
- Sentiment
These insights are essential for honing your B2B social media strategy and for demonstrating social media ROI to c-suite executives. Our platforms handle social media reporting automatically, curating insights within PDFs, PowerPoints, or CSV reports, which means up to date KPIs are always to hand.
Optimizing Your Content Strategy Depends on You Having the Right Social Media Management Tools
Humans write the best content. Always have done, always will – and we don’t mind saying it! But content for the sake of content is not going to engage consumers. Despite the buzz going on for AI at the moment, companies will soon discover that users will always prefer the human touch over anything else. Sure, you can send average content out at much higher speeds – the sort of ‘microwaveable lasagna’ of the content world – but that’s not going to draw a crowd. Only really good, fresh lasagna content can do that.
But creating quality content – really good content that cuts through the rest of the noise on social media, gets users to stop scrolling and enter into a conversation in your comments and tags, takes time and money to create.
So how can AI help? Well, if you want to stick with human-written content, it is perfectly possible to use AI as the sous-chef, rather than the head of the kitchen.
Artificial intelligence is incredibly useful for repurposing and diversifying content so that you can publish to your social channels (or via your employee advocacy or B2B influencer marketing strategies) at scale. This is something the development team here at Oktopost know better than anyone, given we’ve created a range of AI-assisted content tools to support your creators as they work to keep up with the demands of social media and community management.
Our Post Wizard can transform texts in moments, and has the capacity to spin one piece of content into many unique alternatives – longer, shorter, more formal, or more casual than the original. This makes it great for responding to comments and tags. Similarly, Message mixer utilizes powerful AI to rephrase messages for advocacy, while Content Spark auto-generates messages (a time-consuming task, done manually) and Story Slinger instantly generates messages based on just a title and description.
AI-assisted content creation is what any modern social publishing strategy needs. You can thank us later.
Integration Boosts Efficiency…and Results
Having the right social media publishing tools is essential, but it’s just the start. The big moment comes when you integrate other marketing tools with your social media management suite, so that everything your marketing team could need is streamlined together – and all those insights paint a 360° view of your marketing channels, customers, and leads.
This is exactly why our social media publishing platform is built to be integrated with your other marketing platforms like Zendesk, Marketo, HubSpot, LinkedIn Ads and Google Analytics (and more).
Integration combined with cross platform social media publishing proves that, the more pieces you have that fit together, the clearer the picture will be.
They’re the Key to Realizing the ROI You’re Looking for
A few years back, social media was a little like the wild west of digital marketing. It was constantly evolving, which made audiences seem volatile and tough to predict, and that scared-off plenty of brands who wanted a more concrete strategy for social media marketing.
In a way, it’s true – social media is prone to change, and it is hard to foresee what’s going to capture audiences’ attention on any given day. But, at Oktopost, we’ve developed the right tools to ensure that marketing ops are equipped to tackle these unique challenges, make publishing on social media scalable, and turn a struggle into a long-lasting and scalable success story.
