5 Agency Must-Haves for Social Media Management

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An overview of key features every agency needs for managing social media-powered campaigns for multiple clients.

Social media has grown from a curiosity to an integral piece of corporate strategy in the space of only a few years. Nearly overnight, companies have brought on whole teams of specialists to craft effective social media strategies and manage multiplying numbers of social media accounts. Big companies are hungry for better social media tools to engage their constituents. Below is a list of the top five tools to help agencies tap that.

1. Timing is Everything: Scheduling

Social media doesn’t sleep, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to! Ensure your social media management tool of choice allows you to schedule messages in advance. So even if you’re in New York and you need to get a message out to your client’s customers in Tokyo during their workday, schedule it and, as Ron Popeil would say, “Set it and forget it.”

If you want to take scheduling to the next level, look for a tool that offers the ability to schedule large batches of messages at once. This will be a super useful time-saver when it comes to managing campaigns or contests that require heavy messaging around a certain period of time.

2. Don’t Play Hide and Seek: Geo-Targeting

When it comes to interacting with your client’s customers, those in different locations may have different needs, speak different languages or follow different trends. Content that is targeted to individual needs is more likely to receive acknowledgement and be shared widely. Optimize your searches and filter your searches by language.

Using geo-targeting allows agencies to target their messaging efforts based on geo-region or language and helps your content spread like wildfire across multiple social networks.

3. Fuel the Buzz: Keywords

Social media is also an effective way for agencies to keep their finger on the pulse. Setting up keywords or search streams provide insight into what is trendy among your clients’ target audience. This can help agencies develop marketing strategies that focus on customers’ lifestyles and personal preferences.

Keywords are useful for keeping track of competitors’ activities but they’re also useful for tracking brands that are complementary to your clients’ offering. If your client’s software is often purchased in conjunction with another product, keep an eye on the complementary product’s social media activity to take advantage of promotions or recent sales, as these are potential leads ready to be converted.

5 Agency Must-Haves for Social Media Management

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4. Organize Your Owls: Collaboration

It takes two to tango especially when it comes to being social. Collaboration is key when it comes to developing and executing an effective social media campaign. Ensure your social media management tool enables your team to seamlessly collaborate with clients to ensure you execute an integrated social media management strategy.

Useful team collaboration tools include the ability to set different levels of permissions across team members. This will allow agencies to ensure messages are aligned and approved before publication – and no one drops an F-bomb while on company time. Back-end sharing means messages aren’t duplicated by different departments.

You want to be sure that your tool is scalable and intuitive, and will turn your account team into a Social Media Command Centre. 5. Analyze This: Reporting

Gone are the days of social media purely being about ‘building buzz.’ It is now a line item in budgets as companies invest resources in these channels and there is an expectation for reports which show ROI for social media outreach.

Make sure your tool has the ability to analyze important metrics such as click-through rates on shortened links, clicks by region and top referrers. It’s also important to have access to Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

The most effective tools will provide agencies with the ability to access in-depth granular metrics on the efficacy of their social media programs. This will allow agencies to determine which messages resulted in the highest number of conversions, which platform is providing the greatest return and which time of day is most effective to drive traffic.

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Calling all Agency Owls Social is here to stay and to maintain a competitive advantage, agencies need to stay abreast of this ever-evolving space. HootSuite has a Partner Program designed for agencies looking to enhance their presence and return in the social media space. Benefits of the program include access to exclusive partner resources, training and support to help agencies demonstrate social leadership, streamline operations and drive value for their clients by introducing them to HootSuite Pro and Enterprise solutions.