Social Media Management vs. Social Media Marketing: Beginner's Guide
One of the ways businesses can expand their reach to their audience to build brand awareness is by using social media platforms. Social media management and social media marketing are two marketing techniques that have some similarities and differences with the way they work.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management deals with having an account on any social media platform(s), meant to create and provide content on them and engage with your audience. Typical duties include responding to comments or messages, updating your profile information, hosting giveaways, and much more. Social media management makes sure you are using your social media accounts on an intentional and authentic level. The most popular platforms to post social media content are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter/X.
Source: Sprout Social
Organizing something like a weekly calendar to post on several social media platforms on a weekly basis can be useful. This allows you to ensure that you are posting consistently for your curious followers. As Sprout Social (above) is a paid tool, the free version of a tool similar to this is Business Meta Suite.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Like the name suggests, social media marketing is when you are using your business’ social media accounts to market and grow your business. While social media management focuses on how often social media accounts are used, social media marketing instead relies on creating and executing a strategy in order to produce leads for your business through your social media platforms. You are creating and posting content to engage visitors and lead them to your website. It can also rely on advertising to grow your social media following and expand your reach.
Wendy’s Twitter/X page shows their distinctive brand color, logo, and their products featured in their background. When customers find and see the page, one of the first things they will see is the brand’s logo because it stands out from different fast food brands due to its color.
The Benefits of Social Media Management
- Allows businesses to post content to their social media channels for free.
- Increases brand awareness as customers can determine whether a business is legitimate based on social media posts, reviews, engagement, mentions, etc.
- Helps in understanding the right time for posting relevant posts and creating images that fit the content.
- Helps in monitoring customers making a purchase of a brand’s product. An example can be where if a customer has a complaint about a product (e.g. it is broken, it does not work, etc.), then the business can address the customer’s complaint and resolve it like offering a replacement. This increases brand loyalty and trust with customer complaints resolved.
- Increases visibility so that customers can find social media accounts of businesses easily. Whether they are looking for solutions to their problems, social media is great to make a presence and build trust with potential leads.
The Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- Can study the competition. You can gain insight in areas you need to improve on and what not to do by looking through your competitors’ social media posts. This can help gain a sense of how they are promoting a product and which trends they are focusing on.
- Drives in web traffic, leading to more people to your website, thus resulting in more sales. Linking to your website on your social media posts and including referral links in your bio are ways that can help increase traffic.
- Can boost leads by running specific lead generation ad campaigns. For Facebook, ads can be used to encourage more people to sign up to your online event, grow your email list ahead of a product’s release time, or to collect customer information.
- Creates brand recognition by consistently posting social media content that aligns with your branding. Having a branded social media profile allows your brand to be better recognized by people, which includes graphics, profile photos, cover photos, and even calls to action.
- Can target specific audiences based on geography or demographics. An example can be where a business can choose to only display ads in a specific location, which can save on ad costs by not getting clicks for people that reside outside the business’ area.
The Differences Between Social Media Management vs. Social Media Marketing
Both marketing techniques function differently in terms of their strategies. One focuses on developing and applying a short-term approach, while the other deals with maintaining a business’s online existence. Social media management helps in engaging, growing, and reaching an audience through social media. Social media marketing achieves quick results by paying for ads. Digital marketers are the ones responsible for social media marketing within an organization, while social media managers work on social media management to increase a company’s online visibility. Both of these marketing methods acknowledge their target audience, develop content plans, and analyze results to make any strategic changes if necessary. In addition, using both strategies increase brand awareness and drive in more sales.
How Can Two Strategies be Used Together to Achieve Success?
Despite how the two marketing strategies distinguish differently from each other, social media management and social media marketing can actually be used together to form a powerful online presence for your business. Hiring a digital marketing manager can help you strategize your campaigns, pay attention to audience targeting, content strategy, and engagement. At the same time in doing so, hiring a social media manager can monitor, track, and analyze results of your campaigns and make wise tactical changes.
With social media marketing, the key is to create and post content on social media platforms that will interest your audience and motivate them to interact with your brand. As for social media management, you want to engage with your followers and be active by responding to comments, liking posts, following users who follow you, and sharing related content from other sources.
Conclusion
While social media management and social media marketing are both different strategies that have their own factors and utilizations, the two can still be paired up so that your business can create a complete digital marketing strategy to help fulfill goals you may have. At the same time, a social media manager can help you monitor your business’s social media account and make any adjustments to campaigns you have in effect from insights of your followers. If you want to check out some tools to help you get started, HubSpot and Envato Placeit are two tools worth taking a look at.
What’s Next?