Social media is becoming a more and more powerful tool in B2B marketing, and agencies often work across a variety of clients’ social channels on a day-to-day basis. Social media management isn’t as simple as writing 150 character posts, choosing a pretty picture and hitting ‘Publish’. Success involves tactics, strategy, creativity, precision and overall channel management.
How can we easily and efficiently manage content across multiple clients and channels? The answer is simple: use a social media management tool. There are various tools out there on the market designed to help you across publishing content, reporting, social listening and community management: Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Schedule are a few. Each platform will have its strengths and weaknesses, but they are all there to help make your life as a social media manager easier.
At Green Hat, we use Sprout Social to manage social media for our clients. In our time with the platform, we’ve noted a few main benefits that have optimised our work and processes and improved our relationships with our clients.
1. Easy client access & transparency
Access is often discussed when pitching a new tool to clients – and why not? With their reputation on the line, clients and their multiple stakeholders should be able to jump into any platform at any time and oversee the operation. Some social media management tools, like Sprout, offer multiple user log-ins as part of your plan to give clients the access they need.
As account owners, we at Green Hat can grant them varying levels of permission, from editing and approving posts and accessing reports to updating the billing. Each platform will allow different permissions, but here are some of the options Sprout offers:
Transparency – client approvals
The sub-bonus of access leads us to transparency. Not only can our clients easily access Sprout from their office devices and their mobiles devices, but they also have the power to edit, approve and reject any social posts we have drafted.
Sprout Social’s approval feature allows authors (those creating the posts) to select an approver at the drafting stage so content can be overseen by any client stakeholders, such as a legal team. This approval system gives the legal team and social media managers a chance to review the copy, imagery and scheduled date/time, and make edits, reject or approve the post from one location. Additionally, it reduces time screen capturing and emailing posts or working from a large and often messy spreadsheet.
2. Reduced costs and time
At Green Hat, we’ve noticed a marked decrease in time during the drafting and management process than we did pre-Sprout. This translates into cost savings for our client and freed up our time to spend on the creative execution.
As an agency with multiple social media clients, we constantly need to bounce between accounts on a day-to-day basis. The old process looked a little something like this:
- Build all posts in Spreadsheets with columns for copy, imagery, links and themes across multiple social media platforms
- Seek client review and approval and update posts
- Copy and paste imagery and copy into individual platforms
- Check and cross-reference individual social media platforms to ensure free days
- Notify client posts are ready for publishing
- Manage posts and conversation via individual platforms
Now imagine doing that over multiple clients! These days, the process isn’t quite so complicated, repetitive or manual. Everything is seamlessly done within the social media management platform using their Approval feature.
3. An integrated dashboard
A social media management tool means you’ll be working from one source of truth across multiple channels. From the channel management perspective, there are a number of benefits including:
- A single dashboard to draft, schedule and publish posts;
- Ability to post to all major social media channels;
- Find content from third parties across any topic for posts;
- Seek approval and edits from clients;
- Manage and respond to conversation across all platforms;
- Assign tasks to team members;
- Integrate social listening to your daily activities and;
- Extensive reporting options
4. Advanced reporting options
ROI is viewed as a significant success factor when it comes to marketing. After all, if you can’t prove the monetary benefit of your work back to the organisation, then what’s the point of it all? With many social media management tools, you will have access to a range of different styles of reports: from individual channels, paid performance and engagement, to Google Analytics and sent posts.
Sprout offers more than 20 types of reports to help you analyse the whole picture and the nitty gritty of it all. Beneficially, you won’t ever have to leave the management platform to pull the data you need, and you can export any report as a PDF or CSV depending on your reporting process.
So, what’s next?
Get onto a social media management tool! If you already have one, ask yourself if it’s servicing all your and your clients’ needs. While there will always be a human-element to social media, letting technology take the brunt of the manual work means you can focus on creating valuable and quality content for your clients.
If you have any questions about making the switch from manual to automated social media management, get in touch with us today!
