10 Reasons to Consider a Social Media Platform

In the chaos which is social media management, managing multiple social media accounts can often feel like a game of whack-a-mole.

Picture this: You arrive to work with your iced coffee in hand only to discover 30 new emails, 20 DMs to answer, 5 posts to create for 5 platforms, 119 comment notifications and 7 new stakeholder requests.

Each time you knock a task off, two more pop up. 

It can be a lot. 

This is where social media management platforms come into play offering a centralized solution for scheduling posts, publishing content, monitoring conversations, analyzing performance, engaging with audiences, informing product and sales teams and keeping track of competitors. 

As a former Head of Social, I could not run a social team without a proper social management software, but here's 10 reasons why it's a must have for your business - regardless of scale or size. 

1. Streamlined Workflow: I'm both certified in LEAN and Agile and know that not streamlining processes create both productivity costs and culture issues. Management platforms can streamline the complex process of creating, scheduling, and publishing content across multiple social media channels from a single dashboard. This centralized approach saves time and minimizes the switching costs between different tasks and platforms, allowing your team to focus on creating - and optimizing high-quality content for your business. With one of my clients with a 10 person social team we tracked the time and this saved over 100 hours per month - which can definitely add up over time. 

2. Content Scheduling and Automation: One of the best ways to ensuring brand consistency and content mapping through the year is through scheduling your evergreen content well in advance. Social management software allows you to schedule posts in advance, ensuring a consistent schedule. As a Head of Social this allowed me to visually and quickly identity gaps. Additionally, the automation features allow you to recycle evergreen content, repurpose top performing existing posts, and maintain a steady stream of engagement without constant manual posting. Some platforms also have campaign or content tagging features which allow your team to categorize posts to easily find them and see the analytics behind these in the future. 

3. Improved Collaboration: Social media management platforms offer collaborative features that facilitate communication and content creation among your social team. Whether you're a startup or an enterprise organization, features such as content approval workflows, task assignments, and a centralized shared calendars can be an absolute game changer when it comes to organized collaboration. As a former Head of Social this would also help me as a leader quickly identify content gaps, process issues or skills gaps. 

4. Analytics and Reporting: It's almost impossible to get proper reporting by pulling reports across individual native platforms. And unless your social media manager has 10+ hours a week to devoteyou won't be able to see the longitudinal trends. Social media management platforms provide in-depth analytics and reporting tools that offer valuable insights into your social media performance. Just be sure to pick platforms that have API analytics integrations. Not all do. Some only have an API from a publishing perspective. Look for platforms that provide brand to demand analytics help you understand what content resonates with your audience, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your social media strategy. Without a social management platform, teams may only be able to report monthly and miss out on the real time daily analytics insights. 

5. Audience Engagement: Both employing social listening and engaging with your audience is essential for building relationships and fostering brand loyalty. Social media management platforms come with built-in tools for monitoring comments, messages, and mentions, allowing you to respond promptly, understand client pain points, inform product development, address customer inquiries, and nurture relationships.

6. Content Curation and Discovery: Often social teams forget that social strategy can be a mix of creation and curation. Finding relevant content to share with your audience can be time-consuming. Social media management platforms simplify this process by offering content curation and discovery tools that help you find trending topics, industry news, and user-generated content to share with your followers which enhance your brand's authenticity and credibility. The importance of creators and UGC content cannot be overstated - the traditional model of PR is dead.

7. Advanced Publishing Features: Beyond basic scheduling, social media management platforms offer advanced publishing features such as bulk scheduling, post customization, and post optimization. These features enable your social team to customize your content for each social media platform, experiment with different publishing times - all to maximize the reach and engagement of your posts. At my last tech company we saw marked engagement increases simply by shifting our publishing times to align with our audiences activity using Hootsuite's Best Time to Publish feature.

8. Compliance and Risk Management: For highly regulated industries or businesses with strict compliance requirements, social media management platforms offer features for ensuring compliance with industry regulations and company policies. Enterprise teams often have multiple social media personnel posting so that poses a potential risk. From content approval workflows to automated responses, to canned responses and archiving capabilities, these platforms help mitigate risks associated with social media communication and ensure brand consistency across channels. As a Head of social I could approve/reject posts and view them in a batch format. I could also set up stricter approvals for more junior social team members that needed more support. 

9. Competitive Analysis: Understanding your competitors' social media strategies is crucial for staying ahead in your industry and creating whitespace for your brand. Social management platforms have competitive analysis tools that allow you to monitor your competitors' activity, benchmark your performance against theirs, and identify opportunities to differentiate your brand. 

10. Scalability and Growth: Whether you're a small startup or an enterprise corporation, social media management platforms are scalable solutions that can grow with your business. As your social media presence expands, these platforms offer the flexibility to add new team members, track historical performance, manage additional accounts, and implement more sophisticated strategies to support your business goals.

If you're interested in learning more about social media management software, The Brand Audit is an official Hootsuite Partner! We're able to give you a demo, strategic consulting on the platform and map it's capabilities to your objectives. Contact Us to book a FREE 60-min consulting session. 

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