The Difference Between Social Media Marketing and Social Media Management
We hear the terms social media marketing and social media management thrown around a lot, but what do they mean? What’s the difference? Which one is most effective for your businesses and how the heck do we implement either of these into our marketing strategy? Or better yet, how do we implement both?Let’s start with the fun stuff, social media marketing. As someone who has studied and practiced marketing, this is the portion of social media I am most drawn too. Any chance I get to play around with target audiences, demographics and retargeting I feel myself getting super juiced PLUS if I pepper in fancy marketing acronyms like PPC, CPM or CTR, I become an even happier marketer.Social Media Marketing, in my mind, is nearly identical to any other marketing campaign that a business will run. We set goals and strategies and we measure objectives and implement useful tactics. We get hyper targeted to ensure only the people we want to see our ads will see them. Adjustments will be made to optimize our budget and to further increase the effectiveness of our objectives. Almost any objective is possible through social media marketing: Brand awareness, increasing website traffic, acquiring qualified leads, adding to our email list, retargeting shopping cart abandonment, sales… the list goes on. And on. And on. Social media marketing is extremely effective for B2B, CPG, and lifestyle brands. If your company falls into any of these catteries you simply must be doing social media marketing.Then there is the much more widely used version of social: social media management. This is where the grind of social media comes in. Content creation, graphics, scheduling, monitoring and customer service. This takes up a huge amount of time when compared to social media marketing. Our company uses an internal time tracking system and when we took a look at social media marketing vs. management we realized how much time actually goes into social media management. 40% of our time when it comes to social media is used for content creation alone. This includes locating assets, creative creation, content creation, reviews and edits. That is a crazy amount of time and the more content you create the more time it takes, obviously.Another huge portion of social media management is scheduling posts and customer service. We usually create content a month at a time and once all the content is completed and approved we will schedule content in either one social media platform or more, depending on the client engagement, which takes a lot more time. Quality check is always a given, so we make sure images are displayed properly, headlines/CTAs are right, and embedded links are working properly. Not to mention making sure these channels don’t autocorrect our content to something entirely different is a whole process on its own!If your company has a lean budget or no budget at all, social media management is where you’ll be living. However, I must warn you, the game of relying purely on organic content will be difficult to develop into something fruitful for your business. I highly recommend reallocating a portion of your marketing dollars towards social media marketing. By doing so and depending on your industry and geography you could be a step ahead of the competition.In a perfect world social media marketing and management should work cohesively. They should either be supporting each other’s efforts or segmented in a way that you are hitting different audiences at different points in the sales funnel. The management portion is great for nurturing your current audience and customers while the marketing portion is great for developing new leads and conversions. When used correctly they both can make a major impact for your business.