"The strategy forms the basis of social media management."

Svenja, why is strategic social media management becoming increasingly important?

Strategic social media management is becoming increasingly important in order for a company/brand/service to be heard and seen in the flood of content on social media. Nowadays, everyone with a digital device, such as a smartphone, has the opportunity to publish content in the form of photos, text or video content via social media apps 24/7. The result: an almost infinite number of posts are published every minute on Facebook, Instagram and the like. It is therefore no longer enough to simply publish "good content" to get through to the masses. These must always be geared towards the set goals and identified target groups and offer added value for the latter.

It should always be about thinking from the strategic basis, in terms of goals and target groups and the core of the message you want to convey, and not directly from the channel. The question should therefore never be "What do we post on Facebook?", but rather "What content has added value for us, our goals and our target group and on which channels should we play it out in which formats for specific channels?"

Publishing a post is by no means the end of the story. Distribution via ads, community management and interactions are just as much a part of this as the planning, creation and posting of social media contributions. Not to forget: a holistic strategic approach always includes measuring success and deriving learnings in order to move on to the next creative idea generation and editorial planning.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

What hurdles need to be overcome in order to achieve success?

In any case, it is a challenge not to lose sight of the objectives and goals and to always remain innovative, in the sense of always trying out new formats and trends.

The biggest challenge is probably the short attention span of users: they scroll through their feeds and stories and our challenge as marketers is to place content here that stands out visually to such an extent that it generates curiosity and becomes a thumb-stopper. This is the only way we can be seen at all and generate interactions, clicks or conversions.

What role do the aforementioned thumb stoppers play in this?

Content plays a central role, if not the central role, in social media management. At its core, it is always about preparing the message you want to spread in targeted, added-value content. This should meet the following requirements:

• Content should match both the company's goals and the user's interests,
• at best clarify questions or problems posed by users,
• they entertain and/or inform and
• trigger emotions in them in order to be remembered in the long term.

Marketing needs content - social media is "just" a channel. In our view, operating social media without the strategic approach of content marketing is not expedient and does not do justice to the channel and the potential of social media.

How does strategy come into play in this discipline?

See also the answer to question 1. The strategy forms the basis of social media management. In order to be able to measure the success of posts, you must first define your goals: what does success actually mean for us? These goals must be operationalized in measurable KPIs (e.g. key figure "number of impressions" for the goal of reach). In addition, you should identify your target group (e.g. using the persona approach) and find out what questions, needs, interests and requirements they have with regard to the products or (services) you offer, which channels they use, where they already have touchpoints with you, etc. You should also ask yourself what the core message is that you want to convey when creating content for social media, what is the "WHY?". Once you have defined this, you can quickly identify target group-relevant topics with added value that can be prepared in the form of channel-specific content and distributed via social media platforms.

"The biggest challenge is probably also the short attention span of users: they scroll through their feeds and stories", Svenja Teichmann
Image credit: REDPIXEL - stock.adobe.com

And crowdmedia then helps with distribution?

At crowdmedia, we have 3 different roles or combinations of them with our clients.

• We are strategists & concept developers: We develop or revise social media strategies and then develop content & channel concepts based on them
• We are implementers: we work with or for our clients on social media channels, which means we develop campaigns and always-on content and also produce it
• We are sparring partners: We look (together) at the goals again and again, derive recommendations for action from the KPIs and consistently develop the social media activities further

What role does Scompler play for you?

There are many tools that can be used to manage social media professionally. But when it comes to spreading a strategic content marketing approach across (social media) channels, Scompler is the leading tool that helps companies to consistently pursue this approach. At the same time, we realize that marketers are becoming increasingly busy with day-to-day business, so they need an approach or tool that makes it easier and enables them to consistently pursue the strategy. This is what we do with the use of Scompler.

Where does the topicality of the subject come from?

Budgets and resources do not grow in proportion to the possibilities (channels, content formats, etc.). It will therefore be increasingly important for content to achieve goals. In addition to the topic of KPIs for measuring success, which is also becoming increasingly important, it is essential to link the results to the goals. When we are dealing with non-performance topics, i.e. branding, image, etc., the connection between strategy (what and who we want to reach) and the results from social media content is becoming increasingly important and Scompler helps enormously to establish this connection. And we are already seeing a growing need here, which is sure to increase in 2022. It is becoming increasingly clear to companies and marketing managers that they need content that achieves goals and not content that fills channels.

Many thanks to Svenja Teichmann for the interview!