Manage Your Social Media Strategy At Scale – While Driving Engagement
The internet has opened up a world of possibilities for small businesses – and a world of conundrums. While social media is a great way for brands to build communities, develop relationships with consumers, and ultimately grow, it can also be extremely difficult to manage at scale as a company develops and enters new markets.
Whether it’s resource constraints, creating bulk content, or tool fatigue, social media management can be complicated, especially when it comes to staying consistent across multiple platforms and maintaining a cohesive brand identity. Here, we’ll go over how to craft a social media strategy that drives growth and engagement while also retaining a core brand identity across various social media platforms. Let’s dive in.
The problems of managing social media at scale
It takes a lot of work to start and grow a brand’s social media account, but it also takes a lot of work to keep the growth going and manage an efficient social media strategy at scale. Here are some issues commonly seen by small businesses looking to expand their online presence:
Resource constraints: Many small businesses just don’t have the resources to hire full-time social media specialists to help manage accounts across various platforms, and thus must prioritize other work that needs to get done for the business. Social media inevitably falls behind and engagement decreases.
Bulk content creation: Creating content doesn’t just take creativity – it takes time. And a lot of it. Many brands struggle to post consistently, mainly because they don’t have a strategy in place to create and schedule bulk content for each month or quarter.
Tool fatigue: With so many tools now available to help manage social media accounts, it can be easy for teams to fall into the trap of tool fatigue, a common problem in today’s online workspace. If you use many different tools for creating, scheduling, and tracking content, it can be difficult to track everything and form a bigger picture of what’s going on. This is where the line crosses from efficient to overwhelming.
Consistency: Maintaining a cohesive brand identity and story becomes difficult when creating content across platforms with different uses, audiences, and purposes. This is especially true when a brand starts to scale and must keep up with more content, more engagement, and more activity to track.
As we can see, social media strategy and management isn’t always (or almost ever) a walk in the park. Once a brand launches an account and succeeds in growing that account, it must then maintain that growth and engagement to keep the momentum going and keep its audience excited about what’s coming next. There are many things that can keep this growth from happening, but luckily there are also ways you can better create and implement a social media strategy that drives engagement while remaining consistent at scale, which I’ll cover next.
Creating a social media strategy at scale
If you’re struggling to manage your brand’s social media strategy at scale, you’re not alone. Many founders and small business teams face resource and budget constraints, and oftentimes social media management gets left behind. The good news is that even if your accounts have fallen behind and you haven’t posted in a while, it’s never too late to make a comeback or evaluate your strategy to better manage and grow your accounts across various platforms – even while your business scales.
While I mentioned tool fatigue as a possible issue of social media management, not all tools will be overwhelming or cause more anxiety. When set up and used the right way, third-party tools and platforms can tremendously help manage workflows and automate processes. Nowadays, almost every popular social media and design tool has AI features made to optimize systems and make them more efficient and scalable. It’s worth learning exactly how these AI tools work since the upfront effort could save you countless hours of admin work in the long run.
Another way to make sure you’re on top of your social media strategy is to have a plan to post consistently. Creating bulk content may seem daunting, but again, it’s a process that requires more work upfront with many advantages down the line. If you struggle with creating and scheduling content for your brand, especially at scale, consider working with an agency that has the resources and expertise to maintain your accounts. If that isn’t an option, carve out a few days at the start of each month or quarter where you do nothing but create and schedule content – you’ll thank yourself later.
Last but definitely not least, consider implementing an audit and peer review system to not just maintain quality, but also ensure that you’re adhering to your brand’s guidelines, values, and identity across various platforms. Make sure to also add in a monthly or quarterly metric evaluation plan to this audit process to determine what parts of your social media strategy you can devote less time to in the future, and where you see areas of potential to really hone in on. It’s all about working smarter, not necessarily longer or harder.
Conclusion
There’s no question that social media is a great way for brands to grow by reaching new audiences, building relationships with those audiences, and engaging with their communities. While a solid social media strategy can fast-track your brand’s growth, it can also be difficult to manage at scale. Whether you’re dealing with common issues like resource constraints, tool fatigue, or maintaining brand consistency, there are ways to craft a better social media strategy that drives growth and engagement, even during scale. From AI tools to audit and tracking systems, finding ways to optimize workflow and processes can lead to continued growth for your brand for years to come.
