Digital Marketing is becoming a transformative tool in media, technology-driven business, and celebrity endorsements. With numerous advantages such as greater access to a large target audience, ease of maintenance, and low cost, there’s no wonder why people are adopting this channel as a necessary medium for marketing activities.

One of the most significant platforms for digital marketing, as we know, is Social Media. Due to its massive global penetration, most brands choose to extend their business through Social Media platforms, and among them are the commonly used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. Yet, one of the most significant hitches is the inability to manage these platforms consistently. When using them for personal use, the content is personal and spontaneous thus, it can be controlled like a breeze, but when it comes to businesses, the content needs to be curated and planned to engage current and potential customers to expand reach over time; often a daunting task requiring focused human & capital resource allocation.

Some of the common social media management problems faced by marketers are discussed briefly below

Lack of management

Much human resource effort is required to update and manage a brand's multiple social media accounts and oversee other essential tasks, such as customer engagement. Yet, the biggest hurdle companies face is the inability of able team members to help manage social media. Even if they can acquire sufficient manpower, managing the team and their collaboration with other members is complex while keeping track of their performance. Also, the idea of creating accounts on all of the popular social media channels seems to be compelling at first as that would indicate getting maximum reach, but posting content on each of them regularly can be a very hectic task that most businesses struggle with.

Result analysis

Gathering insights from your social media is crucial for a successful business to grow. Not only can you test the waters by targeting smaller audiences first, but you can also improve the digital campaigns based on the responsiveness and effectiveness of previous engagement with your valued customers. Unfortunately, only a few social media platforms provide this built-in facility, which can be challenging to interpret for all platforms individually while also costing a lot overall.

Insufficient content

Most social media users find themselves void of ideas for fresh yet relevant content to publish on their social media after a particular time. More hands and minds are needed to create engaging content suitable for diverse audiences and platforms with successive campaigns. But this is, of course, capital-intensive for smaller firms. When a few people try to create content to keep the platforms active, they keep repeating the same topics and post nothing altogether. Even when they post something, it usually fails to capture the audience because it is not compelling enough, or worse, it results from poorly composed text or low-quality or irrelevant media.

Less engagement from followers

People following a brand on social media usually expect new updates, offers, or fresh content now and then as a way to be aware of the brand’s presence offline and online. If it cannot meet their expectations, attract them, or add value to their personal experience, the engagement will drop. If engagement continues to drop or add value to the audience, they are likely to unsubscribe, causing such brands to lose their audience for good.  Generating content aligned with the current trends and using imagery, gifs, and videos are becoming a more common and effective way to keep engagement high; however, most brands struggle with it.

Lack of formal strategy

People new to the field of social media marketing often think of the process as straightforward. But digital marketing is evolving quickly, faster than we can analyze the trends or produce specified best-case practices. Furthermore, there is often incoherence between the different platforms the brand uses. Content on all platforms needs to be aligned to give out a compelling message to the users of all the individual platforms. Thus, they failed to promote their brand as it could have been with a cross-connected plan for online and offline marketing activities.

Targeting the correct audience

When it comes to new businesses, the most challenging task is to attract the right audiences. While businesses are focused on increasing their likes and reach when they are not popular because people might not visit their pages at all, they often ignore reaching their target audience or the follower who is a likely customer. A common way to tackle this difficulty is by targeted ads and retraction campaigns, but in the case of new brands, not everyone can afford them.

Responding to followers

To maintain a fruitful and trustworthy relationship with your followers, it is essential to be responsive to their queries and provide a customized experience. Not only does this enable you to connect with them, but it also allows you in nurturing new leads for your product or service. Even though higher responsiveness is an important factor in successful social media marketing, it is still challenging to keep track of all the comments and messages and cater to them individually, especially for brands with significantly larger audiences.

Social Media Management Solutions

Lucky for us, many Social Media Management tools and applications present online to assist us in tackling these problems and make the process stress-free for you.

The top 10 among them are mentioned below

SocialBu

Problems tackled: Management, Analytics, Responding, and Strategy
Description: SocialBu is an all-in-one solution to almost all of your social media management problems. It is compatible with the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
SocialBu helps you with the most basic of your social media tasks, which include but not limit to scheduling of up to 1000 posts simultaneously at all of your social media accounts and controlling them via a calendar, managing multiple brands, collaborating with your team members, uploading content directly from RSS feed, as well as responding to followers instantly via messages and comments, monitoring popular trends, hashtags, keywords and conversations on social media, and getting detailed analytics of your social media. All of these services can be accessed starting from the minimal cost of just $8 per month, along with a 14-day free trial and there is also a free subscription for business just starting out.

Buzzsumo

Problems tackled: Content Creation, Engagement, Analytics, and Strategy
Description: Buzzsumo is one of the most popular content marketing tools. It assists you in creating compelling content to attract your followers by providing various facilities such as searching trending ideas and keywords along with content examples and samples and comparing past trends and social media formats to know what has been more liked by the audience. Furthermore, it also offers to allow monitoring of specific comments, conversations, and trends and track the performance of your posts. You can also identify influencers to study their social media strategy and implement the inspirations to build up your brand.

RiteTag

Problems tackled: Targeting Audience
Description: RiteTag is a powerful medium that provides hashtags suggestions for your social media content (that might consist of both images and text). You can also group your required tags, compare them, and add them directly to your posts. As these hashtags are searchable, using these help you summarize the purpose of each of your post in just a few words while driving new audience towards it.

Grammarly

Problems tackled: Content Creation
Description: Grammarly is an extremely popular application among people who create content based on text. It provides a chrome extension that corrects the grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes of the passage as you write, thus helping you improve the quality of your posts. Furthermore, it allows you to check for plagiarism so you can avoid being caught in some legal issues. These services can also be accessed by using its online app and digital keyboard.

Canva

Problems tackled: Content Creation, Engagement
Description: Canva is an online photo editor that allows you to design almost any type of social media graphic. With hundreds of templates, fonts, and sample images, you can create images that help you make your content visually appealing and enhance your user engagement. It also lets you design your own branding kit using customized color schemes, typography, and visual language.

Infogram

Problems tackled: Content Creation, Engagement
Description: Infogram is another famous graphical tool that focuses on the creation of infographics, charts, slides, and reports. Infographics are a creative way to graphically represent information to your followers so they can easily interpret it. Along with providing multiple ready-to-use templates, it also enables you to convert your data directly into the graphics, which can then be edited and shared. It also gives the convenience of editing color schemes of the templates and adding animations to your content. Moreover, you can also collaborate with your designing team and measure the performance of your created content through detailed analytics.

Hootsuite

Problems tackled: Management, Analytics, and Responding
Description: Hootsuite is another in-demand social media manager. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and WordPress blogs. While helping you in managing and scheduling social media content with a content calendar, tracking trending topics and conversations, replying to people’s messages and comments, managing your team, and measuring campaign results, it also allows you to schedule posts as you surf the web with the help of its chrome extension.

Zest

Problems tackled: Content Creation
Description: Zest is an efficient content curation application. It provides you with content based on your selected topics and makes sure that it is fresh and appropriate according to your targeted audience. Along with relevant articles and blog posts, you can also view images, infographics, and eBooks in your customized feed that are just according to your specified subjects.

Ahrefs

Problems tackled: Content Creation
Description: Ahrefs is an SEO tool that lets you increase your social media reach by allowing you to study your competitors as well as monitor the topics that interest you. Using Ahrefs, you can view an analysis of high-traffic keywords while also tracking your competitors’ current ranking on those keywords.

Trello

Problems tackled: Management
Description: Trello is a task management application with which you can organize and prioritize your projects in a flexible way by using its boards, lists, and cards. It enables you to create boards on any topic and invite your team to collaborate with you on it. You can then categorize them via lists and cards. It also allows you to add comments, checklists, and other details, and even add progress status tags such as “to-do” and “done” to your tasks.

Effective Strategies to Overcome Social Media Management Challenges

In the dynamic landscape of social media marketing, merely identifying challenges isn't enough; implementing effective strategies to overcome these challenges is key to success. Time management, a common obstacle, can be efficiently handled by employing social media management tools. These tools automate repetitive tasks, enable advanced scheduling, and centralize management across various platforms, improving productivity and consistent audience engagement. Another critical aspect is boosting audience engagement. This requires a deep understanding of your target audience and the creation of compelling, tailored content that resonates with them. Engaging actively in social media conversations and providing value through your content will maintain your online presence and foster a loyal customer base. Employing these strategies not only simplifies social media management but also amplifies the impact of your marketing efforts, ultimately contributing to a more substantial return on investment.

Conclusion

Managing social media marketing for professional needs is not as easy as it seems at first glance and most brands struggle to use this medium effectively in the beginning. Building a brand’s presence online is a complicated process altogether while there are also organizational hurdles such as lack of resource or strategic planning and evaluation. Fortunately, for many businesses, we have various tools that offer multiple solutions for these common problems to navigate the efforts of the communication team and set realistic growth indicators. Still, the choices need to be clearly thought through to utilize tools that add the most value for the business and offer solutions for various business needs in one place. Although these tools are beneficial in minimizing costs for the business, the results can only be achieved through consistent planning, patience in reaping business efforts and determination in expanding reach of the various social media channels over time.