The Ultimate Social Media Management Guide for Small businesses and brands for using Crowdfire

Raise your hand if you’ve set an alarm to remind yourself that you need to post certain content on one of the Social networks.

🙌

Raise your hand if you’ve spent hours together to find posts worth sharing on your brand page and have often given up on curated content completely.

🙌

Raise your hand if you’ve manually calculated a lot of engagement data on your Social accounts, have added it to a spread-sheet and have spent sleepless nights making them look presentable using your powerpoint skills!

🙌

Raise your hand if you’ve missed a Social mention because there are just wayyyyy too many messages to go through!

🙌

Social Media Management can be time-consuming and overwhelming. There’s so much to do and well, our time is limited. So it’s crucial that you choose your battles wisely. 

YES! Some tasks can be made easier with the right tool and you should use them so that you have enough time (and sanity, yes I said it!) to feed your mind with creative ideas, ponder your strategies and also breathe 😇

First of all, let me tell you, I have been on the other side. I’ve seen the world without a Social Media Management tool and I can say it was nightmare-ish.

I was ready to do anything to make things little simpler, my sleep more peaceful and the constant fear of posting something disastrous under time-crunch. That’s how I know that as a Social Media Manager, as an agency and as a small business owner, a good Social Media Management tool is one of your best friends. Someone you’d want by your side when you say “I do”, as your bridesmaid or your best man. 

Okay, so let’s deep-dive into the entire end-to-end process of your Social Media Management tasks and how you can manage them using Crowdfire 🏊‍♀️

As a small business/ brand your main Social Media tasks include 

1. Content curation
2. Publishing content to various Social networks
3. Sharing the content you’ve created on various platforms
4. Engaging with your audience
5. Analytics and reporting

List of essentials before you get started 

1. Targetted keywords for your business. 
2. Topics relevant to your business.
3. Keywords you would like to track for listening.
4. Your Social Media Content Strategy. 

This will take care of essentials like what Social Network do you want to focus on, how many times a day you should post, what are your content buckets etc. This is ESSENTIAL and you NEED to do this before doing anything else.

Social media marketing without any strategy is like shooting in the dark. Chances are that you're shooting in the opposite direction of your target. Click To Tweet

Getting started with Crowdfire 

1. Crowdfire is available on Andriod, iOS and Web. Sign-up using Email, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook profile. 

2. Create a profile within your main account so that you can give access to other team members. 

Here’s how you can create a Profile on Crowdfire

1. Tap on +New Profile — Set a Profile Name— Set a Profile Description — Set a Profile Picture
2. You can now add different social accounts to this profile. For example, adding the soft drink company’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to the soft drink company’s profile
3. You can go ahead and add team members to each profile by entering their email ID and sending across the invite

3. Add your Topics, your curated content and images would be based on these topics.

4. Based on your Social Media strategy set your daily post frequency on Crowdfire. I use our own best time feature for posting on Crowdfire. It saves time and makes sure your posts go out when most of your audience is active.

How To Use Crowdfire for Your Essential Social Media Tasks

Content curation

Curata’s survey says 85% of people use curated content to establish thought leadership.

Content curation consists of discovering, gathering and presenting content created by others that appeals to your audience. 

Adding your voice to this content is like adding sprinkles to a cupcake and I’d encourage you to do that 🧁

To make sure you have a good mix of original and curated content, you need to make sure you have your Social Media content strategy in place. 

As a small business, you should make it your weekly task to gather content and add it all to your Social Media content calendar ✅

Four ways to curate content using Crowdfire

Articles – This section fetches relevant articles based on your topics.

Images – This section fetches relevant images based on your topics. We have partnered with the world’s best image providers to bring you content that will interest you and your audience.

RSS – You can add RSS feeds and all the latest posts from these feeds will show up under the RSS section.

Chrome extension – With Crowdfire Chrome extension, you can quickly share the article you’re reading and customise it for different Social Networks while you’re at it.

How to use curated content in your Social Media strategy

When you create your Social media content calendar, add content curated by Crowdfire along with your original content. 

You don’t need to add time against any content anymore because Crowdfire best time will take care of it 💃 #LittleJoys I tell you! 

While scheduling content, pick curated content of your choice using one of the above ways and you’re done!

Estimated time – 10 – 15 minutes for a week of content.

---

Publishing content to various Social networks

You know right, what happens to your plants when you forget to water them?
They die.
That’s what happens to your social accounts if you forget to post.

The #1 reason to schedule your content is to make sure that it goes out at the right time. You don’t want to post in bursts and you also want to make sure that you don’t forget posting and hence scheduling your posts is important 🚀

All you need is a Social Media content calendar ready with your curated and original content and the next step is a simple as spelling simple.

Click on the compose button, choose the Social networks you want to post on and hit the Post at best time button. Trust me on this, that’s all you want to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Unless….

Unless it is something very time-specific like a holiday, a special day, your Twitter chat or something urgent like announcements. In that case, please make sure you manually add date and time manually and hit the schedule button.

 

All this comes with a beautiful calendar view. And why exactly is it beautiful you ask? You go back a year or even more, find what did you post on a particular day without scrolling through your time-line, check the analytics AND reshare it if you want.

It’s perfect for days of the year kind of posts and a great way of recycling your content.

Estimated time – 15 – 20 minutes for a week of content. You can further reduce this time by using the Bulk upload option.

---

Sharing the content you’ve created on various platforms

Add your brand’s blog and YouTube channel to Crowdfire to make sure that you can post #FreshOffThePress content. 

When you add your blog and YouTube channel to Crowdfire, you will be notified as soon as a new post goes live. It’s a good idea to share these posts real-time at least once. This gives the post an instant boost. 

And of course, you can schedule them for later as well from Your Posts section ✨

Estimated time – Less than one minute!

---

Engaging with your audience and providing customer support

Social Media support and engagement go hand in hand🤝

The moment you click on Crowdfire Mentions you’ll feel like you’re in your email inbox, almost. 

With Mentions you 👇

1. Never miss a single Tweet, DM, Facebook message on messenger your profile or post comment and Instagram comments.

2. Assign messages to your team members without giving them access to your Social Media account.

3. Close/ Archive the mentions that have been replied to.

4. Add keywords to listen to what’s happening on Twitter.

5. Create automation rules.

6. Use permalinks to share mentions within the team.

7. Access the historical conversations within a glance.

8. Download your performance report 

How to use Crowdfire Mentions

First, add team members – You don’t have to do it all yourself. 

1. To add a team member
2. Click on view profile
3. Click on the edit button next to the profile.
4. Click on USERS and then + Add user.
5. Add the email address and name of the user. 

At the moment, the team member needs to be a Crowdfire user. They can create an account with their email. They can access the profile they’re a team member of this registered email address.

You’ll find a unified Social inbox where you can start replying to the mentions, close the ones you don’t need to reply to and assign messages to your team members if needed.

You can also download your engagement report to see how good you’re at responding and engaging on Socials.

Estimated time – This will depend on the number of mentions you generally get. However, 15 – 30 minutes should do.

---

Analytics and reporting

You need data to make mindful decisions. Whether it’s about changing your strategy or refining or it’s about understanding your audience and your reach, you need numbers to back you up.

You also need numbers (and in a presentable manner) to show #ROI and keep the bosses happy (and informed). 

What does Crowdfire Analytics offer?

1. Analytics Overview
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Competitor Analysis
4. Report Builder

Analytics Overview 

Quickly glance at the numbers every day to be sure that you’re on track.

• Check the number posts shared
• Keep track of your engagement
• Keep an eye on your followers and fans

Advanced Analytics

Deep-dive into analytics to understand your #ROI and refine your strategies.

• Take a closer look at what’s happening on your Socials
• Customise your reports with data points of your choice
• Find detailed insights on each of your post
• Download your reports in PDF and PPT format

You can dig-deeper into Analytics for

• Twitter
• Facebook pages
• Instagram (including Instagram stories)
• LinkedIn pages
• YouTube
• Pinterest

You can pick and choose metrics to customise your report

Competitor Analysis

I’ve always wondered how are my competitors doing. Now I do have answers for the following questions. Come, quiz me 👇

• How do my brand’s socials stack up against my competitors?
• What kind of posts are working for them?
• What’s their posting pattern and frequency?
• How much engagement do their posts receive?

With Crowdfire you can compare where you stand against your competitors on Facebook.

• Find their top posts
• Understand what’s working for them
• Get an overview of their performance

Now I can spend less time digging their data, more time marketing mine 💪

Report builder

Tell me honestly, how frequently do you take time out to check all the analytics, manually adding some numbers, downloading whatever csvs you can and putting it all together while pulling your hair…wondering when is everyone gonna stop talking and trying to take long deep breaths so that you don’t flip out? Well, that happens if you don’t have a tool that helps you with your end-to-end reporting process.

With Crowdfire, you can build and share custom professional reports with the data points you want to highlight.

Here’s what Report builder has to offer

Group Reporting 

Add all the Social networks of your choice in a single report

Report template

A ready-to-use template for all your reporting needs

Customised Reporting

Pick and choose the data points that matter to you

PPT and PDF download

Download presentation-ready PPT and PDF reports

How to build your report?

1. Go to Analytics
2. Click on Reports
3. Click on Build a report
4. Enter a title and the description
5. Choose the date range at the top right
6. Select the Social account or accounts
7. Add the widgets that you wish to include
8. Click on Save report

How to schedule exports of analytics data

1. Build a custom report.
2. Click on View Report Schedule.
3. Add a new schedule.
4. Fill all the important details.
5. That’s it!

 

You’ll receive the weekly report every Monday and the monthly report on 1st of every month.

Estimated time – 0 to 15 minutes depending on your Analytics requirement.

---

And here, we’re at the end of our essential tasks list.

If you’ve ever wondered why you should invest in a Social Media Management tool, you should remember that to achieve more, to aim higher and to be better you need to help and a good Social Media Management tool helps you with this. 

Did you realise all these tasks would take 1-2 hours a week with the right tool! That’s a massive time-saver, no?

---

Where up to I’m concerned, at this point, I don’t know a life without a Social Media Management tool. Everything before it sounds like a call from the 80s (I love 80s, that’s when I was born, but you know what I mean right!).

If you’ve not used a tool yet, give Crowdfire a shot and let me know your thoughts, questions and suggestions in the comment section.

Till next time,