A social media planning guide for MSPs so they can better manage their social media channels.

In the current climate, it would look odd to a customer if a company didn’t have a presence on social media as opposed to them being there. In recent years businesses have been trying to leverage social media as a way to generate leads trying a variety of content to see what pulls their target customer towards their brand. Younger generations are starting to use these apps as their main source of entertainment and news. With the trend moving towards mobile device usage surpassing that of desktop and laptop it is becoming harder to effectively engage with your audience. MSP social media can be quite tricky as you are doing B2B marketing which can make getting that engagement even harder. Depending on if you don’t have a specific vertical that you target social media for MSPs will be a larger task but it doesn’t mean that it should be left out of the MSP marketing strategy.

Source: Ofcom International Communications Market Report 2017

Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as just having social media accounts to be effective at social media marketing. You have to spend some time to understand your audience and what they like to see. Due to the rise in popularity of social media marketing, there has been a rise in social media analytics & publishing tools that will help you to be able to manage and review all your social channels from the one dashboard. There are numerous companies in this market but some of the bigger players are Buffer, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and MavSocial, all who offer their own apps that can be used to manage social media. These apps come with a range of features that will help any MSP take their marketing to the next level with the ability to create and plan content ahead of time, find all social media conversations about your brand on the one interface and receive breakdown reports of your weekly performance. Watch the video below to see how quickly you can schedule Instagram posts weeks in advance to save you having to worry about remembering to do it on the day.

Step-by-Step Guide to Social Media Planning

This section will show you, in steps, how you can go about social media planning ahead of time which will be especially beneficial for new product/service updates or event attendance. We will be using Sprout Social to show how this is done but the steps will be relatively similar to other social planning tools.

1. Picking a day to post.

Once you have set up your paid or trial account go to the “Publishing” tab which is where you will find everything related to planning and scheduling your social media posts.

2. Composing the message

With Sprout Social, they lay it out very easily so that you can quickly pick the day that you want and begin to compose a message. Once you have chosen the correct date and decided to compose the message you will be met with a pop-up “message creator” (image below). In the Red box is a drop-down menu where you will pick which social channels that this message will go out on, one message can go out on multiple channels however you have to make sure that they meet the requirements and restrictions of each channel which Sprout Social will notify you of before you can post the message. A quick way to work around this with Sprout Social is being able to duplicate a message from Twitter or any of the other available channels and quickly edit it to make it suitable for another channel. Underneath this box is where you compose the message.

3. Getting your image ready to post

The Blue box show options to improve your message, depending on what plan you trial/purchase these options will be slightly different. The two most useful of these is the camera and eye icon. The camera icon will allow you to add images to your post to improve its visibility and the eye icon will allow you to preview your post so you can see it exactly as the customer will see it when it goes live.

The Purple box is where you can pick a time and an alternative date if you have changed your mind or you can set it for multiple times and dates. Alternatively, you can decide to post it immediately if you wish. These posts will all be archived on your calendar to be ready to be repurposed at a later stage if you so wish. Sprout Social will give you some information as to the best times for you to post to increase engagement.

4. Sourcing Content for Social

With Sprout Social if you’re struggling to find things to talk about on social media then you can try use their new feature called “Find Content”(image below) which keeps the content generation/sourcing aspect of social media marketing in the app using a number of categories which you can filter through to find content that will engage your audience. The software appears to still be in beta so it is still in a testing phase and working out its kinks.

Using these apps will save your company time and resources being able to plan ahead and get data back on what posts are performing the best so you can use these tools to generate new business and increase your projected growth for the year. The great thing is the majority of these apps offer a free trial between 14 and 30 days so you can find the best one that works for your marketing goals. Here are the links to the trials of the companies mentioned in the article: