What Is Social Media Management?

What is social media management?, Sprout Media (2025)

Social media management is the process of creating content, scheduling content, and analyzing content to increase your reach and audience size across social media platforms.

Social media management is more than just posting a photo with a catchy caption. It's the strategic process of planning and creating content to post across social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc, then breaking down your contents results into actionable data that allows you to create more engaging posts.

Here are five general services you will see a social media manager provide:

1 - Creating Content & Strategy

A strong social media manager has the ability to both strategize, and create. The strategy creation itself relies on multiple factors, such as analyzing KPIs, algorithm changes, trending topics and audios, as well as a look at what works in your industry. This is usually done through techniques like topic mining and competitive analysis.

This social media strategy often comes in the form of a comprehensive content calendar. Sprout Media uses a platform called Planable, which let’s us create a responsive content calendar that gives our clients the option to approve and make comments on our content ideas.

For content creation, you’ll often find that social media management agencies:

• Request raw footage/material and edit it

• Come to you and batch record or batch design content

• Provide you with the resources to create your content

• Recommend local agencies that can help you with the creating process

Sprout Media is based in New York, and we try to get out to as many of our clients recording locations as possible, but we also provide options to ensure that we can still get the content our clients want without sacrificing quality or time.

2 - Posting & Scheduling

Another important task that a social media manager takes care of is posting and scheduling your content. They optimize captions, hashtags, formats, platforms, and even what time you should be posting.

A good social media manager will base all of this on your target audience, their behaviors, and your KPIs.

An amazing free tool that small business owners and creators can use for scheduling their content is Buffer. Check out the link for pricing.

3- Managing Communities

Managing your community is a yet another way a social media manager can benefit you and your online presence.

At the end of the day, a strong community is what keeps your business alive, and a good social media manager knows how to engage with your followers to enhance their experience, increase community retention, and increase brand loyalty as a whole.

Some common ways social media managers manage communities are through engaging with comments, answering questions, and revolving content around commonly asked questions.

4 - Paid Social Media Strategy

Paid social media strategy includes things like paid promotions, ad campaigns, boosting posts, etc. Good social media managers will know how to operate around your ad-spend budget and use it in a way that gives you the highest ROI.

They will also know the best way to structure your social media around ad-spend. Maybe you want to push really heavy into paid promotions, or maybe you don’t want to push hard with ads at all. Whatever you decide you want to do, social media management agencies like Sprout Media will know how to build around your goals and budget.

5 - Analyzing & Reporting

The last major thing that social media managers are expected to do is analyze your metrics and report them back to you. This can come in the form of a quick email letting you know what videos are working well and why, or it can come in the form of a 15 page comprehensive analytical report that goes into every single detail related to your current presence. The best thing is, it all depends on how much you want to know, and how much you care. The point of this is more about transparency and credibility than anything else.

These social media reports include engagement metrics like comments, shares, likes, saves, reach, and impressions.

It should also include platform insights, conversion rates, ad-campaign effectiveness, demographic insights, strategy analysis and revaluation.

Social Media Management is more than just posting.

Social media management is more than just posting. It is all about creating goals, understanding an audience, creating content that appeals to them and your goals, analyzing the results of that content, and then adapting your strategy.

Now that you know more about what social media management is and what exactly a manager can do for you, check out our other blog post where we discuss the benefits of having a social media manager.

Interested in having a social media manager?

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