What is social media management? Everything you need to know
Social media management is a catalyst for positive business impact. A strong social media presence amplifies a brand’s awareness, supports customer care and extends reach to new audiences. Effective influencer collaborations can create lasting audience connections. Well-timed creative visuals and copy can change how consumers perceive an organization.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched businesses like Duolingo and Patagonia earn new fans—and customers—from their innovative brand accounts. Their success is part of a carefully crafted approach to building and maintaining a social media marketing strategy.
In this guide, we break down all the moving parts that go into making social strategies run smoothly. Use these social media management fundamentals to inform your company’s processes, so you can build a follow-worthy presence across the platforms that matter most.
What is social media management?
Social media management is the ongoing process of creating and scheduling content designed to grow and nurture an audience across social media platforms. This includes, but isn’t limited to:
Social media content strategy
Online reputation management
Community management and programming
Paid social media strategy and execution
Team member management and development
The benefits of social media management go far beyond raising brand awareness and staying current on the latest internet trends. The channel is key to building personal connections with target audiences at scale.
The evolution of social media management
Social media management is constantly evolving. Platforms and trends are continually changing, and so are the responsibilities of managing a brand account.
We’re seeing the creator economy completely transform how we post on social. And the rise of social messaging has brought conversations from public to private, fostering more personal connections between people and the brands they love. This phenomenon has turned social into the number one source of insights for knowing who your audience is and what they want from brands. According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index ™, 90% of consumers use social media to keep up with brands and social trends. As a result, social media management has today become more than publishing and community management—it includes translating social data into actionable insights that impact your entire org.
Similarly, social commerce has revolutionized how business leaders perceive the channel, taking it from awareness-focused to a full-funnel experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing tools empower professionals to support content creation, customer personalization and data analytics.
These developments prove one thing: Social is driving how consumers interact with businesses, making social media roles business-critical.
The role of a social media manager
Social media managers are responsible for developing strategies that maintain and grow a social presence, on top of administrative and team development tasks. A typical day might involve content creation, campaign strategies, career planning, reporting—the list goes on.
Yet, a social media manager’s job doesn’t end there. Apart from having to manage social media accounts, they must also prove the ROI of social. This includes tracking engagement, conversions and brand sentiment to show decision-makers how social drives business growth. This also means translating likes and shares into tangible value, such as increased sales, lead generation or improved customer loyalty.
Being successful in such a fluid role requires a unique set of skills, including but not limited to:
Adaptability
Organization
Creativity
Curiosity
Critical thinking
Combined, these talents help social media professionals manage the evolving needs of this business-critical channel.
The best ways to manage social media accounts
Here are some of the best ways to manage social media for your business.
Diversify your networks
It’s an art and a science to manage social media accounts. Your data can give you a good idea of how to spend your resources—in terms of both money and time—but social moves fast. The platform delivering results today might take a dip tomorrow.
Diversifying your network strategy is a reliable way to make sure you’re ready for whatever challenges are thrown at you. An algorithm update on one network is less of a shock to the system if you have a well-maintained presence across the social landscape.
A social media management tool makes managing multiple social media workflows significantly more efficient because posting natively (logging into each social network individually to post) across profiles is a huge time commitment. Factor in engagement and monitoring, and it becomes more than a full-time job.
These publishing and scheduling features automate and complement existing processes so you can get out of the weeds and into the bigger picture.
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Listen to the market
The key to creating impactful content is knowing your audience. Zeroing in on these individuals lets you create more effective messaging across your social media profiles. For this, you need to listen to the market. Social listening goes beyond tracking brand mentions—it requires actively analyzing audience conversations, industry trends and competitor strategies.
Social listening tools help you uncover customer pain points, shifting preferences and emerging opportunities in a targeted manner, quickly. This enables you to refine your messaging, improve product positioning and identify gaps competitors might be missing.
Use automation and AI
According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, 97% of marketing leaders say it’s crucial their teams know how to use AI in their daily work. With automation and AI, you’ll transform your social media management, from automating repetitive tasks and reporting, to streamlining workflows and improving decision-making.
AI-powered tools also help you schedule posts at optimal times for maximum engagement, analyze audience sentiment to manage brand health better and generate content ideas based on trends. Plus, become a more efficient team by managing large volumes of customer interactions with chatbots, and personalize messaging at scale while communicating more authentically.
AI and automation also give you in-depth analytics for comprehensive insights into your social performance so you can refine strategies more tangibly. This automated analytics and reporting also saves you precious time, which you can refocus on creativity, strategy and meaningful audience connections.
Use social data to prove ROI
Analyze social’s wealth of data to prove the ROI of your social strategies and demonstrate the value of social efforts to your leadership. This is especially important in the budget-conscious environment brands face today, where it’s become critical to understand social ROI to ensure continued investment in a channel that has quickly become pivotal to business success.
Prioritizing these quantifiable metrics will make winning resources for future campaigns easier and ensure your social media efforts remain a powerful business asset.
It’s easy for decision-makers to see the return on their social media investments with comprehensive reports that link your social efforts to business impact. Use templates to create presentation-ready reports, such as those available with Sprout’s premium analytics, to prove your social ROI with the most impactful data points.
Social media planning and content creation
To have a successful social media management strategy, you must listen to your audience so you’re culturally relevant but ensure your content is original. This means you’ll need to compete against the noise of social trends while staying true to your brand voice and persona. And social marketers feel the pressure now more than ever. The 2025 Index showed 94% of social pros feel they need to be chronically online to trendspot and have a pulse on audiences effectively.
Social listening can help beat this challenge. By using social listening tools, detect trends that matter for your brand and cut through the noise without always online to stay ahead.
Use listening to pay attention to what your specific audience seeks from your brand on social. Does your audience enjoy funny or educational content? Commentary on trending topics? A community? Tips and tricks? Finding out where you fit can help your business maintain relevance in an always-on social landscape.
Centering your audience also supports your content planning. For example, if you learn that your audience wants more short-form videos, you can plan for this with your content calendar.
Additionally, you can also cross-post across all your social media channels at once, but be sure to customize your content based on each platform’s audience. Sprout’s Compose tool can help you tailor your content to include network-specific features or hashtags. Use Enhance by AI Assist to further improve your content as shown in the video below.
Get a 30-day free Sprout Social Trial to drive impact from social media today.
Reputation management
Reputation management is essential for business success, even if it’s not a core social media role. This is because online reviews heavily influence consumer decisions, with many researching businesses on networks like Instagram and TikTok.
A proactive approach to reputation management strengthens brand trust, improves customer relationships and drives business growth. Consider these key tips to build a strong brand reputation.
Ask for reviews strategically: Proactively request reviews from satisfied customers and make the process easy.
Engage with feedback: Respond to positive and negative reviews to build trust and show responsiveness.
Monitor brand mentions: Use social listening tools to track untagged conversations and sentiment trends.
Social media customer service
According to the Index, 73% of social users agree that if a brand doesn’t respond on social, they’ll buy from a competitor. Being prompt in social customer care is not an option for a brand that wants to remain relevant today—it’s a must. The Index also shows nearly three-quarters of consumers expect a response within 24 hours or sooner.
To meet these expectations, social teams must anticipate customer needs and be proactive with customer care. This can be achieved through:
Self-service tools like FAQs and help center
Educational social media content about your product and services
Interacting with customers throughout the buyer journey
Responding to customer complaints, concerns and questions from social
Since customer care often sits between marketing and customer service, providing your social team with ample support can help you strengthen your marketing efforts and customer service. And in effect, grow your brand loyalty.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has transformed over the past decade. Brands are working with influencers that have various following sizes and different niches to nurture community, build trust and appeal to new audiences.
Knowing how to find and choose the right influencers for your social campaigns, along with understanding how to define and measure success, is a necessary part of social media management.
You also need to consider which influencer marketing trends are relevant to your industry and target audiences. For example, The 2024 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks Report found the food and drink, beauty and fashion industries are the most popular influencer marketing topics across all consumers.
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective tools to grow your business and brand. Download this influencer marketing toolkit to understand what resources you need to build an effective influencer marketing strategy and plan your budget (big or small).
Social media community management
Online communities have been around for a while, but they’ve never been more important than they are today. Take Oatly’s TikTok account for instance. The food company joined the platform in October 2022, earning over 600,000 followers and 8.5 million likes in only six months.
Oatly uses the TikTok comments to showcase their brand voice, interact with their audience and respond to organic conversations. For example, when comedian Simon David made a funny video about Oatly’s theme song, the brand responded quickly in the comments. Their comment earned over 20,000 likes—almost a third of all likes on the video.
This example shows how conversations with your community don’t have to be product-focused all the time. Posts that aren’t product-related still provide social teams with an invaluable look into the needs of their audience. If you want to stay in tune with your target audience, you must use community management on social media to give them a place to make connections.
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