When agencies work on behalf of brands, they face the same challenges as individual brands – reputation management, crisis mitigation, and other social marketing hurdles. However, they do so on a much larger scale because they are entrusted with managing tens, even hundreds of brands. Social media management (SMM) agencies need access to features such as bulk-uploading, managing multiple accounts, and more. And because agencies represent such a large portion of the Viralheat customer base, we thought we’d provide a top-five list of SMM platform features agencies should expect.
Top-5 SMM Features for Agencies
- Large-scale, enterprise publishing. This should include media integration and scheduling. When managing hundreds of accounts, it is impractical to manually load posts for each account. This takes time and resources. The ideal solution includes bulk-uploading, allowing you to import a .CSV file containing X number of posts customizable by date, time, and content, so that you can move knowing your publishing deadlines have been taken care of.
- Workflow management. An integral part to avoiding a social media crisis is ensuring measures are in place that put the right tasks in the right people’s hands. You should be able to assign specific tasks to individual team members, automating to-do-list generation and management. You should be able to create individual roles within your platform: someone who drafts posts, another who approves, and an editor who clicks the “Publish” button. Different roles allows more eyes to review a post so that once it has been published, multiple people have signed-off on the content, minimizing future crises and holding your team responsible for social media mishaps. This also ensures each team member is held accountable for his or her assigned duties.
- Ability to manage multiple clients (i.e. accounts) from one platform. If you’re managing tens or even hundreds of accounts, you want a SMM platform that can switch gears as quickly as you can. You should be able to build individual organizations for your different brands and clients within your SMM platform. This allows you to switch organizations within the platform, each dashboard having multiple accounts and sources ready to go. Switching organizations quickly allows you to collaborate across teams, while keeping track of who is working on what.
- Access to social media analytics and reports. When agencies secure new clients, they need to be able to prove that the investment the client is making in an agency is a worthwhile and cost-effective alternative to managing their social in-house. With reports that draw from social analytics, you’ll be able to backup all those “social ROI” claims and increase your customer base. This also allows you access to metrics that can help determine a client’s social media marketing strategy by identifying what marketing campaigns perform best, helping to set the long-term visions for a client’s SMM.
- User Interface. SMM software is supposed to make your job easier. It is supposed to complement and help streamline your operations. A big portion of this has to do with a platform’s user interface. When platforms are designed with clunky UI, you end up with a solution that then becomes a problem requiring lengthy and expensive training modules. This is not the norm. You should expect a platform to streamline your work – not complicate it.
Viralheat is committed to being a leader in the SMM space. If you’d like to chime in and let us know what you’d like to see in an SMM platform, comment on our Facebook Page or shoot us a tweet.
