Five ways agency management software can improve social media management

From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs your social media department has to complete every day. As one of the most important and profitable areas of focus for agencies, it’s essential to deliver an effective social media strategy.

You can position your team members to be successful in their social media projects by using centralized agency management software tools that can streamline your workflows, help you save time, and provide in-depth analytics to evaluate social media projects.

There are five key improvements that centralized agency management software can make when it comes to your agency’s social media management:

1. Time tracking to improve project resource allocation

You need to allocate the right resources to projects to manage them effectively. To keep costs down while delivering social media projects to a high standard, project managers need real-time insights to see what project tasks team members are spending their time on. It’s useless to wait until a specific project has ended to evaluate the hours spent on tasks as, by then, it’s too late to make any changes.

This can derail a social media campaign’s profitability if not enough time is being spent on pushing out the campaign to the target audience.

Function Point’s agency management software can accurately track and update timesheets across your entire system in real time. Crucially, this lets you visually track the time your staff members are spending on projects and tasks, and can reveal any issues that might need resolving to maximize the effectiveness of a particular campaign.

2. Manage project costs

On top of the obvious costs, hidden costs can also exist in some projects. For example, your agency could be hit with financial penalties if you miss a deadline. And, if you’re not hitting deadlines every time with high-quality work, you risk your clients taking their business elsewhere. To determine the profitability of a project, you need to understand whether that project was completed on time and within budget.

You can choose to manually track projects, but that just adds time (and therefore cost) to the process. Instead, Function Point’s agency management software provides you with centralized access to project updates, giving you instant access to all the information and data you need to keep social media campaigns on track and avoid incurring penalty costs.

3. Unleash your team’s creativity

It’s important to get your agency’s project management right to create an environment where your staff can contribute according to their talents, skills and preferences. Social media management requires creativity from your agency teams and it can be impossible for them to complete high quality work if no one knows who is responsible for certain elements of a project or campaign.

Creativity also shouldn’t be rushed, but it’s important to make every minute count when there’s a looming deadline for a project. It becomes easy to overlook certain details if you have a large team of people working on the same project, so it’s essential to make sure every member of your team is on the same page when working towards the same deadlines.

Function Point’s centralized agency management software can solve these issues. By bringing structure to projects, this solution breaks them down into components and deadlines, and clearly assigns responsibilities to appropriate team members. This allows you to track your projects more closely and ensure that your team members are focusing their creative talents in areas where they excel so they can deliver killer campaigns for your clients.

4. Streamline workflows

If you have large teams working on the same accounts, you can run into issues like having multiple people respond to the same message, or having messages completely slip through the cracks. Social media management requires streamlined team collaboration and workflows to ensure that a robust strategy is delivered without duplication or error.

If you have streamlined workflows and processes that are repeatable and reliable, then you can complete most campaigns quickly and efficiently, ultimately delivering more profitable and successful projects.

Function Point’s agency management software can address this by formalizing processes and providing workflows that save time and lead to predictable outcomes. It can also eliminate the need for multiple work-in-progress meetings by providing project status at a glance through dashboards that can be accessed 24/7 on any device. This can let team members get through their workload faster and more accurately, improving the agency team’s overall efficiency. It also means clients see less time for meetings on their bills.

5. Provide in-depth analytics

Perhaps the most important aspect of social media management is the ability to analyze both live and completed campaigns. Understanding which projects are the most and least profitable lets you choose which projects and clients to focus on so you can maximize your profits in the future.

If your agency manually analyzes and evaluates social media campaigns, you might not be taking every variable into account, which can lead to errors and an incomplete view of a project. This ultimately risks providing clients with inaccurate project information that can be detrimental to these relationships.

Function Point’s centralized agency management software can resolve this issue by providing in-depth analysis of project profitability. Function Point’s software provides business intelligence (BI) tools that can automate the analysis process to deliver timely and meaningful insights to both active and completed social media campaign projects. It can instantly highlight which projects have been profitable and areas that could be improved, and can offer advice on where to allocate resources moving forward to maximize profitability. Without BI capabilities, your social media management profitability analysis is likely to not be as accurate as it could be and, given profitability is crucial for ongoing success, it’s essential to optimize this area.

Learn more about how you can improve your agency’s social media management by booking a free demo with Function Point.