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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs. As a social media marketer – be it a vice president – marketing, content creator or general digital marketer – your day-to-day work can feel chaotic, even when you’re doing everything right. The industry has matured, but even with time, growth has continued, and the strategies need to evolve to keep up. Social media marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies. Unlike paid advertising, it’s possible to grow your visibility and build awareness about your brand without directly paying for it.
Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.
Want to boost your digital marketing efforts using an effective social media strategy?
The various obstacles faced by marketers of any businesses are as follows.
Watch How 15 Social Media Tools Streamline Digital Marketing
Explore the top 15 social media tools that every digital marketer should know. This blog explains how each tool can simplify workflows, enhance engagement, and improve campaign performance — and the video overview gives you a quick walkthrough of their key features and benefits.
Social Media Challenges Faced by Marketing Team of a Business
1. The continuing decline of organic reach
On Facebook and YouTube, the number of monthly users is over one billion, while Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are in the hundreds of millions. Each day, a staggering amount of content is produced by each of these channels. To keep users on the channel and engaged, social channels use algorithms to weed out junk, and only display the content that’s the most relevant and interesting to the user.
While consumers welcome a curated feed, the algorithm can be frustrating for marketers. Over the last couple of years, we’ve all watched our reach drop significantly, despite healthy, growing audiences.
2. Creating an effective cross-channel strategy
If you’re working hard to grow your organic reach, you’re already optimizing your content by channel. Translating your content across many channels and making it work within the channel is a great skill for a social media marketer.
Multichannel strategies can be challenging because each channel has its own format and tone that dictates how your content should fit. Additionally, your target audience has their own preferences and habits, and will often consult different channels while getting to know your company.
3. Time management
No matter how hard you work at social media, there’s always more that wants your attention. Organizing the week based on what can be shared and what needs individual attention has always been the cleanest way I know to get things accomplished.
4. Data management
Collecting data from social media listening, or learning more about your audience, or measuring your brand reputation all require sifting through social data. The information that you gather can feed your business, and inform your work as a social media marketer.
The challenges of data management that we face are in the amount of data available, as well as the dissemination of information to the right people within your business. When data management is done well, it can uncover new leads, conversations about your product, industry trends, and influencers. It can also help you build profiles for your audience and gather information across platforms to help you deliver personalized material.
5. Proving ROI
This is the eternal challenge of social media managers in particular. How do you prove the value of what you do to the c-suite? Vanity metrics alone simply don’t cut it.
Social Media Tools to make Life Easier for a Marketer
In today’s world, social media is one of the best ways for your business to stand out in its field and to reach a wider audience. Having an active presence on all major social networks, from Facebook to LinkedIn and beyond, is a necessity for any brand that wants to become an industry leader while engaging with its potential and current customers in new ways.
However, social media tools can be overwhelming if you don’t have the proper knowledge. Whether it’s to create or repurpose content, to find the best way to engage with your online community or to create a comprehensive posting schedule, having the right and best social media marketing tools is crucial to your success. Here are 15 of the best social media tools currently available and how they can help you make the most of your social presence.
Whether you are a user handling multiple accounts, or an agency that handles hundreds, HootSuite makes it easy. It’s easy to add accounts, easy to schedule posts across all major platforms and easy to add account managers. In addition, the company also has a robust training platform that teaches not just the social media tools, but how to think about social media marketing as a whole.
While there are a lot of social media tools for business out there that let you monitor and publish to social accounts, we recommend platforms such as Hubspot where you can not only monitor and publish but also get closed-loop reporting data. That means you’re not just seeing what channels drive the most engagement, but you can track further down the funnel to see what posts and channels drive actual leads and sales.
There are countless tools that post for you and schedule posts but what about a system that re-shares evergreen posts? MeetEdgar is the one thing I would recommend because it has the biggest impact on traffic by automatically re-sharing your evergreen content.
TweetDeck has been around a long time now, and there’s a reason for that: It’s one of the best and best-priced (what can beat free?) ways out there to be a part of the Twittersphere. This free social media marketing tool has multi-columned layout, which makes it easy to follow several conversations at once, and scheduling content is a snap.
IFTTT, or “If This Then That,” is a great automation tool that can help you save a lot of time on trying to manage social media platforms, apps and websites. This social media tool can link these services together based on a trigger and an action. Based on the trigger you create, it will start an action. For example, if you publish a blog (the trigger), then IFTTT will automate and create a tweet (the action). Moreover, IFTTT one of the best free social media marketing tools available, and premium features can be published as well.
Buffer lets you schedule and manage social media posts across all of the most widely used channels, and you can individually customize each post for all of the different platforms it gets posted to. It also shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day and tracks links so that you can see what content gets the most traction.
Sprout Social is for social media management, which allows the team members to monitor clients’ social media mentions, engage with brand advocates, schedule content in advance, and utilize reporting tools to inform future strategies.
Google Analytics is the one tool that manages the social media. Whether a business receives tons of traffic from Reddit over a month, then Google Analytics can track their conversion to subscriber. Was there a negative ROI on the Facebook ad spend? Google Analytics provides these answers and more.
9. A Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar doesn’t require complex software; you can create one in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. This is one the free social media marketing tool which can be created. Planning out your content a month at a time offers you a distinct advantage: You can plan for holidays, scheduled product releases, newsletter blasts and more. Having a content calendar is a key aspect of developing a cohesive social media marketing strategy.
Individual reports and scheduling posts for individual channels are always helpful, but that is not always a sufficient representation of your online image. Raven provides reports gathering information from pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and social media channels. It also allows you to access data and schedule posts on a wide variety of digital media channels.
SocialFlow’s algorithms analyze user behavior and then optimize each post based on real-time data, in order to predict the best times for publishing content to capture peak attention from target audiences. They release posts when timing, relevance and audience are optimized, and also offer a full suite of services that aim to expand audience engagement and increase revenue per customer.
If Instagram is a big part of your business, you absolutely need to be using Iconosquare. Its in-depth analytics are the best out there, and they keep rolling out new features, such as monitoring the content of multiple accounts in one place, scheduling posts, etc.
Social tools are not all created equal. Some are quite expensive. The tools trying to cover everything mainly focus on organic vs. paid, so it is nearly impossible to have just one tool for organic and paid social. If you want an all-in-one service, Sprinklr seems to be the best social media tool for all of your social channels. It helps you with posting, approval of content, and metrics reporting.
Too often, businesses fail to secure all of the relevant social media profiles prior to kicking off a formal social media strategy. KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. By securing your social media identities you will maximize brand equity.
15. Humans
Perhaps the hardest part of social media marketing is staying relevant. Even large brands find it difficult to connect with their fan base effectively at all times. By having a dedicated social media manager, the company will be able to be very fluid, responsive and engaging. Simply using a tool to schedule posts will not get you results.
Conclusion
New social media marketing tools hit the landscape every day. While these are some that are worth checking out, there are plenty of others being launched to address the common challenges of social media marketers.
For Curious Minds
Declining organic reach is the significant reduction in the number of your followers who see your non-paid posts, caused by social media algorithms prioritizing content they deem most relevant to a user's feed. This forces you to move beyond simply broadcasting messages and instead focus on creating high-value, engaging content that sparks interaction. Without this strategic pivot, your brand's visibility will continue to drop, no matter how large your audience grows. Your strategy must evolve to counter this curation effect by platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
To adapt, you should concentrate on the following areas:
Engagement-First Content: Develop posts that actively encourage comments, shares, and reactions, as these signals are key indicators to algorithms that your content is valuable.
Niche Audience Targeting: Instead of broad appeals, create highly targeted content that resonates deeply with a specific segment of your audience, increasing the likelihood of interaction.
Paid Amplification: Strategically allocate a budget to boost your best-performing organic posts to ensure they reach a wider, more relevant audience.
Channel-Specific Optimization: Understand that what works on Instagram may not work on Twitter. Tailor your content to each platform’s format and user expectations.
By understanding these dynamics, you can shift from fighting the algorithm to working with it. For a deeper analysis of the tools that help track and improve these metrics, explore the full article.
A curated feed directly challenges cost-effective visibility by making it harder for your content to be seen without paid support, as algorithms on platforms like Instagram filter out what they consider 'junk'. This means traditional, high-volume content schedules are less effective; the new imperative is quality and relevance over quantity. Success now depends on your ability to create content so interesting that the algorithm chooses to show it to users, thereby earning your reach instead of just expecting it. This is the core obstacle in modern social media marketing.
You must adapt your content planning by focusing on strategic relevance and user value. Instead of just filling a calendar, your plan should be built around pillars that encourage engagement. Consider how your brand's content can fit into the user's desired experience on a visually-driven platform like Pinterest. This requires a deeper understanding of audience preferences, gleaned from careful data analysis, to ensure every piece of content you produce has the best possible chance of being favored by the algorithm. The full guide offers insights into tools that can help you master this data-driven approach.
The key to a successful multichannel strategy is to maintain a consistent brand voice and message while adapting the format and delivery for each platform's unique culture. Your core brand identity, values, and key messages should remain the same everywhere, but the execution must be native to the channel. Think of it as a core theme with multiple variations; your story is the same, but you tell it differently to different audiences. For example, a campaign on LinkedIn might use data-driven infographics and long-form posts, while the same campaign on Instagram would rely on compelling visuals, Stories, and Reels.
To strike the right balance, weigh these factors:
Audience Expectation: Users on Twitter expect brevity and wit, while YouTube audiences are prepared for longer, more detailed video content.
Content Format: Respect the native formats, such as short-form video on TikTok, high-quality images on Pinterest, or text-based discussions on Reddit.
Tone of Voice: Your brand's personality can be professional and authoritative on one channel while being more playful and casual on another, without being inconsistent.
Failing to adapt your content risks alienating the audience on each platform, making your efforts less effective. Discover which tools can help you manage and customize this content efficiently in our complete guide.
The most common mistake is focusing exclusively on vanity metrics like follower count or likes, which the C-suite often dismisses as superficial. These metrics fail to connect social media activity to core business objectives like lead generation or sales. To demonstrate tangible value, you must shift the conversation to performance indicators that directly impact the bottom line. This means translating your social media efforts into a language that executives understand: revenue, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value.
Instead of just reporting on engagement, successful marketers at companies like HubSpot or Salesforce build a case by connecting social data to business outcomes. Here is how to avoid common pitfalls:
Mistake: Reporting only on reach. Solution: Report on referral traffic from social channels to your website and the subsequent conversion rate.
Mistake: Highlighting follower growth. Solution: Showcase the number of qualified leads generated through social media forms, downloads, or direct messages.
Mistake: Focusing on likes per post. Solution: Track how specific social campaigns influence customer retention or sentiment, proving long-term brand equity.
By linking social activities to measurable revenue-generating outcomes, you transform your role from a content publisher to a strategic business partner. Learn more about the specific tools used to track these crucial ROI metrics in the full analysis.
Leading companies solve this data management challenge by implementing a structured system that treats social data as a strategic business asset, not just a marketing metric. They use social listening and analytics tools to automate the collection process and filter the noise, focusing only on conversations and trends relevant to their goals. The key is establishing a clear workflow for disseminating these insights to departments beyond marketing, such as sales, product development, and customer service.
An effective data management process typically involves these steps:
Centralized Data Collection: Use a primary tool to gather mentions, track keywords, and monitor audience demographics across all relevant channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Automated Sorting and Tagging: Create rules to automatically categorize data as it comes in, such as 'customer complaint', 'sales lead', 'competitor mention', or 'product feedback'.
Cross-Functional Reporting: Generate tailored reports for different teams. Sales gets a list of potential leads, while the product team receives feedback on features.
Actionable Insight Generation: The social media manager’s role evolves into an analyst who interprets the data and presents concise, actionable recommendations to leadership.
This transforms social data from an overwhelming flood into a valuable stream of business intelligence. The full article explores specific tools designed to streamline this exact workflow.
A practical weekly workflow hinges on batching similar tasks and dedicating specific time blocks to different activities, creating structure in an otherwise chaotic environment. This approach allows you to focus deeply on one type of task at a time, improving both efficiency and quality. By separating content creation from community management, for example, you can ensure that neither is neglected and that your week is proactive rather than reactive.
Here is a sample five-step weekly plan you can adapt:
Monday (Strategy & Planning): Review last week's performance data. Plan this week’s content themes and campaigns. Identify key metrics to track.
Tuesday (Content Creation): Write all copy, design graphics, and shoot or edit videos for the week. Batch-produce content for platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Wednesday (Scheduling): Upload and schedule all the content you created using a social media management tool. This frees you up for the rest of the week.
Thursday (Engagement & Listening): Dedicate this day to proactive engagement. Respond to comments, engage with followers' content, and monitor industry conversations.
Friday (Analysis & Reporting): Compile data for your weekly report and identify your best-performing posts. Use these insights to inform next Monday's planning session.
This structured approach brings order to the chaos. For a look at the specific tools that can automate scheduling and reporting, see our complete breakdown.
To create an effective cross-channel strategy, you must first define a single, unified campaign message and then adapt its execution for each platform. This is known as the 'hub and spoke' model, where your core idea (the hub) is consistent, but the content (the spokes) is tailored to the environment of Facebook, Pinterest, and others. This avoids the common mistake of simply cross-posting the same exact content everywhere, which ignores the different ways users consume information on each channel.
Follow these steps to translate your message effectively:
Establish a Core Message: What is the one key takeaway you want your audience to remember from this campaign?
Map the Customer Journey: Identify which platforms your audience uses at different stages of their decision-making process. Pinterest might be for discovery, while Facebook is for community building.
Create Platform-Native Assets: For your core message, create a video for YouTube, an infographic for Pinterest, a text-based discussion prompt for Twitter, and a carousel post for Instagram.
Adapt the Call-to-Action: Tailor your CTA to what's most natural for the platform, whether it’s 'swipe up', 'click the link in bio', or 'retweet to enter'.
This approach ensures brand consistency while maximizing engagement and effectiveness on every channel. Discover the tools that simplify asset creation and adaptation for multichannel campaigns in our full guide.
Successful teams at data-savvy companies like Buffer use social listening not just to monitor brand mentions but to deeply understand their audience's pain points, interests, and language. They transform these insights into a content strategy that prioritizes value and relevance above all else. Instead of guessing what their audience wants, they use data to create content that directly answers questions, solves problems, or taps into ongoing conversations, which naturally earns higher engagement and, consequently, better algorithmic visibility.
Their strategy is proven and replicable:
They identify recurring questions in their community and create definitive, helpful content (like blog posts or video tutorials) to address them.
They monitor industry trends and competitor conversations to find content gaps they can fill, positioning themselves as thought leaders.
They analyze the tone, format, and topics of their highest-performing posts to create more of what is already resonating with their audience on platforms like Twitter.
By letting audience data guide content creation, these teams ensure their posts are welcomed by users and favored by algorithms. Explore our full article to see which tools they use to gather and analyze this critical audience information.
To prove the superior ROI of a multichannel strategy, you must go beyond channel-specific metrics and focus on attribution modeling and customer journey analytics. This allows you to see how different touchpoints on platforms like Facebook and YouTube work together to influence a final conversion. Relying only on last-click attribution will undervalue the crucial role that upper-funnel channels play in building awareness and trust.
Here are the key data points to track:
Assisted Conversions: In your analytics platform, identify how many conversions each social channel participated in, even if it was not the final click. A high number of assisted conversions for YouTube, for example, proves its value in the awareness stage.
Path Length and Time Lag: Analyze how many touchpoints a typical customer interacts with before converting and how long it takes. A shorter path or time lag for customers exposed to multiple channels indicates a more efficient journey.
Cross-Channel Audience Overlap: Use tracking pixels to see what percentage of your website converters have also engaged with your brand on multiple social platforms.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by Path: Compare the CPA for customers who only interact with one channel versus those who engage with several. A lower CPA for multichannel paths demonstrates higher efficiency.
This data provides the C-suite with clear evidence that an integrated approach generates more value. Learn about the tools that make this sophisticated tracking possible in our in-depth review.
Marketing leaders must prepare for a future where 'pay-to-play' is the standard by shifting budgets from pure content creation toward a balanced model of creation, paid amplification, and data analysis. The declining organic reach, which has dropped significantly, means that even the best content will fail without a promotional budget. This requires a strategic reallocation of funds and, more importantly, an evolution in team skill sets.
The future-proof social media team needs to evolve beyond content creation. Leaders should invest in developing the following competencies:
Data Analysis & Interpretation: Team members must be able to analyze performance data to understand what content resonates and how to optimize campaigns for ROI.
Paid Social Media Expertise: Proficiency in managing ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is no longer optional, it is a core competency.
Community Management at Scale: Skills in fostering genuine community and conversations are critical for generating the organic engagement signals that algorithms still reward.
Creative & Format Versatility: The ability to produce diverse content formats, especially short-form video, is essential for staying relevant.
By investing in these skills and adjusting budgets accordingly, you can build a marketing function that thrives in the modern social media landscape. See our full guide for tools that support these advanced team capabilities.
The future role of the social media marketer will evolve from a communications executor to a strategic analyst who curates business intelligence. As data collection from social listening becomes more advanced, the marketer will be uniquely positioned to synthesize information on customer sentiment, competitor actions, and emerging industry trends. This transforms their function into a central intelligence hub that informs decisions across the entire organization, including product development, sales, and corporate strategy.
This evolution implies several key shifts in responsibility and skills:
From Publisher to Analyst: The focus will shift from just creating and posting content to interpreting vast datasets to provide actionable insights.
Informing Product Development: Social listening data from channels like Twitter will provide direct, real-time customer feedback that can guide feature updates and new product launches.
Empowering Sales Teams: Marketers will identify and qualify leads based on social conversations, feeding a pipeline of warm prospects directly to the sales department.
Guiding Executive Strategy: By tracking brand reputation and market positioning, the social media strategist will provide crucial data for high-level decision-making.
This strategic pivot makes the role more critical than ever. To understand the technologies enabling this shift, review our detailed guide on advanced social media tools.
To validate that a multichannel strategy is genuinely improving brand reputation, you must focus on metrics that reflect audience sentiment and behavior over time, not just reach or follower counts. A data-driven approach uses social listening and survey tools to quantify changes in brand perception and loyalty. This provides concrete evidence that your efforts to tailor content for platforms like Twitter and Instagram are building a more resilient brand, a goal that resonates strongly with the C-suite.
Here are proven strategies to measure brand health:
Sentiment Analysis: Track the ratio of positive to negative mentions of your brand across all channels. A sustained increase in positive sentiment following a multichannel campaign is a strong indicator of success.
Share of Voice: Measure your brand’s percentage of the overall conversation in your industry compared to competitors. Growing your share of voice shows increasing relevance.
Audience Engagement Rate: Go beyond likes and look at the rate of comments, shares, and saves. A higher rate on tailored content indicates a deeper connection with your audience.
Brand Recall Surveys: Periodically survey your audience (or a control group) to measure their ability to recall your brand, its message, and its values.
These metrics demonstrate that your strategy is not just visible, but valuable. Uncover the tools that make tracking these sophisticated brand metrics easier in the full report.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
