Margie Barkley: Your Survival Guide for Social Media Teams In 2023

The Year 2023 was a tough year for social media teams, with tighter budgets and higher marketing costs, as well as the rapid rise of ChatGPT, AI and other technologies.

We’ll address some of the most important social media challenges.

You can get a better understanding of each by watching our free Social Media Survival Guide Webinar with Darryl Praill CMO, Agorapulse, Mike Kaput Chief Content Officer, Marketing AI Institute, and Christopher Penn Co-Founder, and Chief Data Scientist, TrustInsights.Ai.

Learn how to:

Use social media to boost sales, website traffic, and leads. Utilize data to optimize campaigns in real time.

Take a look at the current challenges that social media teams are facing and see how they can be resolved.

1. Stakeholders demand data-driven ROI insights

Social media ROI will be a buzzword in 2023, as social media budgets are being cut, costs for social media marketing are increasing, the competition is heating up and stakeholders have become restless.

Social Media ROI is a way to show stakeholders the hard numbers that you can use to justify the costs and resources spent by your social media team.

Think of dollar-centric KPIs for social media, such as:

Leads generatedROI

Creatives make up the majority of social media teams. It’s only natural. It is the writers, videographers, and designers who produce scroll-stopping material.

The ROI of marketing is what stakeholders look at. The easiest way to calculate the ROI of social media is to subtract the marketing costs from the sales growth for your brand or product, then divide that by the marketing cost.

If you don’t deliver, they may be looking for budget cuts.

Marketers should strive for a return-on-investment (ROI), of at least 3:1, for social media marketing. For every dollar of advertising spent, the brand should make three dollars.

Related: Proving Social Media ROI with Stone-Cold Data

Social media survival action plan

Social media marketing is a great way to be creative while still proving the ROI. To get a clear picture of ROI, it is important to use accurate reporting metrics.

Agorapulse’s ROI calculator can be used to calculate the value of your social media activity.

The calculator will take care of the rest. Connect your Google Analytics and ad account to your Agorapulse Panel for the most accurate ROI.

Include ROI in your monthly social media report that can be sent automatically to key stakeholders.

Related: The Best Tools for Revenue Dashboards

Social media reporting is a boon to the overworked stakeholders, because:

Benchmarks important stats such as account growth. Shows a complete overview of all channels. Illustrates growth or reduction in key marketing areas.

2. Budgets are being cut and layoffs are happening

Social media budgets have been affected by the fear of an impending recession.

74% of advertisers say the economic downturn has influenced their budget decisions for 2023. Most marketers said that their budgets, and the costs of social media marketing are being closely scrutinized.

According to the IPA Bellwether Report, marketers are becoming increasingly pessimistic regarding their future companies and industries. Budget cuts have also begun.

Paul Bainsfair (IPA director general) says that maintaining or increasing marketing budgets is the best response to a crisis. He cites IPA research, which shows that the UK’s “strongest” 50 brands will deliver shareholder returns 30% higher than FTSE 100 by 2021. He admits, however, that maintaining or increasing marketing budgets is “not the easiest thing” to do in the current environment.

Social media survival action plan

Be proactive when discussing social media budgets with clients and stakeholders. Even if they don’t express concerns, it’s likely that they’re thinking about social media marketing budgets.

Social media managers can reduce the cost of social media marketing by taking these actions:

Determine low-return channels and activities. Do you waste money on a channel which doesn’t produce results? You can post organically, and reduce or remove your ad spending. Create an Agorapulse Power Report to understand how your channels perform and make data-driven decision.

Concentrate resources on revenue-generating channels. You can invest more in high-performance channels by removing budgets from non-performing social media marketing channels. Consider what “high performance’ means in the context of budget discussions. Social media managers will probably mean high engagement. It is likely to mean $ ROI for stakeholders. Reduce vanity boosts and focus instead on driving traffic to sign-up and shopping pages. While I don’t want to sound like an old lady from the movie “Titanic,” it is true that social media budgets used to be a bottomless hole. Around 2013, I was spending money on everything. I tried the latest tools, and advertised everywhere. It paid off for the most part. Social media was new, social engagement algorithms were more friendly, and the competition was lower. Fast forward 10 years and the landscape is different. Budgets are also smaller. We need to eliminate unnecessary expenditures. Last to go should be your internal staff and agency support. Audit all licenses that you pay for. Do you really need them? Are your employees aware of the fact that you own them? You can cut any tools that you aren’t using and note the money you have saved.

Combining tools can help you save money on your social media marketing budget.

Agorapulse, for example, provides a social media calendar, a reporting system, a social media monitor, an ROI tracker, and so much more all in one tool. You can change the plan to suit your needs.

annual pricing for agorapulse

3. Many people believe that ChatGPT can replace jobs

AI is a topic that has been discussed for many years. This technology has been developed for decades. This year, AI tools and ChatGPT are the most in-demand. Some social media managers feel that this is similar to the Skynet machines from T2.

Some speculators on LinkedIn (who are almost always non-creatives) announce with glee that AI will eliminate the need for writers within the next few decades.

In 2023, the content industry will be valued at $412.88 billion and employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. It’s not just writers who are worried. All artists, musicians and photographers were alarmed to see that AI was replicating their creative work. Legal and HR departments in corporate saw the need for human involvement in the documentation process fall to the floor.

It’s frightening until you get to know it. You may remember your older parents’ concerns about social media, Skype, or email. Once they’ve started using it, you won’t be able to stop them!

After I taught my mother how to use WhatsApp, she sent me this message.

Social media survival action plan

Relax and stop the panic over AI and chatGPT. Let’s not listen to the “AI experts”, who claim that it will steal your job. The majority of them are not experts. They played around with the tools in order to learn how they worked.

You can also do that. ChatGPT can be used for free, but the service may not always be available unless you have a pro account. Educate your team about the tool, and introduce knowledge sharing sessions.

AI tools such as ChatGPT, which provide research and ideas to social media managers, can be a great help.

These include:

Brainstorming Q/As to be used during livestream sessionsCreating taglines and captionsResearching audience or product dataCreating templates for answers to frequently asked social media queries. Making your content more relevant by rephrasing previous posts. Then, you can input them into your Agorapulse stored replies.

Play with ChatGPT. If you do not like it, then don’t use. This is true for social media tools and writing software. Contentworks Agency prefers to use humans to create content. However, it’s not a bad idea to learn about the tools that can help you with your research.

In conclusion

Social media can be scrutinized more than other departments because it is so visible. It’s much easier to find articles on how to reduce your marketing budget than your legal budget.

It’s also more likely that you will hear from outside sources telling you to stop using Facebook or Twitter, to use TikToks instead, to use ChatGPT rather than Twitter, to switch to ChatGPT and to stop using Facebook. The list is endless.

Strategic thinking is the key to success.

You’ll achieve success by having a solid social media strategy with clear KPIs, and a focus social media ROI.

free demo for agorapulse social media management tool