How to Integrate Social Media into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Over the past several years, social media has shifted away from being "just" an engagement platform. Today, it's a critical part of digital marketing strategies. Most customers (51%) use social media platforms to search for information about products or services. (For example: searching for "Italian restaurant near me" or "hotel in New York City."*)

In response, the role of a "social media manager" has evolved and expanded. It's always been part of a social manager's job to craft compelling content. But there's now more pressure than ever to increase brand discoverability and convert users across the board.

Below, we'll dive into the key challenges social managers face today — and what steps to take to make sure your social management is helping your brand stay visible in a crowded market.

Brands now expect social professionals to do a lot more than manage a few social profiles. Roles like "social coordinator" or even "digital marketer" often have a broad range of responsibilities, including analyzing social data, local content creation, customer engagement, and monitoring location pages across multiple core networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram. In other words, these roles have become integral to organizational success — and the work is not just something you can throw at the intern. (We've come a long way since 2014.)

As the digital realm evolves, the demand on social media managers will continue to grow — requiring ongoing learning and adaptation to new technologies and trends.

One common challenge today? Integrating social initiatives into a broader digital marketing strategy — especially one that aligns with SEO strategies.

While social media does not directly influence SEO rankings, it does significantly impact brand visibility and content discoverability. Search engines are starting to take social signals into account – which means you need to pay attention to them. (Social signals are metrics that social media platforms use to record and measure engagement on content. They include likes, comments, reposts, shares, and more.)

It's also important to be consistent across corporate and local posts to ensure brand cohesiveness to provide an accurate representation of brand information. This makes you a reliable source of information for search engines when they collect data across from social content on each channel and profile. (They then use this to provide the best answer for a query.)

This is why it's ideal to have it to work hand-in-hand with other SEO efforts. But that's easier said than done. Why?

SEO content and social content can have different audiences. They may not be able to answer the same questions, and social media content can have a shorter shelf-life before posts are buried with new content.

That said, overcoming these challenges can significantly influence business outcomes like driving traffic, increasing brand awareness and loyalty, and increasing overall customer engagement.

To manage local content more effectively across social channels, you should take these steps:

1. Centralize your social, listings, and review management in one platform

Social, listings, and review management are all key to engaging customers and driving discoverability. Having everything in one central place helps you:

1. Integrate your social strategy into your broader digital marketing strategy, and

2. Scale your efforts across multiple locations — letting you maintain brand consistency and respond to customers more efficiently.

(By the way: we built Yext Social with these challenges in mind. Yext can help you integrate your social media strategies with broader marketing objectives — including SEO — with the ability to manage Listings, Reviews, Pages, and Social all from one platform.)

2. Look for substantial analytics features in your social platform

Social media insights have evolved far beyond "likes" and "follows", these are just the bare minimum. In choosing (or using) a platform, make sure you're taking advantage of actionable insights through its analytics features. Measuring social media ROI more effectively for each of your locations is key to success.

3. Create permissions that let you maintain brand consistency (while responding to local customers)

When working cross-functionally to produce your social content strategy, it's important to include 'checkpoints' throughout workflows. This helps ensure brand consistency, even if multiple people are viewing or posting content.

Your social management tool should allow you to select user roles with the ability to limit or expand their permissions to view, edit, or comment on posts to make them publish-ready.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the importance of skilled social media managers is only set to grow. Prioritizing the right social management tool that empowers social media managers to be more efficient and data-driven will be key to success.

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*The asterisked data results from an online survey of 2,312 adults, 18+ age. The survey was fielded by Researchscape over [June 14 to June 25, 2024. Respondents were from 5 different countries. Check back for the full published report.