5 Things on Your Social Media Manager’s Wishlist

A social media presence has evolved from a "nice to have" to a critical need for brands. But while most understand that social media should be an important part of their marketing strategy, only expert marketers are implementing strategies to convert followers into customers.

That's because doing so is a challenge: as new channels emerge with changing algorithms, social trends come and go in an instant — and customer habits are tricky to track. One thing we do know? Customers expect the brands they interact with to have a strong social presence. We recently found that 81% of Gen Z, 69% of Millennials, and 56% of Gen X have more trust in brands with an active social presence.*

But building this "active social presence" often falls to the unsung hero of modern marketing: social media managers. These multi-tasking titans are responsible for creating content, responding and engaging with customers (69% of whom expect a response to their comments within a week), analyzing performance metrics, managing approvals… need we go on?

That's a heavy lift when supporting a single corporate brand— and when a brand has social pages for hundreds or thousands of locations? It becomes an impossible task to manage content (let alone engage with followers).

Which brings us to an important question: how can a social media manager simplify engagement with local customers at scale?

Here are five things social managers wish they could do to make their lives easier.

36% of marketers say scaling content creation is one of their biggest social media headaches.** Most social media managers spend hours each week trying to create custom content that resonates with local audiences. In an ideal world, social managers could bulk-create this content, preserving authenticity without sacrificing scale.

A whopping 95% of marketers say social media is important for their local marketing strategy — and 56% of brands use social media to engage with customers on a daily basis. But here's the catch: 39% of marketers cite resource constraints as their top challenge with social media workflows, and many are struggling to navigate the realities of limited bandwidth. Overwhelmed social managers long for a unified social dashboard that makes it easy to monitor and respond to customer mentions, comments, and messages.

Local insights are gold, but sifting through complex analytic dashboards, trying to surface the most powerful data points can feel like mining with a teaspoon. 14% of marketers say identifying the local insights they need to optimize their efforts and refine their strategies is their top challenge. Social managers pine for a tool that simplifies this tedious process.

Many brands use social campaigns to announce new products, generate event RSVPs, or promote relevant offers. But campaign language and positioning often varies by location, leaving social managers with loads of duplicative work. Having an easy way to queue up dynamic, targeted social campaigns is high on the 'social at scale' wishlist.

Most social media managers have dozens of tabs open at once, each one tied to a different social management tool. It's overwhelming, right? (83% of marketers use more than one tool for social media management, and it's becoming unmanageable.) Social media managers dream of a day when they'll have a more streamlined way to handle everything, reducing the tool overload that eats up time and energy.

These all-too-familiar challenges are hindering your team's ability to execute a best-in-class social media strategy. But what if they could be addressed all in one go? That's where Yext Social comes in.

Yext analyzed every aspect of the tedious processes involved in managing multi-location social media at scale — and created an intuitive tool built to simplify the process. Our platform makes it easy for multi-location brands to connect with their communities while giving social media managers the resources they need to oversee pages efficiently and effectively.

With Yext Social, you can:

• Enable local engagement at scale: Attract new prospects, engage with customers, and use actionable insights to build brand loyalty across all your locations.

• Boost productivity with AI automation: Reduce manual tasks and free up your time to focus on strategic planning, audience engagement, and content analysis.

• Power cross-team partnership: Foster collaboration and ensure consistent branding, timely content delivery, and efficient coordination between your corporate office and each brand location.

• Accelerate your local customer journey: Use detailed analytics to create posts that resonate, improving the impact of your local social strategy.

Ready to simplify and improve social media management? Learn more about Yext Social.

*Survey details: The results are from an online survey of 2,312 adults who purchased something online within the past year. The survey was conducted from June 14 to 25, 2024, by Researchscape International on behalf of Yext. Results were weighted by country population, age, and gender. Respondents were from five countries: France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

**Survey details: The results are from an online survey of 379 marketing professionals from companies with more than 10 locations that was fielded from July 23 to August 20, 2024 by Researchscape International on behalf of Yext.