In the last decade, social media marketing has become integral to any brand’s marketing strategy. With more than 4 billion people projected to use social media in 2025, and platforms like TikTok transforming the landscape, organizations are investing more resources into the medium. As a result, the social media manager has become a critical position supporting multiple teams throughout a company.
The role of social media managers has expanded to touch several business departments, including marketing, commerce, and care. Social media managers must wear many hats — the strategist, the storyteller, the community builder, the customer care whiz — all while inspiring followers to become customers.
In this 5-part blog series, we’ll share valuable insights from some of the leading minds in the field on topics ranging from technology to skillset. They’ll also offer advice to young professionals aspiring to start their social media careers. Be sure to view them all here!
The evolving role of technology in delivering remarkable results
According to 52% of social media marketers, social media positively influences their company’s revenue and sales, which can put a lot of pressure on social media managers.. They are responsible for building effective strategies and overseeing multiple social media accounts. Although these tasks may seem challenging, they don’t have to be if you have the right processes and tools in place.
Advanced social media management tools are essential for building, executing, and measuring your social media marketing strategy effectively. From managing a multi-channel strategy to analyzing trends and optimizing performance, technology enables social media managers can make important strategic decisions based on real-time content and consumer insights. With the help of technology, social media can seamlessly influence users’ experience through the mode of automation, integration with other social media applications, and Ecommerce.
In fact, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, PwC reports that 52% of companies accelerated their artificial intelligence (AI) adoption plans. Implementing AI on social media has the potential to enhance a brand’s connection and communication with users. According to Forrester, in 2022, companies will combine data in new ways to unlock opportunities for AI to deliver anticipatory and highly personalized customer experiences(1). For example, when customers call in, contact centers can greet them with an AI bot that will predict the reason for their call and find the best path to resolution.
We asked our Social Media Superstars, a group of social media professionals nominated around the globe, to share their perspectives on technology’s impact on social media results. Here’s what a few of them said:
Q: What is the role of technology in delivering impressive results to your company/brand?
1. Bringing creative ideas to fruition.
Analy Zárraga, Content Experience Leader, Latam Digital Marketing: "Technology supports our crazy ideas and allows us to become success stories by learning, thanks to technology, how to do it better next time."
Juan Manuel Farías Salas, Director of Communications, Betterware (MX): "Technology can be your best ally, but without the right person reading the data the right way, it's useless, so it's still a team effort."
2. Simplifying decision-making.
Karla Ramirez, Head of Content Management, Grupo Editorial Altamirano (SV): "Managing so much information, analyzing it and getting an overview to make decisions is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task that is simplified with the use of technology."
Evelyn Girón, Project Coordinator, Banco Industrial: "Real-time data has always been key to social media decision-making. That's why we rely on collaboration technologies with different features that help us make decisions and develop innovative solutions for customers."
Eduardo Caldera, Social Media Manager, Didi (MX): "There isn't a more honest indicator of performance than numbers and all these technological tools just make it easier for us to analyze data to see if we are in the right path or to help us adjust in the way."
3. Entertaining and educating their audience.
David De la Garza, Social Media Coordinator, Grupo Xcaret: "To be able to analyze, compare and measure every action using technology and digital marketing tools give us the chance to be one step forward to always entertain, inform, and educate our audience."
Q: How does Emplifi play a part?
1. A supportive ally
Analy Zárraga, Content Experience Leader, Latam Digital Marketing: "Creative planning requires an ally who supports me to review what, why and how my competition or my own brand is doing quantitatively, as well as showing what people say around my brand, showing me strengths and vulnerabilities. Social media planning requires a tool that perfectly understands the trends, the needs and the business, that ally and that tool is Emplifi."
Aminta Iriarte, Senior Manager, Global Social Media Strategy, Crunch Fitness: "[With Emplifi], it’s also easy to pull data that’s going to make us look good in front of our stakeholders. To this day there hasn’t been one metric I’ve not been able to pull from Emplifi."
Be sure to check out our full Social Media Superstar profile with Aminta for more great insights and advice.
2. Inclusive listening
Karla Ramirez, Head of Content Management, Grupo Editorial Altamirano (SV): "Emplifi has made it easy for us to listen to all our users without leaving anyone out."
Evelyn Girón, Project Coordinator, Banco Industrial: "Emplifi’s real-time dashboard that keeps track of our key metrics and goals at all times. I can customize the dashboards with a variety of widgets to analyze content, review agent performance, easily visualize all analytics on our profiles, and create a full profile report."
3. Improve the customer experience.
Aminta Iriarte, Senior Manager, Global Social Media Strategy, Crunch Fitness: "When evaluating and working with a new technology partner we always want to know how we can improve our customer’s life cycle. Emplifi’s reporting capabilities help us look at the content our audience likes so we can continue to deliver the content that keeps them coming back for more."
Eduardo Caldera, Social Media Manager, Didi (MX): "Emplifi’s community tool allows us to engage with our users or possible ones through the listening queries and to provide customer service to those who need more specific support."
The pandemic has made clear that investing in effective strategies for data use and AI will enable organizational agility and resilience. Forrester suggests that in 2022, companies will take a more strategic and collaborative approach to AI initiatives(1). Let’s look at how global social teams use technology. We asked our superstars so you can prepare for your next move.
Q: What tools do you use as a team?
Payclip
"Clip was created to help users to make card payments acceptance easier. We believe in a future where customers can perform any transaction without friction and provide more secure and delightful experiences to our customers and their consumers."
Viñedos La Redonda
"We created a personalized shopping experience to answer a very important question: Why would a customer buy from us, instead of buying from a popular marketplace? The answer is simple: User experience. Our website rewards you with a discount code for leaving a review with photos, and if your review is of a bad experience, it gives us feedback to contact you and resolve your concerns. In this sense, we are using valuable data that we can generate from listening to our audience. We also use e-mail marketing to deliver value offers to our clients, generating a virtuous circle of data-remarketing-sales."
Piaggio Group (IT)
"[We use] Emplifi for everything related to social media. We use the calendar function to schedule the editorial plan and let the countries/markets duplicate and localize it. We also use the analytics feature. [We also use] MS Teams to chat and do video meetings."
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud has helped top brands elevate their social media game and drive business results.
"Our focus is building an enterprise world class software platform that is unified,” said Todd McCaslin, CTO of Emplifi. “By delivering machine learning capabilities in a rapid way, we empower our clients to be more effective in what they do. From the simple to the complex use cases, our product is straightforward, making it easy for our client’s team to get onboard and use our solutions with a great deal of expertise."
Learn more about our social media superstars featured in this blog, and how you can connect with them on LinkedIn. Want help becoming the social media superstar you’re meant to be? Book a demo today to speak with an Emplifi expert.
(1) Forrester, The Three Customer Service Megatrends In 2022, Christina McAllister, Max Ball, Eric Bellomo, 15 March 2022.
