Posting is the most visible part of social media. It is not the most important part. Here is something I tell business owners all the time about social media team management, and it usually surprises them: posting content is actually the least strategic part of social media. You also need a social media engagement strategy.
That is not a knock on your team. Posting is what social media looks like from the outside, so it makes sense that it becomes the primary focus. That is especially true for young social media managers who are learning to translate personal social media skills into professional skills for the first time. Posting is visible, it is measurable and it creates a sense of activity and progress. But if posting is all your team is doing, you are probably not getting the results you expected and now you know why.
There are three other activities that matter just as much as posting, and they rarely happen without someone deliberately building them into the plan. Here is what they are and how to tell whether your team is doing them.
Activity 1: Growing Your Audience
Every social media platform limits how many of your followers actually see any given post. On most platforms, you are reaching a fraction of the people who have already chosen to follow you. The smaller your follower base, the smaller that fraction is in real numbers. It’s all about the algorithm.
This means that if your follower count is low, posting more content is not going to fix the problem. You need more followers first.
Pull up your social media pages right now and look at how many followers you have. If the number is under 2,000, growing that list should be a higher priority than anything else you are doing on the platform.
There are specific strategies for growing followers on each platform, and your team should have a documented plan for it. Not a vague intention to grow, but actual tactics: what are we doing each month to increase the number of people who follow this account?
If your team cannot answer that question clearly, you have found a gap.
Activity 2: Engaging With Other People
Social media was never meant to be broadcast channel. It was meant to facilitate conversations. If your team is only posting content and never commenting on other people’s posts, responding to what is happening in your industry or tagging partners and customers in relevant content, you are essentially broadcasting messages into a void.
This matters for two reasons. First, the algorithms on every platform, meaning the systems that decide whose content gets shown to whom, reward engagement. When your account actively interacts with others, those platforms are more likely to show your posts to a wider audience. Second, real relationships are built through real interaction, not through announcements.
Ask your team to show you the last ten comments they left on someone else’s post. If they have to search to find them, or cannot find them at all, that is a significant gap in your social media engagement strategy.
Engagement should be an ongoing, regular activity, not something that happens when someone finds a spare moment. Many social media teams have never been asked to do it at all.
Activity 3: Listening
Your social media channels are a real-time window into what your customers care about, what your competitors are doing and what conversations are happening in your industry. That is genuinely valuable information, and most small businesses are not using it.
Social listening, which simply means spending dedicated time reading and watching what is being said on social platforms rather than posting, is one of the most underused tools available to business owners at any level. It can tell you:
- What problems your potential customers are complaining about
- What your competitors are saying and how their audience is responding
- What topics are generating real engagement in your industry right now
- Whether anyone is talking about your company and what they are saying
Your team should be doing this deliberately, on a schedule, not just passively noticing things while they scroll. It is worth asking when they last did a structured listening session and what they learned from it.
Why These Three Things Get Skipped
It is not usually negligence. It is usually priorities. Most social media jobs are defined almost entirely around content creation and posting. Real social media team management means treating growth, engagement and listening as job requirements, not nice-to-haves. If a manager has never explicitly asked for audience growth strategies, engagement activity or listening reports, they are probably not going to happen.
The fix is straightforward: make these activities part of the job description, ask for reporting on them and require that they are scheduled, not optional.
For most small businesses, engagement can be reviewed weekly, until the accounts reach a daily engagement level. Audience growth and listening can usually be scheduled as monthly activities. Whatever the right cadence is for your business, the key is that they appear on a calendar and someone is accountable for them.
Not every business has the capacity to take on growing its audience, engaging and listening in-house. I break down the pros and cons of outsourcing versus keeping it in-house in this look at outsourcing social media.
Three Things to Ask Your Team This Week
- What is our current follower count on each platform and what is our plan for growing it?
- When did we last leave comments or interact with someone else’s content? Can you show me?
- When did we last do a listening session? What did we learn?
If the answers are vague or your team seems uncertain what you are asking, that is actually useful information. It tells you where to focus.
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Lara August is the Founder and CEO of Robot Creative, a marketing and branding company in San Antonio, Texas. She has worked with hundreds of small businesses over 30 years and consults, speaks and writes on marketing strategy, brand development and what it actually takes to grow a business.
