Social media is one of the main ways companies create and maintain their online presence. It helps to shape brand recognition and strengthen its position in the industry. Social media content must be refined beyond just putting messages out at random and crossing your fingers. It is a part of peoples every day lives and companies must make the most out of everything they publish.
Social media management is an ongoing process. The nature of it being a fast paced and constant flow of information leaves community managers with some pretty big tasks. Community managers must develop comprehensive content strategies for all of their channels, gather a variety of input, and monitor feedback.
Companies that use social media effectively will get more leads and customers than those who don't. Developing, organizing, and monitoring your social media content can become a daunting and time consuming task if you have the proper tools or insight. There are some simple tips and rules you can apply to your social media organization to make the best of your time and pack the biggest punch.
How to stay organized:
Organization may not come natural to some people. Sometimes there are shortcut fixes that end up creating long term problems. Taking shortcuts with your social media content plan will not help you reach your goals. Take the time to create a plan each month around your content, promotions and events based on a calendar. This will help you with your daily tasks and implementation.
Tool: Google Docs
This is a simple and free tool and will be a big asset. You can create a spreadsheet to map out your content for the month and easily share them with other departments.
Sometimes you may struggle with coming up with the right content at the right time. Here are some resources for finding social media and blogging content to help you along.
How to implement:
Now that you have organized and mapped out a plan for the month the sharing can begin. Start by scheduling some posts to share before the week begins. You'll feel better knowing you have shared something useful to your followers at least once a day. Advance scheduling allows you to monitor conversations easily. Be careful not to rely ONLY on scheduled posts as they can seem robotic and not personal.
Tool: TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application that can help you manage your Twitter accounts easily. Aside from using this platform to schedule tweets, use it to create custom alerts on a combination of keywords, welcome new followers, and manage notifications.
How to monitor
There are several ways to monitor accounts and there are a few things to look for while monitoring. First, ask yourself "what does my business need to measure?" and go from there. Some metrics to measure:
- Engagement
- Influence
- Followers
- Mentions
It is also important to compare efforts to those of your competitors. It is important to monitor campaigns to take note of what is working, what isn't working, what followers respond to, etc. Having a plan and knowing what to monitor for each campaigns helps you stay organized when it comes time to lay out your next content strategy. You'll know what worked, what didn't, how to fix it, and have new content ideas ready to go.
Tool: Google Alerts
A free and easy way to monitor your social media campaigns is by using Google Alerts. It is the best way to monitor your brand mentions across the web. For every query that you're interested in, Google Alerts regularly checks for any new results. When there are new results, Google Alerts will notify you in an email.
Kicking off any campaign requires great organization. If you start off with an organized content plan, the implementation and subsequent monitoring will be a breeze and help you create content for your next campaign. The nature of social media is a constant flow of information and updates so using the right tools for the job is a key way to stay organized.