As a social media manager, you know how difficult it can be to measure your time. And the game keeps changing. Every day your routine can undergo some changes too.
To maximise your social media presence it is often the case that social media managers need strict, specific daily routines. These routines can often be blown out of the water within just a few weeks.
New technology is created, or old platforms evolve and cause a whole new set of headaches for you. How do you keep on top of these new demands and requirements? It’s simple. You update your daily routine so that you are always on top of what needs to be done. Here’s a refresher starting with the one thing that everyone needs to get sharp on.
The biggie, and getting bigger every week
Customer service has exploded on social media so it really should be the one thing that you take care of before anything else is attempted or even mentioned.
Any unresolved issues should be taken care of as a matter of urgency at the start of every day. This is not a suggestion. It’s a fact.
Social media is becoming the number one place for customers to drop complaint bombs. If you have been contacted directly by a customer on social you need to ensure that you start every day with a clean sheet. This clean sheet doesn’t have to mean problems have been solved, but it does mean that you are confident you are dealing with stuff.
Check out the list of complaints or issues or queries that have yet to be dealt with and jump on them immediately. You know what will happen if you don’t.
Why this needs to be done every day?
Social media is now the perfect place for customer feedback, and that includes complaints. And if you don’t deal with them ASAP, they spiral out of control, killing brands and all who sailed in them.
Taking care of the brand mentions
This is still one of the most important aspects of social media management. Anyone who has any responsibility in their company should be right on top of this. It is vital that you keep a strong ear on all your channels for anything that is related to your brand.
On Facebook, your brand may not even be tagged or directly spoken about, but it could be mentioned. If you’re not there to listen you miss out on a great opportunity to build brand loyalty.
How? Easy. Responding to any kind of mention anywhere shows that you are listening and you care about what people think about the brand you have built. Make this a priority and one of the very first things you do every day. Trawl your channels for any mentions from your audience. If you find one, respond if it is appropriate. By doing this you seem alive and in control of social. Most importantly it shows you caring about your audience.
We cannot stress this enough. Keeping on top of brand mentions is one of the most important things every social media manager should be doing. With even more people using social to talk about companies, it is the only way you can keep your finger on the pulse of what people think.
Why this needs to be done every day?
It will help you know what people are saying about your brand. By responding, you are showing you care about their opinions. It’s basic marketing.
Keeping the profiles updated
Whether you or your team are posting to the various social media networks you are part of, you need to ensure that you are posting and updating at an appropriate pace every day. The number of times you post has been hotly debated for about a million years now.
Ideally, you would analyse each of your profiles to find your own optimal posting frequency. Locowise makes this quick and easy for you. We do the data crunching and present you the simple facts and suggestions on how many times you should post and when. Explore Locowise now.
What about if you don’t have the option to analyse your own profiles? There are some general guidelines for post frequency that, if you follow them, you won’t go wrong with.
On Twitter, you should be expecting to post six to nine times a day now. That’s a healthy amount without seeming like some used car salesman who needs more leads.
On Facebook head for the once or twice a day limit. This is perfect for Facebook and allows you to still spend time there engaging with your audience in other ways.
Google + is a chilled out, easy place to be. Don’t post more than once a day on this channel. It looks about as spammy and desperate as it could possibly be.
On Instagram post no more than three times. This again is about not looking spammy, but just appearing as a brand that likes to keep in touch and share the love.
LinkedIn requires that you only really post once or twice a day. It’s a very professional network and it doesn’t need to have feeds full of stuff every minute.
Keep to the above and ensure that you get those posts organised and done early on in your routine.
Why this needs to be done every day?
Keep your profiles current and up to date, or don’t keep them at all.
Finding the content your audience is interested in
This is still as important as it ever was. Your job on social is to start or join in on a conversation and show some expertise when doing so. That means finding content that your audience will be interested in.
Curation of content is only ever going to get bigger and more involving as platforms expand and update. You need to be able to do this as a matter of course. Spend at least fifteen minutes every day surfing the Web and your newsfeeds so that you can find content your audience will be interested in.
Use Locowise for this too. Our reports help you discover posts that trend and stories that break in your industry. Use this knowledge yourself to curate, share and create better content about the most engaging topics.
And remember that you should always have some curated content on your feeds. It doesn’t matter if this means just once or twice a week. Always have something that you have found somewhere else and that you think is ‘cool’. That’s the slightly laid back, discovery-based approach that your fans will like and come to love. You are not selling, you are sharing. And that will never leave your daily routine.
Why this needs to be done every day?
No brand can afford to be sales-focused on social media. Become trusted with curated content that engages and informs. This will pave the way for developing relationships that eventually turn into engagement and sales.
Find and help people
If you’ve scheduled content and you’ve squashed any sparks that could have turned into fires, it’s time to start searching for keywords so you can jump in on conversations that are relevant to you.
By searching on social media you will find conversations that should be relevant to your brand and offering. If you work hard at this (but not for too long) you should find a spot where you can jump in and offer some advice or a link that helps the people who are talking about the stuff that you have knowledge.
Social media is all about communicating (funny that) and if you find new conversations to be part of you can start spreading your expertise. People like to be helped. If you have found someone to help it feels particularly satisfying. And it means you are using social media in the way it was originally intended.
Just don’t spend more than ten minutes every day on this part of your routine. You can get bogged down. And it can be quite addictive. Just have a quick cast around and pretty soon you will find something you can add to.
Why this needs to be done every day?
People simply like being helped. And the more you do this the more you will spread your brand expertise. It also gives your brand a human face. And having your brand mentioned with thanks can’t do anyone any harm.
Content creation
If it’s not curation, it’s going to be creation. But with social media content the bar has been raised and keeps being raised every week. It’s that brutal.
If you’re really stuck, there’s a cheat sheet of ideas to get you started.
Essentially, you and your team need to focus on ensuring that any content you create, from infographics to video, has to be the very best possible. So part of every social media manager’s day has to be centered around creating content, or overseeing the creation of the content.
Everything is just being made that more difficult to crack. Long articles, long written articles, have to be so good now that they look like they belong in major magazines or newspapers. Infographics are now looking jaded, and a brand has to create something rather special to stand out.
And video? Well, a video has to be memorable, creative and disruptive. And we’re not far off from a situation where even the shortest videos need pretty good production values.
So now content has, incredibly, come full circle. But where before written content was king, now high quality content is king. So this means that to stand out as a brand, the quest to create the very best content is a big part of the day.
A good approach here is to ensure that whatever you create somehow starts a conversation, or brings something else to a big topic. A new viewpoint or an arresting question. This is the way to show expertise.
Why this needs to be done every day?
The biggest brands on social have outstanding original content behind them. That’s just the way it is, and you can’t change that. Bearing that in mind, make it an absolutely key aspect of what you do, every day. Even if you’re just supervising it.
(Really) check your metrics
Metrics are more important now than they have ever been. Brands now should be checking the metrics to see how their posts, content and activity is impacting upon the audience.
If there is any time in social media history where metrics have become absolutely vital it is now. With so much content being created and so many chances to miss the bus on content and activity (where you are actually doing the wrong thing when you think you’re getting it right) metrics can be the reason why you save yourself from disaster.
If you’re pouring all your resources into Twitter for example, and you’re not seeing the results you need, only your metrics will tell you if your text tweets will ever have the kind of impact your competitor’s video tweets do.
As the game keeps changing, so does your relationship with metrics.
So how has the game changed?
We seriously think that customer service has become such a huge behemoth that checking on complaints and queries is the most important thing you do every day. And that just wasn’t the case say, a year ago. It makes such a big difference to be in touch (and be seen to be in touch) and then to capitalise on that connection to be more responsive.
McDonald’s has kind of owned this part of social media management. You don’t have to be as big as them to get it right. Just be there. Believe us, things have become so clear now with responsiveness. You’re either on top of it or you just look bad.
High quality content creation is also becoming more obvious as part of good social media management. It has to be top drawer stuff because every brand worth its salt is producing top drawer stuff. There are so many ways to create video now. You’d have to be an absolute disaster to look anything less than good with your video content. The key is to make it fun and memorable, to cater for those rapidly shrinking attention spans. Stand out with content. Get creative. If ideas come easy, they’ve probably been done before.
These two areas are feeling the burn the most, but keeping on top of all the areas in this article will help you to stay sane, and stay relevant.
So there you have it. The key focus your day needs as a social media manager. Do the above to some extent every day (we will leave the time allocations to you because they are dependent on resources) and you will be able to quite confidently say ‘we are on top of social’.
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