What does your social media process look like? Do you even have one? Or have you fallen into a habit of arbitrarily checking notifications and timelines whenever you find time?
In this article, we’ve compiled suggestions and best practices to help navigate through constant updates, comments and interactions you come across with your social media accounts.
Create a Plan
The best way to be prepared with your social media profiles is to have a plan. Whether that is planning your content out months in advance, the month before, the week of or the day before, find a timeline that works for you. Timeline strategies are often dictated around the type of business for which you work. If your business is more event or retail based, it might be hard to forecast content for a longer timeline. If your business is more B2B, a longer timeline might work better. Consider creating placeholders for important dates or times that can be filled in or adjusted at a later time.
Find a process to create content in advance and be willing and able to adjust your content when timely opportunities for content occur. Blending the two together will engage your followers more.
Constructing a Full Social Media Post
What does a social media post have to include? Generally, a graphic/photo with a sentence or two is the bare minimum when creating a social media post. But you want to aim for content that’s better than average! Ideally, you would have a folder of professional photography you compiled for the business. These photos can be used across all visual aspects of your marketing (i.e., your website, digital campaigns, printed materials). Stock images are okay, but people want to see people they know.
With the written content, tell a story. You want to connect with your audience’s emotions. Fabricate a story or ask for help from someone within your organization who might have more insight into a topic than you. Start by grabbing the attention of the social media scroller with an image or verbiage. Once you have their attention, tell the story. Include a link for more information, hashtags to help your post to be found and emojis to create more of a personality.
Digital and Physical Organization
The third recommendation we have is dictated based on how you prefer to stay organized. Some people love the physical aspect of a checklist, planner and business cards. More tech-savvy people enjoy updating their Outlook Calendar, sharing contact information digitally and creating customizable lists on their laptop or phone. Find a blend of how to stay organized with written social media posts and graphics. Consider circumstances where a digital copy is needed for you to share with a client or superior for approval.
Overall, you want to create processes and systems for yourself and your marketing department to be as efficient as possible. Break down your potential bias towards completely hardcopy or 100% digital. Find what works best for your process and combine them.
Customize Notification Settings
The final suggestion we have is to prioritize your notifications. Notifications can be a distraction and cause us to lose focus. Certain pings and dings are far more important than others. By going into your phone’s notifications or the applications’ notifications preferences, you can adjust the settings to hide certain notifications or have push notifications for higher importance information. These notifications should be customized to each social media platform. Comments and Tags on Facebook should be prioritized over Instagram “Likes” on a recent post.
Whether you are managing six social media channels for your company or one Facebook page, finding the balance between over checking or undermanaging your profiles will help optimize your time and attention. Find a system that works for you and stick with it.
Whoever is managing your business’ social media channels may also benefit from having an agency consult them on their processes. Reach out to us at baerpm.com for suggestions on how to make your internal marketing department more efficient with their social media interaction.
