One of the biggest misconceptions about social media management is that it does not take up a lot of time. For those who don’t work in the social space, it’s easy to think that posting to Facebook or sending a tweet now and then is not a time suck.
This is simply not true. For those of us who have social media management as part of our job responsibilities know that strategic and quality posts take time to curate and create. Your fans don’t want junk posts. They want the good stuff. And that simply takes time and planning.
Managing a brand’s social media presence across multiple platforms is a big undertaking. Keeping track of what needs to be published to LinkedIn, assets created for a Facebook post, when to tweet, and let’s not forget that we need a Snapchat story… is a lot to juggle. I am extremely fortunate to work with an exceptional team of three other full-time social and digital media professionals. I realize that working as a team of four dedicated to social is not a reality for many organizations, but the following tips are ways #CSUSocial stays on top of our editorial calendar and content management.
Weekly Meeting
As obviously as this is, our weekly staff meeting is a valuable time for our team to sit down together and forecast our content calendar for the week. Every Monday we each review big projects that we have on our plates. We’ll also review the content that I believe will need to be pushed out over the course of the week and determine what types of multimedia assets need to be created.
One of the strengths I bring to #CSUSocial is my natural propensity for organization. As such, I am typically the keeper of the “master calendar” of content. I am also the person who attends most meetings on behalf of our team and can relay back to #CSUSocial our role and responsibility for communications efforts. As such, my Monday forecast of content is fairly complete, however, my list is not the end-all-be-all content calendar. Everyone pitches ideas and we talk about creating content that are fans are going to be interested in.
#ThisIsWhatImDoingThisWeek
Every member of #CSUSocial is responsible for sharing what they’ve got cooking on a weekly basis during our staff meetings using a simple template that outlines a couple of things.
1. Most used hashtags for the week: This is handy when we have special events like #CSUHomecoming or #RamWelcome and we all need to be on the same page with our hashtag game.
2. Accomplishments/Successes: A look at what went well from the previous week. This is also a time to note if something wasn’t particularly great.
3. Social Content: Items that should be considered to be shared across CSU’s various social media platforms.
4. Upcoming: Running list of events/projects that we’ll eventually need to tackle for social content.
5. Projects: Specific long-term projects on each person’s plate.
6. Additional agenda items: What we need to discuss as a team.
7. Meetings: What meetings each person is involved in (good to know when and where our team is represented).
Daily Lineup
After the Monday staff meetings, we have a good sense of what the week brings in terms of content that needs to be created and shared by #CSUSocial. Quality social media should never been fully scripted or limited to a set schedule so on a daily basis I provide the team with a quick lineup of what needs to be shared on each platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat, primarily).
The daily lineup (via email) is also a good time to assign/volunteer team members to post content to each platform. We’ll also brainstorm text for posts and additional posts for the day. It’s been a valuable way for us to make sure that all of our primary channels are attended to on a daily basis.
Scheduling
We will use the Facebook scheduling tool along with Tweetdeck to schedule some, but not all, of our posts on a daily basis. Because we are a team of four, we are fortunate to be able to manually manage our channels along with being flexible to respond to new content requests and opportunities when they arise.
Gretchen Gerding and Marissa Isgreen wrote an awesome post, Guide to Scheduling Posts: A Little Bit of Planning, Big Rewards, that outlines several other tools and tips for making the most of an editorial calendar and scheduling tools.
How do you manage your editorial calendar and content management process? Hit me up on Twitter, @KimberlyLStern.