Social Media Managers: How Best to Spend Your Time

When the average person considers social media, they think about funny videos, pictures of friends, and killing time. However, as a social media manager, the thought of Facebook, Twitter, and other large networking sites comes with different connotations. For you, they aren’t just sites where you go to catch up with friends and see what’s happening in the world; these sites are your livelihood. In order to avoid getting distracted by the constant stream of posts, content, and messages, you need to have a plan.

Taking a Page Out of the Project Management Playbook

Social media marketers and managers can learn a lot from studying project management and applying basic principles, such as development of consistent routines and the setting of daily, weekly, and monthly objectives for each task. With this in mind, let’s take a look at how you, a social media manager, can approach each day for optimum productivity and success.

Rise and Shine: Your Morning Routine

How you handle morning tasks is arguably the most important indicator of whether or not you’ll have a successful and productive day. Generally, your morning should consist of the following:

·         Search for relevant content. Depending on what industry or niche your company is in, it’s likely that industry news and developments change on a daily basis. Though developments will happen throughout the day, it’s important to locate valuable stories in the morning so you can plan your posts and content around them. Spend 15 or 20 minutes browsing websites, looking for fresh, relevant content.

·         Check emails. The last thing you want to do is to leave your inbox filled with unanswered emails. This will leave you feeling rushed and scattered for the rest of the day. Use the early hours of the workday to reply to any messages you received overnight and to organize your inbox.

·         Scan notifications. Finally, use the rest of your time to scan notifications, and respond accordingly. If your social media accounts are highly active, you won’t have time to acknowledge every notification, but do your best to get to as many as possible.

Powering Through: Your Afternoon Routine

If you took control of your morning routine and eliminated distractions, your afternoon should be open to handle some of the following tasks:

·         Write posts. Using your content calendar, or material you curated in the morning, start writing and publishing unique posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other platforms with which you work.

·         Review stats. After posting new content, keep an eye on your monitoring tools, and monitor the efficacy of your blog posts, pictures, videos, or comments. If something isn’t working, make some tweaks to see if you can improve it. For posts that are being well-received, make note of why they’re working and how you can capitalize on those strategies again in the future.

·         Meet with decision makers. Finally, at the end of each day, you should meet with project managers, decision makers, and team members to determine whether or not goals are being met, how ongoing campaigns are doing, and what tasks need to be handled the following day.

Develop a Schedule That Works

This is obviously a sample schedule; the important thing is that you develop a schedule that works for you. Not everyone operates the same, but every social media manager needs a schedule to stay on track.

[image error]