How to organize your social media marketing and be more productive
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Social media marketing can be a bit daunting when you don’t have a good system in place to organize it. You need to keep track of all your different social profiles, make sure you respond to all the mentions you receive, post great content regularly and so much more. This can lead to a bit of a headache though, if you simply leave it all to chance. In this blog post, I’m going to share my top tips and tricks for how to organize your social media marketing and become more productive and efficient.
The best way to go about organizing your social media marketing is to try to simplify as many of your regular tasks as possible, and where possible, look for ways to automate them. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be sacrificing your results from social media, in fact, by organizing and simplifying it you can even improve your results in the long run. Here’s how to get started:
Organize your updates in an editorial calendar
A good social media marketing strategy requires you to be very active and post updates regularly. As a solopreneur and entrepreneur that doesn’t have someone dedicated to social media marketing, it can be a bit of a pain to make sure you are always posting updates when you need to.
In order to make your job just a little bit easier, you can start by organizing all of your updates in an editorial calendar. This way, you can schedule updates for when you won’t be online and you also make sure you’re sending updates every day, as opposed to whenever you have the time to post something.
Keeping an editorial calendar will ultimately help you save time as you can schedule updates ahead of time and you won’t have to spend time every day thinking of what you should post; rather, you can do it all in one go for an extended period of time, and otherwise, try to engage with other users whenever you can. It will also help you improve your results, as you can make sure you never miss an opportunity to reach your audiences with one of your updates.
Many social media management tools offer this feature, such as Agorapulse, Sprout Social or Sendible. Some also let you add any evergreen content you might have on your website to be re-published on a regular basis, without you having to schedule or post them by hand every time.
Organize your followers
As you grow your follower base on social media, you need to find ways of organizing them in order to help you keep track of all the different connections, relationships, as well as any brand advocates or influencers.
The best way to go about it is to use a customer relationship management tool. Many of the major social media management tools provide CRM tools; use them to:
- Tag your followers based on past interactions, what types of leads they are and so on
- Keep track of past conversations with your connections so you’re never out of the loop
- Keep track of customer service issues: customers are increasingly using social media for customer service, so it’s useful to have information on them handy so that you can more easily assist them with any issues
Organize your social media monitoring
A good social media strategy involves a lot of monitoring. There are several things that you should be monitoring, such as:
- Mentions of your brand: use a social inbox like the ones provided by Agorapulse or Sprout Social to keep on track of all your mentions, across social networks. This system makes it much easier to see exactly what mentions need responding to, and the fact that you get them all in one place can help you save a lot of time.
- Your brand name: in some cases, users won’t always tag your brand handle in their social media updates, so you need to monitor your brand name for this eventuality. You could uncover potential issues that if left unattended, would be damaging to your brand. By monitoring, you will be able to quickly see and act upon any mention of your brand name on social media.
- Your competitors: what are your competitors up to? What types of updates are they posting and what results are they getting? See how you compare to your competitors and use them for inspiration on how to improve your social media strategy.
- Relevant keywords and hashtags: by monitoring relevant keywords and hashtags you will be able to find opportunities for engagement, new potential followers and even more leads. Make sure to check these monitoring searches regularly so that you can jump into any conversations happening right then, and boost your engagement.
Use a tool to find great content easily
A good social media strategy will often involve sharing some great content with your followers. However, it can be very time consuming to have to look for great articles every day that you can share.
There are quite a few tools that can help you with this and make your job much easier. For example, you can use a tool like Feedly, where you can set it up so you get the RSS feeds from all your favourite sources, which you can then easily share from within the app. Or, you can use something like PostPlanner, which helps you discover great content and gives your content recommendations based on your industry or your interests.
Conclusion
Social media doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming if you have a good social media management tool to help you organize your campaigns and strategy. You can browse through some of the best tools on the market right now in order to find the right one for you based on its features and pricing with this tool.
What are some of the ways you’re organizing your social media to help make your life easier?
What methods are you using to help you save time with your social media marketing?
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Hootsuite and IFTT so far have been extremely useful ways to post to multiple accounts at once, but I’ve been looking more into social media enhancement and using some of these tools (like PostPlanner) might really work for me. Thanks!
I love IFTT but don’t use it nearly as many ways as I could. Thanks for the reminder!
Hi Brittany, thanks for your comment:) I hope you’ve found some useful tools in this post that will help further improve your results – PostPlanner is definitely a favourite of mine!
My favorite social media management apps are Tailwind for Pinterest and Hootsuite for Twitter, Google+, and Linkedin. Because Facebook doesn’t like social media manager apps, I prefer to schedule posts directly on the Facebook page. It may seem like a hassle, but it really isn’t. You can customize and create posts directly for your Facebook audience which may be different than your other social media sites. So, be sure to visit the Insights sections on all your social media pages to see if there is a similar audience before determining the same content on all your social media pages.
Great tips, thanks for sharing.
Great points about Facebook, Sabrina. You have to measure the value of your time to schedule your posts directly on Facebook versus the increase in reach – something I need to remember too!
Hi Sabrina, many thanks, glad you liked the post! Facebook is definitely a pain, as they are always making all kinds of restrictions. That said, since you can’t exactly post updates too many times a day anyway, it’s not as time consuming to do it directly within Facebook.
Great tips though, and thanks for the comment:)
I could do more with this. I do schedule, and I monitor my name (and brand)… which is actually pretty interesting! The challenge to me is to stay genuine in the process. All of these tools help you do this better, as does spending real time connecting.
I need a better system for monitoring. I check my Notifications on all the sites (except Pinterest, which is out of control) but don’t check for mentions where I haven’t been tagged.
I agree, it’s very important to remain genuine while on social media, and not just rely on scheduling tools. I think the trick is to spend some time every day actually engaging with people, and not just schedule all of your updates.
Thanks for your comment Seana:)
I use buffer and FB scheduler to schedule posts, i have started to use my social media strategies binder more effectively this year. I have cut back on how much i output, and concentrate on what my readers want and how i can give them quick snippets. I am with Seana, i am also making more in person connections.
Quality is better than quantity no matter what you’re doing!
As you and Janet both say, quality is definitely better than quantity. While scheduling is definitely okay in my opinion, if you do use scheduling tools, you also need to spend some time actually engaging with people on a more personal level. Social media is not about one-sided conversations.
Thanks for your comment Jill:)
These are helpful suggestions. I can always improve what I’m currently doing. I’ve cut down a bit on how often I post. I mostly used Hootsuite for scheduling across platforms and monitoring different feeds and content, but it stopped being as effective as it once had been.
I may need to do some rethinking and strategizing about the direction I want to move in with my social media efforts.
It seems that quite a few people have cut back in one area or another. Through some of the work we’ve been doing in Maximize Marketing Club, I’ve discovered that that a lot of people Like and Share posts without actually clicking on the links, and although there’s some value in having your name tossed around, at the end of the day, you really need eyes on your website, or at least actual conversations with people.
Social media marketing is definitely getting more complicated, the issue is that there are just so many voices shouting that it’s getting quite difficult to get your own voice heard.
As Janet said, many people share and like updates and links without reading them, or even without clicking on them once. A lot of the tactics that used to work, just stop working – strategizing and planning your social media marketing is definitely the way to go, though, good luck with that:) And thanks for the comment, Linda:)
You’ve offered so many great suggestions here! This is an area I could certainly improve upon. Your point about organizing your followers reminded me of something a colleague told me once. He shared he has a category called “sneezers” for all the folks who are great customers and actively *spread* the word about his services! Lol.
That’s awesome – I have a few of those!
Ha, love that term:) Thanks for your comment Sarah, glad you enjoyed the post!
Organizing followers is definitely useful as you can clearly identify your most important ones (those that support you, share your content etc.) so that you can support them in return.
Thanks for these helpful suggestions!
Glad to be of help Priyesh, thanks for your comment:)
Thanks for this awesome post. i saw the suggestions for social media management. I have been using Hootsuite for years and find it useful as it works well for me for nearly all of my accounts including instagram. From using Agrapulse and Social Sprout, what makes them a more preferably platform to use rather than Hootsuite?
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it:) Well, I think it’s a matter of personal preference, as well as the features you need. Hootsuite has bad reporting (plus you need to pay extra) and I’m not a big fan of the interface, which doesn’t seem to have changed at all in years. Agorapulse and Sprout Social also have better tools for organizing, particularly the CRM tools and their social inboxes (where you get all of your mentions and notifications). Hootsuite is a very good tool, don’t get me wrong, plus it works with many more social networks than most other dashboards.
Hope that helps, thanks for your comment:)
Thanks so much Lilach! I will test out one of these and see how it goes. Will be interesting to move away from hootsuite after all these years 🙂
Thanks
Shelina
Hello,
In regarding social media management, I am an expert. It is pleasure for me to meet smart people like you. Nice and useful article, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for your comment, pleased you enjoyed the article:)