How to stay organised on social media
Hello! I’m Deepa, the new web and social media editor at Sookio. As the title suggests, I create and plan content for our diverse set of clients.
I’m a long time blogger and writer - starting in the early 2000s with an angsty LiveJournal and nowadays I write a food blog and take pictures of my dinner for Instagram.
I have already bribed and fed the team at Sookio with my homemade cake. I also make jewellery; I save that for the real bribery. As much as you’d love my banana bread recipe, I’m here to talk about how to keep your social media organised.
Social media is fantastic for brands large and small; it allows you to engage with your customers, find new customers and engage with your industry. One of the most important elements to nail when you begin is the art of organisation. You will likely find yourself managing 3 or 4 networks and you’ll need to co-ordinate each channel with your marketing campaigns, blog, products, industry news, breaking news and trends.
All of this requires you to use your time effectively to optimise the content that makes up your social media presence.
Schedule (some of) your posts
This might seem obvious, as schedulers are commonplace, but it’s the first step to organisation! There are lots of dashboards out there to suit different budgets and needs – Buffer, Hootsuite or Sprout Social are good places to start.
We always say don't rely on scheduling too much though - you'll get caught out by unexpected events and will miss out on opportunities to engage with your followers.
Create a social media crib sheet
Can you remember the optimum in-post image size for Twitter? How about how large a Facebook cover photo should be? Look it all up once, and then create a crib sheet with all of this useful information, it will save you Googling each time you need the dimensions.
Saving frequently used URLs, logos, images and brand colours in one place also makes it easy update networks according to your style guide or brand constraints.
Use a content plan
If you find yourself blankly staring at your social media dashboard each morning, you need to write a content plan. Even if you don’t, a content plan will help you to maximise the return you get from social media. This is a weekly, or monthly, spreadsheet detailing the content that you will post to each social network.
We also like to add blog posts titles and notes about product launches or ongoing marketing campaigns to the plan, as it shapes the updates we create. Write full updates in your content plan, or brief snippets to help you compose updates on a daily or weekly basis. Include links, hashtags and image locations to quickly schedule updates to multiple networks.
It’s a little bit of work in the beginning but it will save you time over the month, and you will get more value from your social media channels by aligning them to your other marketing activities and important dates and events.
Track, track, track
It’s so important to track your activity on social media. It will be what your activity is judged on, and helps you to make decisions quickly to improve your content based on what worked and didn’t.
Use bit.ly trackable links to count clicks immediately. Get to know Google Analytics to see how much referring traffic you get from social media, and set up goals to see the percentage of visitors who convert or make an enquiry.
Create lists and saved searches
If you need to share industry news or keep up to date with what people are saying about your brand, you should let technology do some of the work for you. Use Twitter lists and saved searches to track what people are saying. For example, if you’re a housebuilder create lists for architects, local councils and estate agents to track news, sentiment and also to help you engage.
Save time for engagement
It’s not all about broadcasting! Organise time in your diary for 30 minutes every day (ideally) to engage. Follow people back, say thank you for sharing or use the time find influencers in your industry – reply to their posts, retweet them and discover who else is in their network. Having the content plan in place that we talked about earlier will free up your time over the rest of the month to do this.
How do you stay organised?
I hope you picked up some tips from me in this post, and I’d love to hear what you do keep on top of your social media accounts. Let us know below, we’d love to hear from you!