Improving Social Media Operations

Integrate a few employees to manage social media.

Some companies either can’t afford a social media manager, or haven’t decided if they’ll need one, so establishing a solid in-house foundation is key.

Not only does this inclusion give way for fresh ideas and insight, but it also creates an opportunity to shape your brand’s voice. Utilizing multiple employees means aligned goals yet different specialties, personalities, and approaches. And this kind of foundation is invaluable to businesses new to the social media scene.

Draft an editorial calendar.

This will be your organized basis for posts, content, personnel responsibilities, and overall benchmarks for attaining social media objectives.

Keeping in mind things like holidays, non-traditional “holidays”, individual employee workflow, and business objectives, build an outline for posts. This creates a calendar around your followers and gears posts towards their tastes. It also prevents confusion within your staff and lets everyone know what he or she is accountable for.

Generate image reserves.

Stock up on photos during promotional events, charity participation, big projects, or anything else that you think would be worth sharing.

Not only does this give you an idea of how to build onto your editorial calendar, but it also maintains a sense of social media awareness with your employees. Plus, letting your followers in on upcoming products or services with behind-the-scenes glimpses adds value to their news feed.

Use tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to manage platforms.

Both of these are great for streamlining posts, although TweetDeck is for Twitter accounts only. But the value that they bring in terms of saving time via their management dashboards is worth it if you’ve got little time to dedicate towards posting.

Hootsuite also monitors follower comments so you’re able to maintain an appropriate response time and ensure no one is overlooked. And for companies that are already overwhelmed, that feature alone can be the most valuable.

Print and stay up to date on each platform’s guidelines.

Each site has “rules” for its business accounts and, to add to the fun, most of them change every few months. Having printed copies for each social media user eliminates the chances of breaking one of these rules and getting kicked off completely.

For instance, Facebook has strict rules about running contests through its site, like no asking for personal information. This makes contacting the winners tricky since businesses can’t direct message followers and creates another step for participants. And that’s just one small example of one of the many platforms, which makes it so important to know each set of guidelines.

Your business is accountable for every platform it takes on, which makes efficiency and organization crucial. And these key takeaways will prove especially worthwhile as you take on the world of social media.