Your social media work week at a glance:
Write the week’s posts: 1 hour
Create graphics, videos or source imagery for your posts: 1 hour
Schedule your posts: 30 mins
Engage with your customers or targets: 1 hour, split into 15-minute chunks
Find your people: 30 mins
Explore your analytics: 30 minutes
Keep an ear to the ground for opportunities: 30 minutes
Write the week’s posts: 1 hour
Writing the coming week’s social media content in advance stops you for rushing or scrambling for ideas at the last minute and helps to keep your presence consistent. You may choose to write the next week’s posts on a Friday afternoon, or on a Monday morning so it’s all ready to go.
Think about anything that’s coming up for your business in the coming days that you’d like to talk about to enhance your reach or exposure (for example an event, awareness day or industry occasion) but make sure they’re highly relevant and try to avoid bandwagon jumping.
Patch tip: avoid broadcasting your products or services constantly and provide a mix of strategic promotional messages, valuable content that is of interest to your target markets, and engagement messages (e.g. responses to news, articles or communicating with prospects).
Create graphics, videos or source imagery for your posts: 1 hour
Spend some time creating or selecting engaging imagery or videos to accompany your posts: Canva lets you create branded graphics for free and has tonnes of templates for you to choose from if you don’t have an in-house designer, or if you’re talking about your team or an in-house event or occasion, use real life photos of your business.
Patch tip: don’t forget the power of live social – if you’ve got something exciting going on in your office, an in-house event or are looking to share information about your team, take loads of snaps and use those – even if you don’t use them all on the day, you’ll start to build an image library for later. The more, the merrier.
Schedule your posts: 30 mins
Schedule your content in advance so that you don’t need to think about it or remember to post – it’ll all be done for you. There are a number of social media scheduling tools available and you’ll even be able to find some free ones.
Engage with your customers or targets: 1 hour, split into 15-minute chunks
Log in each day and check industry news, trending topics and what your competitors, customers and prospects are up to. Spend 10-15 minutes each day liking, commenting, starting conversations and sharing curated content and useful resources.
Patch tip: this is going to be some of the most important time you spend on social media throughout the week. It may not seem like much, but the time you spend engaging with your community will be how relationships are built. Social media management isn’t all about getting clicks. You can probably remember the people that commented on your posts as well as you can remember the content of posts that you commented on yourself.
Find your people: 30 mins
Once you’ve got valuable content on your profiles (remember that your social media platforms are like shopfronts and show off your brand), you can begin finding the people who are going to find it useful. Look at relevant hashtags and find out who is using them, who is engaging with competitor content, and think about what interests your target buyers have and therefore where to find them.
Don’t be spammy or bombard your new connection with messages, remember that the purpose of this exercise is to build relationships.
Explore your analytics: 30 minutes
Spend a bit of time each week having a look at which posts have performed well, which haven’t – and more importantly, why. Each social media platform has in-built analytics for businesses to review recent performance (free to access), or you might like to find a premium analytics platform like Sendible for a deeper dive.
This data will shape future posts and you can use it to create more successful content week by week.
Keep an ear to the ground for opportunities: 30 minutes
Follow and search for tags, create lists, bookmark go to places for ideas, inspiration and discussions, follow important media outlets and influencers and set up Google Alerts for mentions of your brand or any others you are connected to. Set the notifications to go to a chosen inbox or phone and spend just a few minutes per day checking notifications – this way your brand is going to be the first to talk about breaking news, the first to congratulate your clients on important announcements and the first to join important discussions (and therefore get your brand and point seen by more people).
If you have ambitious plans for your brand’s social media presence, get in touch to find out more about social media community management at Patch.