Social media moves at an astronomical pace. With the latest trend always on the roll, the strategies, processes, and analytics have to be revisited time and again.
So, it feels like a social media manager's job is never done. It doesn’t matter what time of the day or week you work; there’s always more to do.
For the majority of brands, social media remains the first touchpoint with their potential customers. Hence as a social media manager, you don't just have to be ok with your schedule; you need to thrive on it.
You remain the crux of the brand and create strategies that cultivate an engaged audience and drive accurate results for your brand. Your role is cut across several departments, right from marketing to sales. In addition, you have the responsibility and liability of speaking on behalf of your brand.
A social media manager is authorized to create genuine and authentic values of a brand, which takes time and effort. There are a bunch of tasks lined up for a social media manager, including analytics and strategies behind them.
You work in a field that is constantly evolving and requires detailed research and thought. So as a social media manager, how do you balance your hectic day without disturbing your work-life balance?
This guide will walk you through a balanced routine to manage your busy social day, along with supercharged tips to increase your productivity and do more in less time.
- Morning Routine Of A Social Media Manager
- Afternoon Routine Of A Social Media Manager
- Evening Routine Of A Social Media Manager
- Productivity Tips For A Social Media Manager
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
Click here to download detailed infographic on tips to schedule your day as a social media manager.
Morning Routine Of A Social Media Manager
Set time for checking emails
Begin your day with a nice cup of coffee and a leisurely stroll through your inbox.
While most of your team communication occurs through messaging services like Slack, email still remains the top business communication tool for people outside your organization.
As a social media manager, your customers matter to you more than anything else. Hence taking care of their needs first thing in the morning is simply a practice of good customer service.
You might also need to connect with stakeholders and upper management through email to share updates on your marketing efforts along with necessary reports.
To avoid scrolling through your inbox for an endless amount of time, set a time limit, say 20 minutes, and go through the most important emails first.
Read more: The Complete Guide To Social Media Manager Salary
Take a look at the social media calendar
As a social media manager, you remain the frontline for anyone who wishes to come in contact with your brand. Hence, you need to be highly aware of what’s going out on your social media page today.
First, double-check your social media calendar for peak time and confirm if the posts have been scheduled at the best time. Next, you need to check for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and tone while posting, and you can’t let anything slip. One mistake can make or break your post. Everyone is watching what you are posting on social media, so you need to be extra careful.
Ensure that all social media messages are designed according to the platform and are cohesive in terms of your brand’s core message. Keep your content calendar fluid and open to change, allowing you to insert timely content as and when required and relevant.
Engage on social media
This is one of the favorite parts of being a social media manager. Of course, it’s exciting to see when your content has been a success. But, at the same time, it is beneficial to see when content is not generating any engagements. This helps you in knowing what not to do for the betterment of your brand.
Image Source: Anthony Yepez, Head of Social Media & Community at Bodybuilding.com
When you post content on your brand's social media page, your audience is putting their effort to reach out to you, and hence you need to return the favor. Your timely response to them could make a difference in retaining loyal customers.
Today, people hardly call a company to get customer service matters fixed. Instead, the first place they visit is the company’s social handle. As a social media manager, you need to strike a balance between posting fun and exciting content and answering the customer service questions that pop up in the comments section.
Not every person who mentions your brand on social media will tag your page directly. Therefore, you need to check your brand’s hashtag page for such unmentioned and untagged yet essential conversations. One of the effective ways to track such untagged conversations effortlessly is using Statusbrew's social media listening tools.
Keep a look at your brand’s product, and service-related keywords to find the conversations you should join. While engaging, you might even develop a key persona about your target audience, as to what worries and what motivates them, and how they prefer to consume content. This will help you in strategizing and creating content during the second half of your day.
Statusbrew unifies all your social media conversations and messages into a single inbox, making it easy for you to glance and reply at once. You can also assign conversations to your team members based on keywords. By integrating slack with Statusbrew, you get notified whenever a new discussion is received or replied.
If you want to discuss more, book a free demo or start a free trial using the below link.
Wrap with the morning meetings
Spending time with the team to plan for the future social media content and strategy is a necessary part of your working day. Start your day with a short status meeting along with your team. Then, plan the content to be prepared for the next day with your team members and share any quick learning with them.
These team meetings will help you gain more insights into deciding what type of content to create, the upcoming events around which content could be created, or just any ideas where it makes sense to engage the fans.
A portion of your day should be devoted entirely to meetings. These will include meetings with other departments like customer service or sales to keep everyone informed. You may also have discussions with your upper management or stakeholders to discuss and go over the social media content and marketing strategy you have prepared.
It would be good to arrange all your meetings towards the starting of the day itself as this will help you work without any interruptions in the latter part of the day. Also, any critical point of change in your workflow, if discussed in the morning itself, can be inculcated and acted upon by you at the earliest.
Prepare a to-do list
As your day starts, priorities will pop up in your team, and you might get busy firefighting them. Any time which is not already devoted will naturally get consumed. And that's why preparing a to-do list plays a vital role in deciding what you do during the day.
A to-do list is all about building self-discipline and setting achievable goals for yourself. So seek to create a to-do list using which the best can be achieved from the day.
Pick up priorities and focus on completing the most crucial task at hand and the time-sensitive work first. Next, estimate how long it will take to complete a task. This will give you an overview of the amount of work you can achieve today.
A social media manager's day revolves around being plugged in online. Therefore, you need to align your daily activities with other essential tasks and external events within your field. For that, you will have to block out time in your schedule to take care of each task individually.
Afternoon Routine Of A Social Media Manager
Track analytics
Analyzing data is a big part of social media marketing. However, as a social media manager, it's essential to take a step back from social media content and explore the numbers because numbers never lie!
You would be amazed to see how different audiences behave, and these audience behaviors will influence your future marketing decisions. Therefore, you need to keep measuring analytics daily to see if your social media content is performing well and if ROI is being established.
Extracting and keeping an eye on these reports is vital as they will also be sent to stakeholders, upper management and can be used in team meetups to discuss content patterns. In addition, these data will come in handy when looking for opportunities to increase customer retention, satisfaction, engagement, and sales.
Besides, you also need to monitor your competitors and stay updated with what they are doing to expand their audience base. Analyze what works well for them. Then, use this analysis to your brand’s advantage and gain the upper hand in advancing your brand on social media.
Learn more about Top 4 Social Media Marketing Metrics And Their Objectives
Spend your time making sure that your social media strategy is aligned with your audience’s bottom line goal and that you have analytics to prove your efforts and contribute towards these goals.
Statusbrew provides you with in-depth insights into the social media engagement generated and your target audience’s demography to help you tune your social strategy. Using custom reports, you can focus on the metrics that matter most to your brand and also measure the ROI of your team's social media efforts.
Content curation - elevate your brand through content
Your audience doesn't follow your brand just for the sake of increasing followers. Instead, they like the content that is frequently pushed out on your brand’s social media page and want to see more of it. And hence, content curation should be one of your main to-dos for the day.
You need to make a habit of posting something new on all your networks at least once a day. Hence, you need to plan your content in advance so that it goes out on time.
A social media manager is not just responsible for posting and adding hashtags. Every post that goes out is based on goals and purposes. Creating new content every day will help you engage with your audience and acquire new followings. As a social media manager, you should craft content that best achieves the desired results.
While creating social media content, it's essential to save your brand's tone in the underlying message and not make an uninteresting post that drives the audience away. An excellent social media manager creates content to resonate with audiences that are responding to your different posts and ads.
Take out some time each day to find exciting things to post on your brand's social media page. Then, you can create a batch of shareable materials. In this manner, you wouldn't have to brainstorm and create something new every day. Here are two ways in which you can create exciting content that will drive significant engagements.
Pivot content with analytics
The best way to increase your social media activity is to pivot your content with your analytics results. That means if you see a particular type of content performing well, post more of it.
Leverage the trends
An excellent social media manager keeps up with the latest social trends and adopts them at the right time. See what type of content performs well for other brands and leverage what's buzzing around on your social channel.
Scheduling content
Once you have created your social media content, what's left is to put it up on your brand’s social account from your repository. However, you can't just post at a random time of day; neither can you put out an innumerable number of posts each day.
You need to post at the best possible time when most of your audience is active on the platform to gain maximum engagements. You will get an insight into the best time to post when you analyze the analytics.
This time will vary depending on the social media platform. But does that mean you need to be available at the best possible time of the day to post content on every social platform? Certainly not. Using a social media calendar, you can get your social content published at the optimal time without your interference.
Statusbrew allows you to customize each post according to the platform and publish it to multiple social media profiles with live previews. You can schedule posts by custom time, or you can also use category queuing systems. Besides, you can also schedule bulk posts.
Media planning
This is often the most challenging yet most important job of a social media manager. Social media changes daily, and hence reading blogs, watching videos, and following the latest trends and news is so important.
As you shall scroll through your social feed and see the posts from your favorite brands, you will notice that nothing was posted randomly. There is well-crafted research behind everything that your favorite brand’s post, and it remains a social media manager's job to research this.
As a social media manager, you should pay attention to what's currently happening and what's trending in the market space. You can include these ideas in your content strategy to prepare your social media calendar. It becomes imperative to innovate your content strategies if you want your brand to be recognized in the field.
Spend this time researching trending and relevant hashtags, references to create content around and check industry news and competitors news. These will give you incredible ideas to make your social media content that can resonate with your target audience and drive engagements.
Create and optimize ads
As the competition is insane, organic social media marketing might not be enough for your brand; that’s why it becomes necessary to invest in advertisements. Ads will obtain targeted traffic in a matter of days. But for that, you need to develop a strategy that will result in a high conversion rate.
Your job does not end once you create an ad. Building a campaign that gets enough traffic, engagement, and hits the goal is a crucial task. You need to use your industry knowledge to gain results.
However, ads will perform each day differently based on several factors such as consumer behavior, competition, or an overall change in the economy. As a social media manager, your role is to identify high traffic and conservation areas and tweak your ads accordingly, which entails good performance and drives conversions.
Statusbrew helps you to manage your ad campaigns at a glance. It allows you to visualize a complete timeline of all your ads and promotional posts using an easy-to-use calendar and help you reimagine your content planning. It also enables you to get in-depth insights into the performance of paid impressions and engagement on them.
Statusbrew’s Asset Manager makes it easier to manage your campaigns by maintaining an asset repository that helps you to store high-quality images and videos and make them shareable with your team.
Keep time for newsjacking
As a social media manager, you should leverage the trending social media topics and breaking news stories to devise and craft timely content and generate buzz on the internet. But you need to be extremely careful and intelligent while creating content around newsjacking, as this strategy can also get your brand in hot water if it's not done the right way.
In newsjacking, two factors play an essential role in making your content viral, and that is the timing and relevance of your post. Hence, you need to create the best social media content and post it at the right time so that your newsjacking strategy makes new users and followers connect with your brand. With your already busy schedule in hand, you also need to keep aside some time for creating such newsjacking social media content.
Oreo shows that newsjacking can be affordable and a great chance to gain engagement and brand awareness with other brands embracing newsjacking with high-budget commercials and campaigns. It doesn't have to be too complex, time-consuming, or costly for marketers.
Image Source: Oreo Twitter
Evening Routine Of A Social Media Manager
Review your day
Being a social media manager means a hectic day of work. You would have done a lot during the entire course of the day, but you need to review it at the end. Time management is a massive aspect for social media managers as your day can go from 0 to 100 within a matter of minutes.
Reviewing your day will help you to know where your maximum time was extracted during the day and if that could be minimized. It helps not to repeat the same mistake again.
You could also review your top distraction for the day and eliminate them to make the most of the next one.
Productivity Tips For A Social Media Manager
With all the above to-dos of a social media manager, it's key to identify the productivity hacks that can give you maximum results in a limited time. Use the below-given productivity tips, and you will eventually see your productivity rising.
Stay highly organized and become a calendar pro
Managing social media requires you to wear multiple hats. Until and unless you don't have a system in place, you will most likely get lost in a maze of tasks throughout your day.
A social media manager should know that organization is everything, and optimizing your time will allow you to complete all tasks by the end of the day. As a social media manager’s day can go in many different directions, they must remain organized and prioritize their day.
Reuters estimates that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions.
To avoid wasting time in your day, begin by prioritizing your task. Unexpected issues might indeed come up, but your focus should be to plan for the best and prepare for the worst.
Don't multitask
Whenever you write an article, texting your colleague while also analyzing the performance report, you might feel that you are getting more work done. But the reality is your concentration and effectiveness diminishes in this state.
Studies show that your IQ drops, and your stress levels increase when you multitask.
Hence focus on doing one task at a time wholeheartedly. This would allow you to think critically and complete work faster than doing multiple tasks at once.
Batch work
Some people work better when they get into the flow for a specific task. Rather than switching from one task to another, you can maintain your focus by batching similar tasks.
If you devote a certain amount of time to creating batch content, it will free up a lot of time to work on other tasks in the coming weeks.
Evergreen content like answering some common customer challenges and updates about your products and services will be easy for you to create in batch and schedule for posting.
Automate as much as you can
Build your own toolbox of social media tools, software, and apps to speed up mundane tasks. From scheduling to content creation to extracting performance reports, social media management tools will help you accomplish more in less time.
One such intuitive and easy-to-use social media management tool that will help you with the majority of your daily tasks is Statusbrew. See how it allows you to get the most out of your time.
- Centralizes all your social media conversations in a single inbox
- Automates your publishing workflows
- You can assign conversations to your team members based on keywords
- Provides insights into engagements generated and target audience’s demography
- Makes it easy to visualize a complete timeline of all your ads
- Helps you maintain an asset repository to store high-quality images and videos and share them with your team
- Enables hassle-free content planning and publishing among teams using configurable workflows and approval permissions
Want to discuss further? Book a free demo or start your free trial today!
Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
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