Last week I wrote about your social strategy and the importance of analyzing what works and what doesn't. In this post, I want to offer you some tips on creating your "perfect" social media team, and how to keep it organized - an essential part of any social strategy.
Step One: Gather up the troops
I think this step is where most businesses get it wrong. When selecting who is going to be on your social media team, the most important thing to remember is to pick people who are actually social.
You don't want the person running your social account to be the same type of person who doesn't attend company outings, doesn't volunteer at fundraising events or doesn't work well in teams.
Instead, the type of person you want on your team is the type of person who already shares things on their personal accounts. That's right. The same person who is clogging up your Facebook with animal meme's, the girl who is constantly pinning recipes, and the guy whose first thought after reading an article is, "Ah! I'm going to tweet that."
The only way your social efforts will succeed is if you have team members who genuinely enjoy doing it and already know how to.
Step Two: Decide which person controls which social accounts
There have been many debates on whether a single person should handle social media efforts or if you should make up an entire team. In my experience, having a team works - as long as you know who is doing what. In order to do that, organized documents are a must:
In this (completely fake) example above, it's obvious which team member is responsible for which account. However, the most important piece to point out in this example is the account information included. This is essential.For instance, if Tim is out on vacation for a week, Jake can be sure to keep up with the company's Facebook activity without having to call Tim to ask for login information. It's already there.
In addition, another problem teams can face is keeping track of what type of content gets shared and when. Again, this can be simplified with the right tracking documents. The following is an actual example of a document I share with my social media teammate, Dylan Mazeika.
In our situation, Dylan is in charge or uploading the content and my responsibility is to promote it. As a result, after Dylan publishes a new piece of content to our site, he adds it to our "Tweet Tracker" so I know to promote it, and on which network.
This allows me to keep track of which articles get shared and by which accounts. This is extremely helpful if an article goes "viral" because I can look back and figure out if it was because of the time that I promoted it or perhaps because the account had more followers.
Step Three: Stay organized on long-term social promotion projects
"Fresh content" is a must-have nowadays but producing too much content often leads to either article neglect or sloppy promotion.
Don't do that.
For long-term social promotion efforts, I suggest creating a tracking document that is organized by seasonality (and straight-up logic).
For instance, say you have an awesome blog post idea centered on retail tips; it's silly to write and promote this in the fall, months before the holiday season. However, if you don't write it and promote it right away, there's a good chance you'll forget all about it.
Instead, schedule it to be written and promoted when it's relevant; in this case, during the holiday season. By thinking like this, you'll end up creating an editorial calendar.
Above is an actual social promotion calendar I made for November. Again, I didn't just pick a few articles that I wanted to promote across all social networks. Instead, I picked specific articles that would do well on certain social channels.
With a calendar like this, your social media team will have a visual idea of what's coming up in future months. This will help maintain organized collaboration and also increase the likelihood of social efforts being successful.
What other tracking tools or documents does your team use to stay organized? Include them in the comment section below! Also, be sure to stay tuned for part three: Encourage Company-Wide Collaboration.
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