5 habits of successful social media professionals

Are you a social media professional looking to up your game? Or someone just starting out in a social media career?

Here are five habits you have to get into to make social media management work for you, including regular reporting and content planning. Every successful social media professional has these habits ingrained into their routine.

Planning content monthly

Content planning can be a rigorous, time-consuming exercise, but it needn’t be tedious.

Everyone has a style of content planning that works for them, but consider stripping your content plan back to basics and removing copy from the picture, leaving you with a framework for dates, post themes and ideas for photo or video.

For most social media managers, planning content monthly is much more time effective than weekly or daily planning.

Bear in mind of awareness days, events and holidays. Days like Valentines Day and Christmas are obvious ones to consider, but there are many awareness days you might not be aware of. Here is a full list of awareness days for 2019.

Here are some templates you can use for content planning.
 

Scheduling posts in advance

Monthly content planning goes hand in hand with scheduling posts in advance.

Social media managers can publish posts as and when they are created, which works well for reactive posts about trending topics. 

However, you should have a monthly and quarterly social media marketing strategy which you should plan content for, and for these strategic and pre-planned posts, advance scheduling is the only way forward in terms of time management and good organisation.

You can use Hootsuite for free for up to three social accounts and it also comes with a great social listening feature. Buffer is another great economical tool for scheduling posts in advance.

Checking social accounts daily

When managing multiple social media accounts, it can be difficult to keep tabs on all profiles and monitor their output, ensuring quality control across the board.

However, one trick of the trade is to check all social media accounts you are managing every day you are at work. Social media is a daily task with deadlines daily and daily publishing, so in order to catch any technological or human errors on your profiles and respond to customer queries, checking it every day is paramount.

Check others’ social accounts

 
Don’t just check your own profile daily, but those of your competitors, partners and customers.

Social media means engaging with content, so don’t post without engaging in the content of others. Comment, like and share. With Twitter you can get involved in Twitter chats and on Facebook you can check out events.
 

Reporting good performance

Social media management involves tracking and reporting. Without this, it’s impossible to know what does well and what doesn’t. 

Your report may be a simple performance update or it may be an insights report containing analytics such as month-on-month growth, best posts of the month 

Your reporting schedule should be monthly, or weekly if requested. Whatever you’ve agreed with your client, make time to report ad-hoc between monthly reports when performance is good. If you make the time to monitor performance weekly and send impressive performance stats to your client as soon as you notice them, it will offset any underwhelming or concerning stats in your regular report, reminding your client – and yourself – that social media can be a whimsical channel and strong performance doesn’t always occur within the metrics or criteria you set for yourself.

Work with other teams

Social media marketing is rarely used in isolation as a marketing channel, it is normal used in conjunction with marketing tools and practices such as SEO, Content Marketing, PPC, email marketing, print advertising and PR.

Whatever the client or business you are managing social media for, don’t work in silo as a social media manager. Be in touch with the rest of the team of the brand you are working with so you can coordinate marketing efforts – a well-placed social post has way more impact when timed in sync with a mail-out and a product launch.

Speak to the sales team regarding any deals or common questions which you can address on social media. Liaise with other marketing professionals about which content can be shared.

Review cross-channel marketing efforts quarterly to give the next quarter of your social media output the structure and oomph it deserves.

These are five strong ways to structure social media management and essential habits to get into if you are in the social media profession. This is the tip of the iceberg though – social media management comes with all kinds of challenges. However, with the right commitment and insight it can be one of the most rewarding and creative jobs out there.

Cristina studied English Literature and Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary University of London and now works as a writer and photographer. Catch her on Twitter, LinkedIn and her website.

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