How does your day start?
Does your day start with a buzzing of an alarm your phone as you jump to your senses and search to turn off the alarm, or does it start gently with the sunlight peeking through the curtains and you slowly rise from your slumber?
"Woke up, fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup, then looking up, I noticed I was late" - Lennon/McCartney
Well, whatever way your day starts, it does not mean it should continue in a frenzied way, yet so often our days are filled with busyness and we forget all about the business. Those of you, who, like me, work from home, are tasked with greater opportunities to procrastinate and to allow our days to escape and we sit, on Friday and wonder what we did, and more importantly, what we did not do.
As a social media marketer, I need to have some organization and structure to my day and to my week and to my working month, because failure to have this structure sets me up for failure. And my failure is my clients' failure and I do not want that.
In order to alleviate the stress and have some management in my day, I came up with a checklist, which enables me to complete the daily. weeklu=y and monthly tasks so I am more able to focus.
Now, last time I told you about the benefits of time management and gave you my top tip benefits of time management; this is just a step on from looking for those benefits regularly in. my working life. Read more about the benefits of good time management here.
Here are some benefits of good time management which, by completing your daily tasks can only add to; benefits like a reduction of your stress, an improvement in your focus, greater productivity, decreased procrastination and my favourite, an improved work/ life balance.
Daily
The Daily Social Media Checklist
Reply to everyone
This seems fairly self explanatory, but to many fellow marketeers, it is not. Basically, many marketeers do not take the time to get to know their audience and are therefore missing out on the opportunity to learn about their audience and boost their engagement.
I view ignoring a customer on social media in much the same way as ignoring the telephone ringing when you are in a call centre; you don't do it.
You cannot be social if you only talk to people you choose, you need to engage with all your customers equally, because on social media each customer has a voice and they have a potential of reaching hundreds of thousands of people with the wave of a finger and the return button.
"An hour planning can save you ten hours of doing" - Dale Carnegie
How can I engage with everyone?
Here are some useful tips to help you improve your engagement with your customers:
push notifications - turn them on
email notifications - set them up
apps - use desktop apps to assist your scheduling and messaging
software - invest in some software to assist
hashtags - use these to filter to correct departments
Check any mentions
This is closely related to the "reply to all" point above, but it requires you to be more personal and organised.
You could be clicking onto the every social media platform to check mentions, regularly throughout your day and end up not getting any work done, so in my opinion, it is more advisable to check in once or twice a day.
This can get a little more complicated if you are working across time zones, but again, knowing the audience makes it easier to choose an appropriate time to engage. You can experiment with what times work best or you and your brand and the times may be different for every client you have, so it is always a good idea to play around with the timings and to ensure you set a timer when you do this to avoid being side-tracked.
Checkout keywords and phrases
Look for keywords relating to your company, your product and/ or your brand, and remember to check out the wrong spellings also. You would not believe how many times I have mis-typed a word or name, and if it happens to e it must also happen to others.
Check for mis-spelled words and for the competition, as it is imperative to stay on top of what the competition are doing and how they are dong it.
Update and revise your schedule
Social media is a very fluid entity and you must be very reactive to the changes, so, in order to not be left behind, you should be regularly updating and revising your schedule to include news and views that have come up.
I have a formalized plan of what to post on any given day of the week and this plan gets tweaked as the day unfolds depending on what has happened the day before , and I know when I am most likely to post in order to maximise the potential of engaging with my audience.
I also work for clients in differing time zones so their posts are scheduled more tightly in my daily plan, but there is always room to manoeuvre, which happens often, because as I have said, social media is reactive, reacting to the audience, the client and the industry. Yes, social media can dictate, but it must also react.
Check out the competition profiles
All social media marketeers do this and over the years marketeers in general have done this. It is important to keep ahead of the competition and the only way we can do that is by knowing what they are ding, and the only way we can know what they are doing is to check out their posts.
Do not limit yourself to the competition, check out industry leaders and some of your favourite profiles to see what's going on and to get some inspiration for future posts. DO NOT STEAL FROM THEM. Use them to get some inspiration. Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery!
"Are you copying others? People won't pay extra for that. You won't be followed for that" - Seth Godin
Create new content
The largest part of the social media marketers' job is to create engaging, useful unique content, which can be daunting if you are working with a new client in an unfamiliar industry.
Knowledge is power and if you want to be successful, you need to know the industry you will be working in. There are many sites which can offer insights into popular content, but I have found that the answer lies in my knowledge of the industry and looking for areas of interest within the industry.
Don't forget that there are a host of applications and programs for both mobile and desktop which can make the creation of content easier and more recognizable with your brand. Play around with them to find the best fit for you. Personally, I like to use Canva for the design side of my content creation process, but there are a host of others to choose from.
Ensure easy sharing between platforms
Successful social media strategies rely on the audience sharing the content through their network. You need to remember that you probably have an audience base ready to share in the company or friends networks. You must, therefore make it easy for them to share the posts through their own networks.
When I was in sales training, I always told my clients that every member of staff was a salesperson, they were the company's ambassadors, and this is true still today where the employees are the brand advocates and ambassadors and you should ensure they act in that capacity.
Today, I advise all my clients to get their employees to follow the company page and to run competitions for company engagement to make it easier for the staff to engage with the company page. You should also remember to filter negative comments from employees, so regularly interaction with the page is essential.
By gamifying the company page for employees it encourages them to interact positively and regularly with the content, thus making the sharing of content between users easier.
Engage
Social media is all about the engagement. The engagement between the user and the brand, the brand and the user and between the users, which leads to a wider audience of engaged advocates of your brands.
How do you engage?
Come up with a list of your followers who engage with you regularly and show them some love. Let them know you care about who they are and what they have to say. When someone feels loved they are more likely to reciprocate. Its like the old story about the restaurant - if you like our service tell your friends, if you don't, like it, then tell us. This is true of the social media platform today.
You show you care, they feel cared for, they in turn tell their friends who have that desire to feel loved and will want to try you out. Some will and some won't, but by showing love you can gain more followers.
Follow back new followers
Now this leads on from the love fest above. If you get followed, it isn polite and respectful to follow that person back. Social media is built on a reciprocity, so follow back new followers.
You can opt to not follow if your new followers do not meet with the ethos of your organization or your brand. If you feel that by following them will be detrimental to your brand, don't follow them, but on the whole, most people who follow you are in your sphere of commonality so it's good form to follow.
"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf" - Walter Lippman
Engage with one new connection
This is another point that follows on from engagement and following new followers. Social media is all about the social side of life, so in order to gain a larger audience, it is important to reach out and connect with followers, commenters and viewers, but it is impossible to connect on a personal level with each and every one, so initially you should be tactical in your approach.
It is important to connect with at least one new connection every day to make that connection feel recognized. Their efforts get recognized and there is an acceptance on their part and guess what? They become an advocate for you and your brand.
Our company’s motto, tag line or ethos is educate, engage, extol and empower.
Educate the customer in the added value of you and your brand.
Engage the customer on a personal level. You are a person and your brand can add benefit to their lives.
Extol the brand and the added value of your brand, and most importantly, the wisdom of the customer in housing your brand.
Empower the customer to have the confidence and the conviction to be your salesperson. The customer becomes a brand advocate, or more correctly, your brand advocate.
Remember you have to educate, engage, extol and empower.
Schedule a time for engagement with a new connection today and every day. By setting the time aside for this activity you are more likely to do it. On the wall in front of your working station put your daily checklist there so you can see it and schedule the time in your meetings app. You need to wall off the time so that you take the time to complete the tasks. If you have the time marked in your calendar, then you know the optimum time to plan your meetings without interfering with your schedule, and if you share your schedule, others know when you are available.
In summing up, you have a lot to do as a social media manager, and your daily weekly and monthly tasks are the backbone of your job. Yes you can be creative, you van be masterful at content, but if there is no plan behind you, you are always playing catch up and you are destined to be stressed and unable to manage your customer portfolio. Failure to plan is your way of planning to fail.
Accent on Training have been helping companies improve their social media presence and engagement through bespoke marketing strategies. If you need any information or assistance in designing your website, contact us for more information.
Jonathan Moore is the founder of Accent on Training, a Social Media Management, Brand design and website design agency based in Seoul, South Korea. For nearly ten years, he has helped clients in developing their businesses online, branding their business, website design, and bespoke social media marketing solutions.
Thanks for reading, I am fortunate to be able to reach my audience through this blog.
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