#025 Easy Ways To Keep Your Social Media Content & Strategy Organized

The two things about social media that are always true are that it is always changing and never shuts off. As a member of a social media team or a lone ranger wrangling digital assets on your own, organizing and planning your social media strategy is a gamechanger when it comes to efficiency. This episode came out of the vault to share organization tips on access, content planning, and reputation management. Bri chats with Tiffany and Mackenzie about easy organization tips. Stay tuned to the end of the episode, where they regroup on how these tools have helped during COVID-19.

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Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Always make sure you have the right access.

Use this access doc to keep track of who has what and what each role type means.
Facebook does NOT have a username and password like other platforms. Your access to the business page is verified via your personal Facebook profile.
Make sure your passwords are secure, both from a password length and strength perspective, but also that they're saved in an encrypted software that you can easily access and share. We like LastPass, 1Password, and Podio.
Know what email is on your social assets! It's so important to know where your "forgot password" or verification emails and invites would go.
We suggest creating a generic social media email with Gmail or your internal domain to set up accounts that require an email and password.

Content calendars help save time and keep you looking forward to the month ahead.

Keeping content in a calendar can give you a higher level of your overall content strategy and plan.
You can plan your publishing strategy and maintain oversight of your cross-platform strategy.
We incorporate our advertising plan into our content calendars.
If you don't have a platform like Sprout Social with a publishing feature, use a doc, so you know what's coming up and can be agile when you need to.
Speaking of looking ahead - download these 2020 Holidays!

Make moderation an everyday habit.

We're big fans of calendar blocking. Creating a routine and habit of checking your social media pages for incoming comments, replies, inbox messages, and reviews right away in the morning is essential. This habit will give you a good indicator of your online community's health right at the beginning of your day.
Organize your day to at least check all of your assets in the morning and afternoon. Get your plan and cadence that works for you, but make sure you prioritize moderation! Your reputation is on the line, and not responding doesn't look good.
You can use tools like Sprout Social to respond and tag to all of your messages or use the platforms natively. Facebook has an option that you can mark messages as read or unread to keep track of what you've responded to.
As you're responding, make a spreadsheet or doc with frequently asked questions and an answer template. You'll want to customize your response each time, but this is a SUPER helpful tip for someone else covering moderation if you're ever gone or growing your team.

Transcript

This text below is a straight-up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

This is Bri Gorman and I am here with our awesome Baton Rouge crew. They came all the way up here into the snowy snowy Tundra to spend a week with us and we are going to talk today quite a bit about organization because they are organizational Queens but I will let them introduce themselves. Tiffany, you can go first. So I'm Tiffany Kleinpeter. I'm originally from New Orleans. I started with Chatterkick four years ago and I am the Digital Media Manager. Awesome. And Kenz, you are also here with us in the snowy Tundra and you are, yeah, you're surviving. You're actually from Colorado though. So this is not totally foreign to you.

No, it's not, my name is Mackenzie Thibodeaux. It's a Cajun last name. So I live in Baton Rouge. I've lived there for about 10 years, been with Chatterkick for three years and I am a Customer Success Specialist.

And we've had a couple of Customer Success Specialists on here. But talk a little bit about what you do.

Well, really we, we have a great support team. We have obviously all departments where we're working with creative and ad strategists, but the Customers Success Specialist really wants to be that front person for communication. So I talk to all of our clients, convey their strategy, what's working, what's not working and then their creative everything.

So with both of your job titles, there's a lot of stuff that goes into organization and keeping all that stuff straight, which is why we have both of you on here to talk about how to keep your social media strategy and presence straight. If you are just a one person or a small team and you're doing it pretty manually right now. So the big question we want to answer is how do you keep yourselves organized? I think a big part and most of the questions that I get are about, first when we first get a client, it's about access. So just getting their team access, making sure you have the right access, access to Facebook pages or Twitter logins or Instagram logins. And a big question that I don't think a lot of people know is that you cannot create your own like username and password for a business.

It has to be based off of personal and then you create a page that way and then you're allowed to add people in your company or other members on your team to the Facebook page as admins. That shocks a lot of our clients right off the bat cause they want to know what their username and password is and that's not the case with Facebook. And then it changes so much. When you go to Twitter, Instagram, you have to have usernames and passwords that are specific to that company page. So a place to organize those and keep them organized, but also make sure that it's secure. I know some people on our team use LastPass. We use Podio internally to make sure that all of our passwords are secure, but that other people can access them when they need to. And then as always, if you change a password, you need to make sure that you let people know that the password has changed.

And where those requests new passwords, emails go. You have to know what email that's going to go to. So backing that access up a little bit. First you said personal for Facebook pages and you mean like Bri Gorman, this is my Facebook page. Yep. This is the one I've had since I was 14 and now I have to use that to create a business page. Correct! Yes. So you go into your personal page where you see your timeline, where your grandma posts and your best friend posts and you create a page that way and that's how you make your business page. And then you can go and add Mackenzie as an admin and Bri as an admin. And how do you see how, how can they see who's an admin, how do they remove admins and make sure the people who have the right levels of access because there are also different levels within that business manager that you've set up for different types of access. They go straight into their settings on that business page.

And there is a left hand bar that says page roles and that's where all of that lives. And you can have somebody be an advertiser, you can have them be a moderator or an editor. And then you can have all the way up to admin access is which then they can do anything on the page. So another thing that I talk to clients about is to make sure whoever has admin access, they trust, they knew the ins and outs of what that access really means for that admin. And all that really goes back to security. That's why the different levels exist. That's why we're talking about not keeping things in a spreadsheet. If it's a or on a piece of paper on your desk, if it's a password is to use some of these tools that are available to you like LastPass, Podio, places where you can securely keep passwords and also share them with your team.

Right? Absolutely. And a little bit different, Instagram. So what we like to recommend to clients is unlike Facebook, where you have to have a personal profile, with Instagram, we like to have a social email account just for that. That way other people can access the account on your team, so it would be like a generalized clientnamesocail@gmail.com or whatever you tend to use. But then that way it's a lot easier with security. And then it's never tied to some of these personal account where they, you have an issue and that person leaves your team, then you can always get back into it

And those verification emails will all be sent to one place and you're not trying to hunt down who got the six digit code that you have to put in within an hour. That requires a lot of work if you don't know where it's going. And I know that Tiffany specifically is the Gmail organizational queen, so all of that stuff gets filtered into different folders if you set it up that way. Right. So, yeah. So on top of all of that, after access, what's your second biggest thing for organization? For a social media strategy? So I kind of implemented content calendars at Chatterkick. Uand I think it's important to have a content calendar that you can really plan out what type of content you're posting out for the whole month. Uwe do monthly content. Usome people can use quarterly content calendars if you just want to knock out three months at a time and have a focus per quarter.

But where I got ours was, I think it was actually a HubSpot download, which went onto a Google sheet and it's just a calendar view and it lets you add what posts you want to put on what day. And then I've actually adapted that a little bit and we keep our budgeting spreadsheet right under that month. So you know how much money you're gonna put in advertising for certain posts and what posts those days are going out and different things like that. And I know there's also things like downloadables and then we use Sprout Social quite a bit at a Chatterkick and there's a month view within sprout where you can also see all of the posts on the platforms and if you've got that spend on there. So it's really how you work best. But the main takeaway from this as you want to be able to see your content at a, at a higher level than just remembering to post every day,

Right! Well in the frequency of posting too, you can look at it strategically. If you have an event going out over the weekend, if there's a holiday how you want to adjust to that. Having a third party software is great. You can always of course schedule it into, in Facebook if you want to, too. But at least knowing that it's coming up, it takes a lot of the stress away from your team because if you're gone or if you have another person covering for you, you at least know your content calendar is good to go cause it's all scheduled out ahead of time.

And if there's any big events coming up, you want to do two or three posts that lead up to that event. So being able to plan that out on a calendar is a little bit more visual than just saying, Oh no, this weekend I have something I'm going to post out twice a day. And once tomorrow it gives you an option to be a little bit more strategic. And then it also gives you an option to look cross-platform. Yes. Cause we don't want all of our content going out on every platform. We kind of want it to be specialized. So you can on our content calendar right under the post, we put what platform it's going to go out on. Sometimes you might leave LinkedIn off, sometimes you want to do only Instagram, sometimes it's an Instagram story. So you want to put under that post what exactly what the content is and where it's going.

Because some content works for multiple platforms, but you don't want to just blanket post everything across all platforms just because you need to post that day. Right, right. And it's hard to keep all that straight in certain instances. Like what piece of content is supposed to go where and what we really want to do is help the people and give advice to people who it's they're the only person or they're a small team. And so they are more than likely doing more than social at their job. And so you want to be able to give them an option to make it less stressful and less of that thing they have to remember at the end of every day before they can go home and think about it more as, that's already planned. Like take a couple hours, plan your social for the month and then go about it. And that's a big thing I think is when you just sit down and fill out a content calendar for an hour for a whole month.

It actually is going to take a lot less time to do it that way than if you were stopped for 10 minutes every day to think about if you should post and what you should post. So just taking that hour a month is going to be helpful. So we've got access and then we've got looking at it from a month long view instead of an everyday. So let's look, what's our third big organizational tip? I would say how you're going to fit social into your day to day Whether that you're going to be looking at your content calendars. Obviously you're going to know what's going out, but taking that time to actually moderate and go through the messages that are coming in. That's a part of your social strategy obviously, too. Because you're having these posts go out, but you need to make time and organize that within your day to make sure you're responding to your people.

And how would you recommend organizing all the comments that come in, all the messages that come in across the platforms. And then also we, moderation for us means answering all of those things. But also then we do outreach as well, which is where you go out and you are looking at other accounts that are similar to you as you're commenting on other people's posts or things like on Twitter, you're re-tweeting stuff like that. How do you keep all of these? That's kind of the, the last step there, too. We've posted, you've got everything organized, you've got your access, and now you're involved in your community. So how do you keep all of that or I know how we keep it organized, but how would you recommend that they keep it organized? I think we have, it's important to have a plan and a cadence. So every day you start the same day, you start at the same way and you do like I'm going to check Facebook and Twitter and kind of calendar blocking it.

Like that's my first 10 minutes that I'm going to try and do. And then maybe at lunch time you check a different platform. I don't know how do you organize it. I would say the same way a time blocking that. And then at the end of the day, outreach or getting back to people that have responded to you and just knowing that that's what making it a habit every day instead of like be proactive instead of reactive I think is the best strategy. Because it's going to be a lot of incoming at first and it could be overwhelming. But if you already are organized with all the other fronts and you have your content calendar, then with your last step of actually moderating, it's going to seem more of a flow because you already have the other stuff taken care of that's going to be repetitive.

And we do a lot of that in Sprout Social. We do our engagement coordinator coordinators do all of their moderating there for the most part. And you two both have done that at Chatterkick. But if you don't have Sprout Social, your Facebook notifications come to your Facebook app because it's tied to your personal page, just like any other notification from your grandma. Right. so how do you keep it organized, too, so you don't miss anything? You can check it off. Like you can use the backend of Facebook to mark messages read and that way you can view it as only read, unread messages that have come through. So if you check in at 8:00 AM and then you mark them and check them off, then when you come back in at four, it will only be new messages for you. I was also thinking we use a tool and it's not really a tool, but we like spreadsheets of course.

But keeping track of constant questions that you're answering. That way you can kind of have your answer planned and then just personalize it for that person that's asking it. But if you always get a question about pricing or about a service that you offer, like keeping a sheet that has those answers to it, that way you're not retyping that answer every time somebody asks. You definitely don't want it always to be the same exact answer. You want to make sure it's corresponds with exactly what the person's asking, but it helps you kind of get in that mindset a little bit quicker. Shortening how much time you're spending on moderation. Awesome. So our big three takeaways here are access. Make sure that you know who has access to your pages and where your, all of your passwords are. Content calendars at a monthly view, and then keep an eye on moderation.

Don't let it overwhelm you. Right. Is there a big three for keeping your social strategy organized? Yup, that's it. See, this is why we bring you up from Louisiana. Aren't you just so glad. Of course. Okay. I didn't say y'all too many times.

Business, Social Media, inspirationChatterkickJune 30, 2020organization, downloadable