Today’s social media manager must be a master of many domains. They own multiple platforms with a variety of rules, guidelines and best practices for each. They must keep in mind the different brand voice and tone for each client and they have to make sure not to overlap. The social media manager must also be attentive to the communities he or she presides over, ready to answer the needs, complaints and praise of their community members.
It can be a lot. Lose a step and you’re trying to answer a Facebook comment by retweeting a LinkedIn Pulse post to Snapchat. If you’re a social media manager, it is essential that you are organized.
The digital marketing industry has recognized that forgetting to switch from the client’s account to your personal account before you launch into a expletive-filled Twitter tirade against your local barber can be disastrous for business. They’ve offered up all kinds of tools to plan, schedule, organize and track your social media accounts. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Buffer, and Sprout (just to name a few) all offer social media managers the promise of better organization because they recognize organization as an essential element of the job.
Multi-tasking isn’t the same as being organized.
Many social media managers will think of themselves as multi-taskers, but hopefully they’re wrong. Multi-tasking is trying to do two things at once which means you’re doing two jobs at 50%. When one small typo can bring out the haters and trolls, 50% isn’t near good enough.
Social media managers do need to hop from task to task quickly and efficiently. The only way to do that effectively is to be organized and know where information is when you need it quickly. If you’ve just posted a wacky and hilarious tweet for an edgy clothing brand and all of a sudden need to respond to a comment on a Funeral Home’s Facebook page, you’d better be able to make that switch, not just mentally but in your process as well.
Being Organized Gives You Flexibility.
When you’re rushing to post something because you haven’t scheduled it, you open yourself up to make mistakes. When you can’t remember which client wanted you to avoid certain topics, you risk presenting your client inappropriately. When you’ve planned ahead, scheduled well and know what’s happening and on what platform, you give yourself the time and space to handle issues when they invariably arrive.
If a social media manager is always just trying to keep up with their communities, they are going to be less likely to learn and gain insight into that community. One of the greatest things a social media manager can bring to the table is a strong understanding of what a community of fans or followers is interested in, what they are passionate about and what their client can do to cater to those passions. If you’re constantly behind the ball, you’ll rarely have time to listen.
Know Your Numbers
Analytics are an integral part of any social media campaign, and a large part of every social media manager’s day. Website Clicks, Click Through Rate, Total Reach, Likes, Retweets and other numbers are a part of proving the value of social media to your clients. When you’re working with multiple clients and multiple campaigns you need to be organized to keep those numbers straight.
If you’re organized and able to keep tabs on all the numbers, you’ll be better positioned to look into the analytics and see the trends that appear. If you’re organized you won’t just look at last month’s numbers, you’ll see them in the context of the months and even years previous and you’ll be able to see what did and didn’t work in the past.
Organization Leads to Your Goals
This has a tendency to be true no matter what your profession is, but it’s especially true for the busy life of a social media manager. No doubt, one of your coworkers has come by your desk and said “What do you do, just play on Facebook all day?” They may have been joking, tinged with a little bit of jealousy, but there is a truth in their sentiment. Social Media is fun. It’s fun to find engaging content and get into discussions with followers. Don’t let the fun of looking for the perfect Gif distract you from the fact that you have specific goals for each of your clients.
