4.01 – Keeping Up With Your Social Media Schedule

After you create a Social Media Marketing Plan, one major task you face is managing the effort. If you’re the only one doing the work, the simplest – and likely the hardest – task is making time for it. Although social media need not carry a lot of upfront development costs, it does carry a significant labour cost.

In this chapter, we discuss how to set up a schedule to keep your social media activity from draining all your available time. If you have employees, both you and your company may benefit if you delegate some of the social media tasking to them. You can also supplement your in-house staff with limited assistance from outside professionals.

For small businesses, it’s your money or your life. If you can’t afford to hire help to work on social media, you carve it out of the time you’ve allocated to other marketing activities – unless, of course, you want to add a minimum of another two hours to your workweek.

Finally, this chapter carries a word of caution. Make sure that everyone posting to a social media outlet knows your policy about what is and isn’t acceptable, as well as how to protect the company’s reputation and confidential material. As you launch your marketing boat onto the churning waters of social media, you should ensure that everyone is wearing a legal life preserver.

Managing Your Social Media Schedule

As you know from the rest of your business experience, if something isn’t important enough to schedule, it never gets done. Social media, like the rest of your marketing efforts, can easily be swallowed up by day-to-day demands. You must set aside time for it and assign tasks to specific people.

Allocate a minimum of two hours per week per platform if you’re going to participate in social media, rather than set up pages and abandon them. Otherwise, you simply don’t see a return from your initial investment in setup. If you don’t have much time, stick with the marketing you’re already doing.

Controlling the time commitment

Social media can become addictive. If you truly like what you’re doing, the time problem might reverse. Rather than spend too little time, you spend too much. You might find it difficult to avoid the temptation of continually reading what others have to say about your business or spending all your time tweeting, streaming, and posting.

Just as you stick to your initial dollar budget, keep to your initial time budget, at least for the first month until you see what works. After you determine which techniques have the greatest promise, you can rearrange your own efforts as well as your team’s.

Social media marketing is only part of your online-marketing effort, and online marketing is only part of your overall marketing.

Selecting activity days

One way to control the time you spend on social media is to select specific days and times for it. Many business people set aside regularly recurring blocks of time, such as a quiet Friday afternoon, for marketing-related tasks, whether they’re conducting competitor research, writing press releases or newsletters for the following week, obtaining inbound links, or handling their social media marketing tasks.

Other people prefer to allocate their time early in the morning, at lunchtime, or just before leaving work each evening. The time slot you choose usually doesn’t matter, unless you’re offering a time-dependent service, such as accepting to-go orders for breakfast burritos via Twitter.

Whatever the case, allot time for every task on your Social Media Activity Calendar, followed by the initials of the person responsible for executing the task.

Allowing for ramp-up time

Even if you’re the only person involved, allow time for learning before your official social media launch date. Everyone needs time to observe, to master new tools, to practise posting and responding, to experiment, and to decide what works before rolling out your plan.

Bring your new social media venues online one at a time. This strategy not only helps you evaluate which social media venue works but also reduces stress on you and your staff.

Developing your social date book

There are as many ways to schedule social media activities as there are companies. Whatever you decide, don’t leave your schedule to chance.

Larger companies may use sophisticated project management software. Some offer a free trial such as Basecamp (https://basecamp.com) and Smartsheet (www.smartsheet.com), whereas others are available as freemium proprietary solutions, such as MOOVIA (https://site.moovia.com) or as open source programs such as GanttProject (www.ganttproject.biz). For more options, see http://alternativeto.net/software/smartsheet or www.workzone.com/blog/smartsheet-alternatives. Alternatively, you can schedule tasks using spreadsheet software.

However, the simplest solution may be the best: Calendar software, much of which is free, may be all you need. Paid options may merge schedules for more people and allow customised report formats. Several options are listed in Table 4-1. Look for a solution that lets you:

» Choose a display by day, week, or month or longer.

» List events or tasks in chronological format.

» Select different time frames easily.

» Easily schedule repeat activities without requiring duplicate data entry.

— Affiliate section for calendar software —

If several people are involved in a substantial social media effort, select calendar software that lets you synchronise individual calendars, such as Google, Yahoo!, or Thunder Lightning. Figure 4-1 shows a sample of a simple social-marketing calendar on Yahoo! The calendar shows the name of the person responsible. Clicking an event or a task reveals item details, including the time allotted to the task, the sharing level, and whether a reminder is sent and to whom. Figure 4-2 offers an example of an event detail listing in a Google calendar.

Note: Google and Yahoo! require you to set up an account before you can use their calendars.

Throughout this book, we refer to this calendar as your Social Media Activity Calendar, and we add frequent recommendations of tasks to include on your schedule.

Set your calendar to private but give access to everyone who needs to be aware of your social media schedule. Depending on the design of your social media program, some outside subcontractors may need access to your calendar to schedule their own production deadlines.

Creating a social media dashboard

Your social media marketing efforts may ultimately involve many tasks: Post to multiple venues; use tools to distribute content to multiple locations; monitor visibility for your company on social media outlets; and measure results by using several analytical tools. Rather than jump back and forth among all these resources, you can save time by using a graphical dashboard or control panel.

— Yahoo! Calendar example —

— Google Calendar example —

Like the dashboard of a car, a social media dashboard puts the various required functions at your fingertips in (you hope) an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use visual layout. When you use this approach, the customised dashboard provides easy access in one location to all your social media accounts, tools, and metrics. Figures 4-3 and 4-4 show several tabs of a customised Netvibes (www.netvibes.com/en) dashboard – one for social media postings and another for tools.

— Social media dashboard example —

The items on your primary dashboard may link to other application-specific dashboards, especially for analytical tools and high-end enterprise solutions; those application dashboards are designed primarily to compare the results of multiple social media campaigns.

Table 4-2 provides a list of dashboard resources, some of which are generic (such as My Yahoo!) and others, such as Netvibes and Hootsuite (see Figure 4-5), which are specific to social media.

Before you try to build a dashboard, list all the social media sources, services, and reports you want to display, along with their associated URLs, usernames, and passwords. It will help if you indicate whether services are interconnected (for example, note whether you’re using a syndication service to update multiple social media at the same time) and how often statistical reports should be updated for each service (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly).

— Netvibes dashboard example —

— Affiliate section for social media dashboards —

— Hootsuite dashboard example —

The more complex your social media campaign, the more functionality your dashboard needs.

Dashboards sound simple to use, but they can be a bit of a challenge to set up. In some cases, your programmer needs to create or customise widgets (mini-applications). Plan to create and test several versions of the dashboard until everyone is satisfied with the results.

Consider implementing password access for approved users to various functions in the dashboard. Some users might be constrained to viewing reports, whereas others might be allowed to change the dashboard configuration.