How to Create a Social Media Checklist for Social Media Managers
As a social media manager, it is your responsibility to keep social feeds fresh, stay on top of trends, engage with your business’s target audience, and build brand loyalty. Staying on top of everything on your to-do list can be overwhelming. One of the best ways to ease the to-do list anxiety is by utilizing a social media checklist.
I started my marketing journey as a social media manager and have had the opportunity to work in a variety of different fields including retail (B2C), eCommerce, and B2B. The one thing I found to be the most helpful for me was having a checklist I could use on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to make sure the brands I was responsible for growing online were actually growing.
As someone who’s been there, I understand all too well the anxiety that comes with managing a social media presence for a brand or business. As a social media manager, you have a full-time schedule! That’s why it’s important to stay organized and on top of your game.
In this article, I am going to break down the major components of what makes a social media manager successful, and how to break those components down even further into daily, weekly and monthly tasks.
To get started, we are going to cover the 5 major components of your job as a social media manager:
Sharing
You are responsible for posting to all social media channels regularly to grow and maintain an audience. So, it’s your number one priority to share content. Content is what helps you reach your target audience on social media. Some of the types of content you will create and curate for your social platforms are:
Where, what, and how often you post content to social media depends on a variety of factors including where and how often your target audience spends most of their time online, and what your return on investment will look like.
The bottom line to remember when sharing content is that whatever content you share, wherever you share it, it needs to add value to your audience otherwise you won’t have good engagement or see a good ROI.
Engaging
A key component to building brand loyalty is to engage with your audience. You can do this by responding to comments, replying to DMs, reposting UGC, and sharing industry news.
If you’re just starting out, or you’re struggling to generate comments, try starting a conversation on another post encouraging others to join in. You can also ask your audience to tag a friend that would enjoy your post. The best way to engage your audience is to have a conversation with them. The more inviting you are to having conversations, the more your audience with engage with you and the likelihood of them purchasing from you will then go up because you are not only relatable — but you’re also responsive.
If you’re working for another business that has an established audience, you also need to reply in a timely manner to any messages or mentions you receive. Nothing will make an audience lose interest faster than a brand that doesn’t hear or respond to their questions, concerns, or complaints.
You may have all the answers to customer questions, but if you don’t, most businesses I’ve worked for have an escalation process if someone reaches out on social media. Be sure to ask your customer support team how those questions and concerns should be escalated to them so they can handle the issue in a timely manner.
Monitoring
Monitoring comes down to researching how your brand is perceived online. For social media managers, this means monitoring mentions and branded hashtags as well as chatter on any related forums.
Most social media platforms have notifications in place to alert you when your brand has been mentioned. Some platforms, like TikTok, do not. So, it’s your responsibility (notification or not) to check for brand mentions, and for any new posts using your branded hashtags so you have an understanding of how your brand is being perceived online and what is being said about it.
For forums, you can do a search of your brand name to see if any threads come up related to your brand. Forums are a great place to find out what kinds of questions are being asked about your business. While most forums don’t allow businesses to create accounts and respond to users, you can create a repository of commonly asked questions to generate future blog posts and social media content.
Reviewing
Reviewing your key metrics weekly and monthly helps you stay on top of social media performance and trends. This is especially important when you are directly responsible for reporting ROI to company stakeholders.
Reviewing key metrics also gives you insight into what popular trends you could be taking advantage of. The trick to maximizing social media performance when you follow trends is to jump in as they’re growing in popularity and know when they’re dying out. Trends come and go so fast, so how do you keep up? Social listening.
When you use social listening to create content, you can create the kind of content your audience actually wants to see from you. There’s nothing more tone-deaf than creating and posting content for the sake of creating and posting content. Everything you do as a social media manager should be determined by your audience. By utilizing social listening you’re improving your customer experience by continuously shifting your strategy to fit the current need.
Optimizing
Once you’ve reviewed your key metrics, the next important step you need to take is optimizing your content. Understanding your audience and social listening are key here. It’s important that you consider what posts your audience is looking for. If you don’t post something they’re interested in, your audience isn’t going to engage with you.
With social listening, you’re keeping an eye on the industry as a whole. What hashtags are trending and what waves can you ride for a short time to engage your audience? Remember, everything you post needs to be relatable to your audience.
The more your audience engages with you, the more actionable data you have to make informed decisions about what’s working and what isn’t.
To be a successful social media manager, you must be strong in all of these areas. Each one is important in its own respect, and also directly affects other areas of performance.
Now that we’ve discussed these five major components that make up your job as a social media manager, let’s break down each of these into simple tasks that can be accomplished on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Daily
On a daily basis, we need to focus on sharing and engaging with our target audience. Carve out sometime early in your day to respond to comments and messages, check your mentions, and monitor your branded hashtags.
After you’ve completed those tasks, take some time (a good hour at least) to research industry trends and related news, and curate that content for later use. This is also a good time to collect user-generated content (UGC) that is directly related to your brand and business.
Weekly
On a weekly basis, we’re going to engage with our biggest influencers and partners on social media. This means, resharing their content (with their consent of course) as it relates to your business or brand and commenting on their posts.
On a weekly basis, you need to review your key metrics for each social media platform and how they are relating to the goals you set for the month. Are you on trend for the month? Or is there room for improvement? What could you be doing, or sharing more of, to reach your target for the month?
Lastly, carve out some time each week to review the performance of any social media ads you have running and refresh them as needed.
Monthly
At the end of each month, it’s time to perform a social media audit. A social audit is your time to sit down and review post performance from the month and what metrics look like. You also need to review how these metrics meet up with the goals you set. Did you meet goal? Where did you fall short, and why? Asking yourself these questions will help you create and curate better content for next month.
Remember that data is your brands most valuable asset. Data holds insights about your target audience that you need to make informed decisions about social media content and literally every other aspect of your business.
On social media, the data you gather tells you the types of content that resonate with your audience, and what type of content is your highest converter. If you’re just starting out, give yourself a good month of collecting data before you start digging into the why. Anything less than that, and you’re not seeing a clear enough picture to make actionable decisions.
Now that you’ve reviewed the month’s metrics, take this time to set your goals for next month. Reviewing your data will always set you up for a better month ahead. When you are first starting out as a social media manager (especially for a new brand or business) you don’t have a baseline of data to fall back on to make your decisions. Initially, you’re going to be shooting in the dark until you’ve grown your audience enough to collect actionable data. So, don’t be too concerned if you haven’t mastered creating and meeting goals in the beginning. Focus on creating your content, being consistent, growing your audience, and listening to what your audience needs and wants from you.
Finally, use this time to create and schedule your new content alongside the UGC and industry related content you curated throughout the month. You have already created your goals for the month, so now it’s time to create the content that best aligns with your goals. If you’re working on a team, consult with team members on any events, announcements or campaigns that you will need to share so you can schedule them ahead of time. The earlier you have creative assets together the easier it will be to create your content calendar.
There you have it! You have learned what it takes to put together a daily, weekly, and monthly checklist of your most important tasks as a social media manager. I hope that this checklist has made you feel more confident in your ability to create and manage a successful social media presence — whether that’s for your brand or business or if you work for a company.
