How to Make a Social Media Checklist (Free Template)

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Managing your brand’s social media is a lot more work than most people might think. A typical day can include creating content, answering comments, and staying up to date with the latest features all while managing everything else on your plate.

Maybe you need a little help to manage your social media better?

In this article, you’ll be getting a step by step guide on how to make a social media checklist so you’ll be handling it like a pro in no time.

I’ve broken down your social media checklist into three main lists:

  • Daily Social Media Checklist
  • Weekly Social Media Checklist
  • Monthly Social Media Checklist

These three checklist helps to keep you from feeling overwhelmed with managing your social media. Feel free to edit it so it works best for you.

Daily Social Media Checklist

  • Check all Social Media Platforms
  • Reply to Customer Comments & Replies
  • Follow Social Media Influencers
  • Check Your Brand Mentions
  • Monitor Branded Keywords and Phrases
  • Update Your Social Media Content
  • Schedule Your Social Media Updates

Check all Social Media Platforms

Set aside time in the morning and at the end of the day to check in on your social media platforms so that you’re up to date with what’s going online.

I’d advise checking twice because throughout the day and social media is always changing, you always want to be the first to know what’s going on your social media profile before anyone else. So you’re quick to pick up potential fires or customer praises.

Reply to Customer Comments & Replies

Engaging with your followers is an essential part of your social media checklist and strategy. Sprout Social suggests that persons now see social media as the top choice for people seeking a brands customer service.

Jay Baer found that companies that answer complaints on social media were able to boost customer loyalty by as much as 25%. Sprout Social’s research discovered that 30% of online customers who were shunned by brands on social media would not only switch to a competitor but would also advocate for them.

Now more than ever customers want to feel like their being heard or seen by the company they’re doing business with.

So the moral of the story is answering comments, retweets, and messages are just as important to your customers as it is to your brand’s online image.

Follow Social Media Influencers

If an influencer decides to follow your account returning the favor of following back is a win-win for both of you. Giving you the chance to open the door to start a conversation, work on new projects or exchange content with each other.

So the next time an influencers followers your page, don’t be a diva and pat yourself on the back, follow them back and begin to engage. It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Some may say that you should follow any and everyone who followers your page, influencer or otherwise as a way to grow your followers, but I find that being selective about who you follow holds some value for your brand, so follow at your own discretion.

Check Your Brand Mentions

Taking time out to check mentions of your brand online helps you to see two things:

The people who love your brand

It’s always a good idea to engage with fans and even highlight them on your social media profile. Believe it or not something as small as that makes followers feel appreciated and apart of your brand’s community.

The people who hate your brand

Hate is a strong word, but you might see some angry, sassy or mean comments about your brand from dissatisfied customers. Now you can use this as an opportunity to fix the issue and change that customers mind.

If the problem goes deeper than a quick fix, bring it up with the right team so that they can understand what real customers are saying about problems that might have been overlooked in the past.

Don Draper from Mad Men once said: “If you don’t like what is being said, then change the conversation.”

Pro Tip: Using Tweet Deck or Iconosquare are great tools for monitor mentions, retweets, and content based around your brand. Based on how big or small your following is you can decide which one works best for you.

Monitor Branded Keywords and Phrases

Just as mentions about your company are important, you also want to take time to see what people are saying about your brands through keyword and phrases.

Wait, monitor all my brand’s keywords?

Don’t worry with Twitter’s own analytics tools, Ahrefs, and Google Alert. tracking your mentions and keywords anywhere is easier than ever before.

8 Types of Keywords or Phrases Should Monitor:

  1. The name of your CEO
  2. Your brand’s name (i.e. Wishpond)
  3. Misspellings of your brand name (i.e., Wispond and Fishpond)
  4. Name of the most active member of your company (i.e., @JDScherer)
  5. Mentions of specific campaigns currently running.
  6. Your brand’s slogan or tagline
  7. Industry related topics
  8. Specific names of products and features

You can also use this type of monitoring to find potential customers that may be interested in your company or thinking of buying from you.

Update Your Social Media Content

After scheduling post every week or bi-weekly it’s always good to update or check in on any content to go out today. This can help you to update any old information, reschedule post or update graphics that needed changes.

You can also schedule your content for the next day, but personally, I find scheduling post a week in advance to be more of a time saver and realistic if-if changes need to be made the day before. It also opens up a window of free time to be more productive with your day to day tasks.

Schedule Your Social Media Updates

Scheduling your updates ahead of time is perhaps our number one time-saving tip for social media.

I’ve personally felt such great freedom and productivity from batching the creation of social media updates into one window of time each day.

If your not sure what time to post or check in on your content you can use Personalization Guide for the best times to post on social media.

Weekly Social Media Checklist

  • Schedule Your Social Media Content
  • Review Social Media Stats
  • Weekly Goal Check-in
  • Employee Advocacy on Social Media

Schedule Your Social Media Content

Earlier I mentioned that scheduling content a week or biweekly in advance helps to take the pressure of posting every day.

The truth is most of us are guilty of forgetting to post at all, if not on time. So to avoid the haphazard; will I won’t I post mentality today, use social media tools like Buffer, Hootsuite or CoSchedule.

They help you to manage your content in advance. Because when you’re in your 2 pm meeting, posting on Instagram is the last thing on your mind.

For more tools to create, manage and monitor your social media content here are 50 Essential Social Media Tools, a modern marketer like yourself can use.

Social Media Content Curation

If I’m being honest it can be mind-numbing to come up with new creative concepts to share on your social media pages, so why not curate some of your content.

Content curation is finding any useful and high-quality content you’d love to share with your followers. It’s that simple.

It’s also a fantastic way of highlighting persons or brands in your industry you wouldn’t mind collaborating with in the future. Curating their content is a pretty good way to get their attention that you’d noticed and appreciated their work well enough to share it on your page.

I found this Hootsuite guide to content curation including tools, tips, and ideas to be very helpful to know the best places and ways to curate content on your social media pages.

Review Social Media Stats

Once you’ve freed your content out into the wild, it’s good to check your social media stats to see which content is effective and what you can learn from it.

On Twitter, you can see which tweets have the highest engagement from the ones that don’t. You can see which tweet gets the most likes, views, engagements, and retweets for the month.

For Facebook and Instagram where you can see your post reach, likes, shares, and total engagement.

As you check on each piece of content for the week you can see if a post did well because of the content, the time it was posted or all of the above.

There is an off chance that sometimes posts just doesn’t do well, we’ll never really know why because as much as we don’t like to admit it, social media can be mysterious.

But if your content keeps falling into the category above, the chances are that you need to improve your social media content.

Each social media platform is different, so I’ve listed three of the best Wishpond guides below that can help to bring your content from zero to a hundred on social media:

Check Your Weekly Goal

When your done reviewing your social media stats, it’s time to take a deeper look at how effective your content is.

Further down we’ll talk more about the KPI’s you’ll be setting for the month, once you have those your weekly KPI’s or goals follows after.

For example, if your overall goal for the month is to gain 100 followers on all your social media channels, set a weekly goal to get 25 followers each week. From there can see if you’re falling off track or on your way to meeting your goal.

It’s a chance to see the bigger goal in bite size portions. Sometimes seeing a massive number every week can be intimidating but with weekly goals, you’re able to take it one day at a time.

Employee Advocacy on Social Media

Sometimes our faces are so glued to the screen busy reading comments, likes and creating content we forget to share it with the people who matter the most, our employees and teammates.

It doesn’t matter if you are a team of three or ten, having employee advocacy online is a major boost for brand awareness and at time SEO.

5 Ways to Use Employee Advocacy on Social Media

  1. Ask Employees to share branded content on their own social media profiles.
  2. Ask Employees to like, share or comment on your social media posts. Help to start the ball rolling and conversation going.
  3. Ask the CEO to promote any campaigns, individual or company achievements on his LinkedIn or prominent social media pages.
  4. Ask Employees to refer a friend to products and services that they might need.
  5. Include your employees in your content. Show off star teammates or let followers see the faces working behind the brand.

When your employees are included it makes your brand more human and let robotic. Here’s an example of our amazing Wishpond women we highlighted for #internationalwomensday

If you want to go deeper into employee advocacy you can check out Falcon.io article on how to harness the untapped power of employee advocacy on social media.

Monthly Social Media Checklist

  • Social Media Audit
  • Social Media Strategy
    Key Performance Indicators
  • Plan Ahead for Next Month
  • Update Ads and Marketing Campaigns

Social Media Audit

At the end of the month, the last day or week, doing a social media audit of your efforts and content the first thing on your Monthly Social Media Checklist.

Doing a social media audit allows you to take a good hard look at your “social media inventory” such as:

  • The number of followers you gain (or lost)
  • The amount of traffic brought to your website or campaign
  • The results of your ads
  • The most engaging content or activities
  • The content or channels that brought in the most leads

The numbers don’t lie, even if you lie to yourself. Doing an audit isn’t just as an extra checkbox to mark, it understanding what works and what doesn’t. Taking everything you’ve learned and observed then taking it with you to improve for the next month.

Pro Tip: Keep an evergreen folder where you keep the most loved and engaging content you’ve posted so far. You can always repost them or recreate them for another time.

Social Media Strategy

A lot of people overlook this when they start managing their brand’s social media, I’ve been guilty of it too. If you think all you need to do is push out great content and check on comments you’re in for a rude awakening. You need a social media strategy.

A social media strategy is your map to your bigger goal. Writing it out shows you a clear path to where you want to go so you don’t waste efforts getting results you don’t want or allowing you to realize the bigger picture of it all.

Your strategy doesn’t have to change every month depending on what your goals are but fine-tuning is always in need.

10 Things Every Social Media Strategy Needs

If you’re looking for a quick one-pager social media strategy you can write down the following:

  1. Create objectives and goals
  2. Have a detail description of your target audience
  3. Define your brand voice
  4. Do a S.W.O.T analysis
  5. Determine your platforms
  6. Create a content marketing Plan (general content, promos and specials)
  7. Determine your marketing campaign or ads
  8. Find your best time to post
  9. What is your brand’s message
  10. How will you schedule and automate your content

Determine Your Key Performance Indicators

After you’ve determined what your strategy for the month is it’s now time to set the KPI’s to determine if you’re on your way to your goal. Your goal can be as simple as:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Generate Leads
  • Drive sales
  • Build a community around your brand

What your KPI’s will do is determine how you’ll measure how effective your actions are to meeting your goals. So it could be

Goal: Increase brand awareness
KPI: Gain 100k followers on Instagram

Goal: Generate Leads
KPI: Have 10,000 people sign up for my webinar

Goal: Drive sales
KPI: Have 40 people use a promo code to gain sales

Goal: Build a community around your brand
KPI: Have 20 people join in our branded twitter chat each month

For each goal listed above, it has a KPI aligned with reaching and measuring the goal. The more precise your goal is the more precise your KPI can be. So if you’re having problems with creating your KPI’s take a step back and look at the type of goals your setting.

If you need a better understanding on how and what types of KPI’s you’ll need to try these 18 key performer indicators by Clear Point Strategies.

Plan for Next Month

Have you ever heard the phrase if you fail to plan, you plan to fail?

Planning your social media for the next month helps you to plan and slay dragons that will try to rob you of next months productivity.

On empty when it comes to ideas? Try team brainstorming sessions, they help to get your creative juices flowing and you never know who has a great idea up their sleeve. You can also ask feedback from your sales team or persons from different departments to give you a better perspective on the brand’s social media.

5 Effortless Ways to Get Creative

  1. Have a brainstorming session
  2. Take a sneak peek at what your competitors are doing
  3. Revise your Evergreen folder
  4. Ask your followers what they want to see more of
  5. Write down all your ideas, good and bad, then pick which one works.

Pro Tip: If your beginning to feel burnt out between projects and managing social media, don’t be afraid to pass the task along to someone else. Burn out on social media is hard to hide and takes time to recover.

Update Ads and Marketing Campaigns

If you were running any ads or campaigns on social media, check to see how well they’re doing. If ads not performing the way you want, stop it immediately and take a look at what you can fix to make it better. Sometimes a different image or change in call-to-action can make a difference.

You can also try using ads outside of social media like Google Adsense or Adwords or Display Network might help to bring results to your social media marketing efforts.

Summary

You now have a checklist fit for an expert social media marketer:

  • Daily Social Media Checklist
  • Weekly Social Media Checklist
  • Monthly Social Media Checklist

What’s your take? How do you manage your social media and have any tips you’d like to share. Let me know in the comments below.

victoria-taylor

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