Set Your Social Media Strategy up for Success

After you set your sights on your social media goals, it’s time to get serious about setting yourself up for success to meet and even exceed them! There are many services available for free or with a paid subscription to help you manage social media. However, we find it’s a combination of social media management tools that make the transfer of ideas, information, and assets easier and faster. Prevent excuses and obstacles by finding the right combination for your team. Folding new habits into existing systems can make a world of difference!

1/ Idea Collection

If you’ve ever spent more than a few minutes in front of a blank screen trying to figure out what to post about you know the pain of lacking ideas when it comes time to post. Vice versa, your audience also knows the confusion of having a flurry of messages with different ideas or calls to action all coming through their feed in a short window of time.

Start your process by organizing your ideas. This can be done in a variety of ways. We highly recommend finding a method that can be shared across team members and is easily accessible when inspiration strikes! It is helpful to have the ability to record not just the idea, but a date or time-frame for when it should be posted as well as any notes or links that might be needed in the next step.

Neat + Nimble’s Top Choice for collecting ideas for inbound marketing: AirTable

Other options:

• Evernote
• Word
• Excel
• Google Docs
• Trello
• Asana
• Pinterest

2/ Content Calendar

Now that you have a bunch of ideas, it’s time to organize them into at least a semi-thoughtful schedule. This is called a content calendar. You can learn more about why a content calendar is important here. It’s important this tool have the ability to be updated and accessible to everyone involved in the social media process. It’s also the one piece that can most quickly go out of date if it’s not habitually updated.

Neat + Nimble’s Top Choice for managing a content calendar: AirTable

Least Effective: Paper Calendar

Other options:

• Excel
• Google Calendar
• Outlook Calendar
• Monday.com
• Story Chief
• Content Cal

3/ Asset Creation & Storage

Now that you know what you’re going to post and when, you likely need to actually write it and pair it with a multi-media asset. This might mean sourcing from a royalty-free image site, creating your own, scheduling a time to build a library, or out-sourcing to a trusted partner. Once you have it though, you’ll need to get it from point A to point B quickly and easily from nearly any device. To reduce the amount of time you spend searching for the “just right” asset or creating something that already may exist you may want to invest in digital asset management (DAM) storage.

Neat + Nimble’s Top Choice for creating and managing digital assets: Adobe Creative Cloud, AirTable & Google Drive

Other options for creation:

• Canva
• RelayThat
• Pixlr
• Crello
• Promo.com

Options for storage:

• MavSocial
• DropBox
• PhotoShelter
• SharePoint

4/ Scheduling

Already a master of ideas and keeping a neat, organized content calendar? You’re ready to take it live! Batching your posts through a social media management system can save you hours and the headache of remembering to publish every day (or however often your strategy calls for). Recycling the same message for multiple platforms increases efficiency. However, to really look like a social media pro, you’ll need to also customize the formatting and hashtag use by platform. So using a tool that pushes to multiple social media platforms can really help.

Neat + Nimble’s Top Choice for scheduling social media posts: HootSuite

Other options:

• Later
• Sprout Social
• Buffer
• AppSumo
• Loomly
• Co-Scheduler
• SEMRush
• Meet Edgar

5/ Monitoring, Responding, & Measuring

It’s time to close the loop. After you’ve published your post(s) you’ll want to monitor for the response of your audience…and the algorithm! How quickly your content is seen, engaged with, and responded to can greatly impact it’s reach and performance. Social Media best practices also calls for a two-way conversation. So posting then ignoring is definitely not recommended.

In order to make the most of your time on social media as part of your bigger digital marketing strategy you’ll need to measure your success and areas for improvement. This goes beyond the vanity metrics often associated with social media management. Dive deeper and find what matters most to you using our Social Media Strategy guide.

Neat + Nimble’s Top Choice: HootSuite & Google DataStudio

Also important: in-app analytics/insights

Other Tools:

• Sprout Social
• HubSpot

Find Your Perfect Combination

Setting up workflow to successfully execute your social media strategy is key to making the impact you plan for. It may require some new behaviors and habits which can shift your culture. When it works, it will become second nature and be shared among your entire team. Once that happens, it will be important to keep your key players accountable.

TLDR: Finding the right combination of software and habits to capture inspiration when it hits, batch schedule, monitor, and measure will cancel set your team and strategy up for success on social media.

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