Speaker 1: I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I've been asked, oh, you do social media management. So do you like just play on Instagram or Facebook all day? And I get it. I see why people say that. But the good news or maybe the bad news, depending on how you feel about it, is that that's certainly not all that a social media manager does. And I know that if you are new in a social media management role or new in your social media management business, it can be confusing. Like, what do you actually spend your time doing? How do you prioritize your time? And I realize I've never talked about this before. So let's go through my new social media management checklist. OK, so the first thing that I recommend doing every single day as a social media manager is checking your social inboxes and mentions. This is really important because, you know, we often think of social media management being all about marketing and hopefully driving people down to sales, but another really important part of the job is customer service and crisis management. And obviously, it depends on the industry that you're in, on the type of client that you're working with. But sometimes you might actually be the first, you know, touch point with the customer. And I know when I was working at one of my old jobs, we used to get customer complaints or customer questions like daily in our Twitter inbox and our Facebook inbox. And occasionally we would even get threats or like really negative things in our mentions that needed to be escalated or sent to a security team. So it is really important that every day you check that. And then also you're going to be catching up on, you know, what you did the day before. So there may be responses that came through that you need to close the loop on and all of that good stuff. So I usually, you know, it totally depends on the size of the organization. For some of my old jobs that I had, which were very large organizations, I would spend like the first, you know, one to two hours of my work day doing this. For smaller clients, this might be like 15 minutes. But definitely make sure that you check that first and foremost. I think it's really important. The second thing that I recommend doing is reviewing your content calendar for the day and just for the week. So a content calendar basically has all of your posts lined up and you can kind of take a look at it and just get a feel for what's going to be going out on the social platforms that day. The reason I think this is important is just because I don't know if there's anything that still needs a little bit of work or maybe you've found some inspiration that needs to be bumped up in the content calendar, moved around. Also, it's important to just keep your ear to the ground. And, you know, if there's anything going on in the world that requires you to pause your social media posts or update your content calendar at all, it's really helpful to just be in the know about what's coming up. And if you happen to be looking for a content calendar tool or template, I've got you covered. The social media content calendar is one of the most important tools that a social media manager can have. It keeps all of your posts organized and planned out, and it also serves as a communication tool between you and your client or your manager. You can easily send it back and forth for revisions or their thoughts, their comments, all of that. I find that organizing my content calendar in Excel or Google Sheets just works best for me and also works best for my clients so they can easily leave those comments and we can send it back and forth. And I've got you covered with a template thanks to HubSpot. In addition to the monthly planning calendar, inside this content calendar template, you'll find a content repository to store all of your most linked to websites and week by week update tabs for all of your different social platforms. The monthly planning calendar has space to identify particular campaigns, holidays and more. And I like to color code this planning calendar by platform and priority level to stay organized. So be sure to click the link down in the description box to get access to this 100% free. It'll definitely help keep you more organized and enable you to do these content calendar checks and updates every single day. So once I've checked my content calendar, I see what's coming up for the day. I then take some time to engage with relevant hashtags and just do a little bit of research around whatever the day entails. So, I don't know, let's just pretend that our posts for the day are focused around women in STEM or something like that. Well, I might just take some time to go through Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and any other platforms that my clients active on and look at the women in STEM hashtag and just kind of start to engage with things, get some conversation going around that topic. So that way, the people that I'm engaging with under that hashtag, well, I know that they're interested in that topic. So once I see my name or see, you know, my client's profile, they go back to it and they see that we're also posting what women in STEM will. Then maybe we can make friends. Maybe they're going to want to follow me. Maybe they're going to want to continue to engage with me. That's just a totally random example. But I kind of use my content calendar to sort of guide me on what I should be engaging with that day. I also do have just a general list of hashtags for each client. So I definitely recommend you do this. Just put it together, throw it into your notes app. You can add it to your content calendar if you wanted to. Just sort of like a hashtag library of hashtags that you often look at, that you often use and go through and spend some time engaging. I get this question all the time of like how much engagement time should you write into your day? And again, it really depends. It depends on how niche your topic is and just how fast you're looking to get results. Obviously, if follower growth is your number one priority, your client is really focused on awareness. Well, then I would probably spend quite a bit of time doing an engagement because that is really, really important. Meanwhile, if I'm just kind of trying to maintain our audience and things like that, I might spend a little bit less time. It's really hard to give a solid number. I usually engage until I start to see things that are really repetitive. You know, you start to see the same people's posts over and over again. And then I can always go back. That's a great kind of filler task that once you're done with all of your other things, you can always go back and spend, you know, the end of your day doing and catching up on as well. OK, so then I go back to my content calendar and I add to it. A lot of times going through those hashtags, engaging with other accounts, sparks some creative ideas for me as well. I might see that there is a trending sound on Instagram, Reels or on TikTok that I think we need to create some content around. So I might add a placeholder to the content calendar and remind myself to create some content or reach out to the person on the team who's responsible for that if I'm not the one actually creating it. I may also find some curated content or some content that exists, you know, on external websites or external platforms that I want to share with my audience. So I might throw something like that onto the content calendar as well. I think it's great to have a good, you know, monthly plan and a weekly plan. But noting that your content calendar can be a little bit flexible because especially in today's day and age where things are so trends based and things go viral like in a minute, I think it is important to have a little bit of flexibility around your content calendar. So I usually spend a little bit of time adding to it or just getting ahead. If my content calendar for the week is good, we're good to go. I'm going to move ahead to the next week and just spend a little bit of time planning. And I'm usually spending a couple hours trying to get ahead on the content calendar. And then for those last couple hours, the next thing I'm going to do is take a look at my analytics. Now, I am kind of an analytics nerd. Some people choose to look at analytics just once a month, once a week. And don't get me wrong, I'm not like running full reports every single day. But I do like to day by day just take a quick glance at how things are performing. If those posts that were scheduled to go out that day have already went out, I'm going to just take a preliminary glance at them, see how they appear to be performing. Of course, I'm not going to make any solid, you know, life altering decisions based on these first few hours of being out in the world. But I do kind of want to get a glimpse of just how things are going. Also, this is important to monitor your comments that came in from any posts that went out that day. So just kind of review your posts, review your analytics, respond to comments, especially if there's any customer service type questions or things that really need to be addressed for the day. After that, I'm going to take some time to review the inboxes. Once again, I might check my mentions one more time as well. I think it's good to do an early morning and then later in the afternoon or evening. And then if I have any other time left over, that's when I'll just do some more engagement, maybe do some more inspiration sourcing. So that's what the people say is playing on Instagram. It's definitely not playing on it, but just kind of reviewing again some of those hashtags, some of those target, maybe key influencers or thought leaders in our space, seeing what they're doing, see if I can respond to them and get their attention a little bit. And then I'm pretty much going to pack it up for the day. I would say that's the average day of a social media manager. Of course, there are days that are maybe a little bit more content creation focused, a little bit more analytics focused where you're running reports. And of course, there are days when you may have meetings with your clients or with your team. But if it's just a random old Tuesday, that's generally what you can look out for. Let me know what your average day looks like. Is that different? Does that sound about right? Did this help you kind of map out your day? I'd be really curious to know. And again, I want to say a big thank you to HubSpot for offering that content calendar template. I really love their content calendar template. I just think it is so, so solid. And having a good content calendar is really going to help you save time and stay on top of things. So I definitely recommend checking it out. It'll be linked down in the description. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope this was helpful. Please be sure to like the video. Thumbs up, subscribe, comment, all the good things. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.