How to Manage your Company’s Social Media On The Go
The good news about being a social media manager is that you never have to come in to work. You can work from home on your own schedule. The bad news is you never get to take a vacation.
Social media management works best when you are putting out a constant stream of content. You want to take advantage of every minute that your potential customers spend logged in. Suspending your social media campaigns and content for even one week can cost you thousands in opportunity cost.
Fortunately, it is becoming much easier to do work from your mobile device, saving you the trouble of bringing your laptop on every weekend getaway.
The Basics
Set your phone up to be the most efficient workstation possible. Use Android or an iPhone, not a Blackberry. Download and install the Swype keyboard to speed up your typing. Make sure that your autocorrect dictionary recognizes all the terms your company uses.
Accept that your tasks will take a little bit longer using a smartphone than they would take using a laptop.
Advanced Steps
- Download and learn content management apps. Apps, plural. While one app like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck might seem like its suits all your mobile needs, you will miss out on some of the monitoring features of other apps. Download and learn a few different apps. That way, your smartphone will have the same social media monitoring tools and abilities as your laptop. At the very least, I recommend that you download and use Hootsuite, Radian6, SpredFast, and TwitterFeed. Hootsuite is great for managing your content streams, Radian6 helps you monitor and engage with the people talking about your company, and SpredFast and TwitterFeed bring unique data analysis to the table.
- Use IFTTT to set up an alert system. Figure out which kinds of things require your immediate attention. This could be posts, messages, or sudden drops in followers on any of your social media. Then configure IFTTT to send you a text when these things happen.
- Build up a backlog of posts before you go away. Then, most of your time can be spent monitoring your posts instead of writing them.
- Keep to the same usage schedule if possible. If 4-6 PM Eastern Time is when you usually log in to make posts or reply to customers, try to keep 4-6 PM Eastern Time free for work while you’re away.
- Bring your historical data with you. Load any charts tracking previous ad campaigns or social media campaigns on to your mobile device. Or, even better, load them on to Google Docs so you can view and edit them from anywhere.
- Triple-check all your work. Problems with autocorrect dictionaries can lead to some truly heinous sentences. Your ordinary tweet might be autocorrected into complete gibberish. It could even end up sounding offensive or sexual.
It might not sound very enticing to set yourself up for more work during your vacation. I’m sorry to say that it just comes with the job. The best you can hope for is to set up a system so efficient that you only need to put an hour or two in a day, and spend the rest of your vacation relaxing.
Steve is a Social Media Manager and Google AdWords Certified Individual at TechWyse, an internet marketing firm based in Toronto, Canada. TechWyse specializes in SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing. You can read more of Steve’s writing at TechWyse.com/blog.
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Thanks for the kind words. Glad you found the articles helpful. Unique (non-duplicate) content of course is key. Even better is content that adds value i.e. contributes to the topic in new ways.