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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Social Media Process & Planning
00:17:37
Social Media can be massively time consuming. Unless you have a robust process behind its management things can slip. In this episode, Daniel shares with us an effective way to approach social media to maximise the impact while minimising the amount...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about social media process and planning. We are.
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B
Sounds rock and roll. Right, so the key thing behind this is that social media can be massively, massively time consuming. And in reality you're creating content, you're going out to different channels, you're doing outreach and it's all very manual. And actually if you're not careful, you can spend a phenomenal amount of time on this. And normally what happens is it becomes a bit ad hoc, so we start doing our day by day roles and then I haven't done anything on Instagram I need to do that. I haven't tweeted in a week. Oh, it's going to do that and quick, do it quick. And we don't really think about it. And unless you have a really good, good process behind all this, it slips. And the one thing I'd say is that what's really happened is that because everyone's doing social media, everyone's doing content, there's a bit of a hygiene factor this and that. You kind of have to be doing it. You want to get your stuff out there and you want to, you want to be kind of seen and you want to maximize the impact that you're having with what you are doing because otherwise you can be absolutely busy constantly getting stuff out there and not really getting any traction just because the lack of actual social engagement you're going to get with a lot of channels as well. So it's really about maximizing your bang for buck and really minimizing the amount of time you have to spend on the process orientated stuff. So the way I would describe it is a hub and spoke approach. And hub and spoke basically says at the center there are some central tools, rules and working processes and there are a number of people within the organization doing different bits of this, but it's all kind of task and process managed from that point of view. So the key things that you need at the center, and I should say as well, by the way, this even counts for small organizations. So for massive organizations, you definitely, definitely need this. But even if you've got kind of five people, you need to think about this because otherwise what happens if everything's going through one person, that person will get so bogged down, it'll be incredible. But not only that, in the, the more successful you become the more of a problem it becomes, because there's more and more just to respond to all the time as well. So where you start is with there's two kind of core things I'd say. One is a content calendar. Now we've got the content calendar you can download on the website. We'll put into the show notes again, and we've even got a podcast that explains how to use it. But the idea of the content calendar is not just to plan what you're publishing and when, but to maximize your channel usage. So you talk about what the content will be, but then you've done your keyword research as well, so that you have identified how are you going to optimize this blog post or podcast or video, whatever it is as well. You have thought about email marketing, you thought about social channels, you talk about outreach and all those sorts of different things as well. We've got an updated version of the content Canada that you can download to take a look at that auto populates the dates and does some other nice kind of things as well. Yeah, it's good. So well done, Kieran. So we've got that. He said, very clever. He's just done it himself. So, yeah, very pleased with himself. So anyway, you've got the content calendar. That's one of the things then you need a social media policy. Now, the average social media policy says, don't do this, don't do this. If you do this, you're going to be in trouble. But what we really want is a policy that says, don't do this, but you should do this. And here are five great examples of doing it. And here are three most popular, popular tweets. And this is the right tone of voice. Here's an example of good tone, here's an example of bad tone. And it should be a working document that people find useful enough that they refer back to it all the time as well. So you've got your content calendar, you've got your social media policy. You then want to have things like outreach templates and outreach lists. So you should have pre identified who are your advocates, those people that say nice stuff about you and you probably want to signpost content to them before other people. So we've got a podcast coming out next week, but it's live on the website now, so you can get it before anyone else if you want to, or here's a snippet or something else like that as well. And actually giving people assets is quite important, but for advocates, just signpost stuff for them. And make it clear to them now, influencers and kind of bloggers, those kind of people, you want to give them a reason to talk about your stuff. And if you can give them something exclusive that gives you an opportunity. So again, it might be that you've got a quote, that you can give them a graphic with a quote in it, or, or you can give them some insights into a report before anyone else gets it, and so on as well. You might interview them for your podcast or your kind of blog, whatever it may be. But what you want is a pre identified list of advocates and influencers. Then what you want is a template, maybe an email template and you are ready just to go, here's our new blog post, thought you'd like to have it and just send it out to those people. So you're kind of pre prepared to do that. That's part of the process. What you also want to look at is having some sort of graphical templates to work with. So a great one to use is canva.com so C-A-N-V a.com and it's online graphics editing package, but you can create your own templates in it. And if you build your own templates and say, for example, you use certain stock photography you've licensed, you can pre upload that stock photography. And what it means is that anyone on the team can go through login to Canva and they can use the templates. They're going to stay on brand, but they can use the stock photography and they can modify things and change them if they want to, but they're going to be within the brand and they're only going to use licensed images. They're not accidentally going to grab an image that they shouldn't be using. Canva incidentally has lots of templates you can get for free. There's also some paid for ones. And the way it works is that you either pay a dollar to use it once or you pay $10 for a multiple usage license. So if you haven't had a look at it, go and set up a free account. It's an absolutely brilliant tool.
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It's a little tip that I picked up on the Canva template. Some elements of a template cost and other bits don't. And actually if you're on a tight budget, you can just remove those elements. So there might be a really interesting tick around a particular call to action and it's the tick that's going to cost actually be fine with just a little oval or a square around it. It would still look great. So you can cheat a little bit and remove those paid for elements if you're on a tight budget.
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Yeah. And there's loads of really good free ones in there as well, so it's definitely worth taking a look at. Now the other thing you want is some sort of task management, process management kind of thing and that is where I can say, right, you do this, then when that's done, pass it onto this person. Then when that person's created the image, they're going to post it and then someone's going to sign it off. But you don't want that being done manually because stuff gets forgotten. So something like asana Asana will allow you to go through and task manage across your different teams, put things into different lists and so on. And we use it as well. When I say we, everyone else team uses it and then I kind of ignore it and then get in trouble all the time for not really using it. I think I've got a list as long as my arm in there at the moment as well. So Kieran re records audio for me and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, he'll do a script for me and I go, I'll re record that. And then I do and I don't do anything with it. So if I were actually using asana properly, that would not be a problem and at least you'll know when I was finished as well. So to the extent, I'm taking two days off next week just to catch up with my asana list. So it's a great way of processing, managing things and seeing. Why has that not been done? Oh, that's because this person sitting on it hasn't approved it yet or whatever else it may be. So you can kind of get a viewpoint on things, but you do need a culture of using it and it's always good if leadership set an example. So I should really pull my finger up.
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There's lots of systems out there, basecamp.
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And all sorts of things.
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Base camp's very good. Reich W R I K E R I particularly love that actually. Of all of them, asana is my favorite today. I have to say it's lovely. They messaged me whilst I was using it saying, is there anything we can do to improve? I sat and thought about it and actually no, I don't think there is. It's really, really good. And we're only using the free version.
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Yeah, there's only limited number of people on the teams that are using it and it's great. So definitely take a look at that. And then the other thing you need at the center of your hub is, is a Social CRM. What's Social CRM? Social CRM. Social Customer Relationships Management. Could just be something like Hootsuite. It could be SocialReport.com all the way up to. If you're doing kind of customer service at scale. Something like conversocial Conversational is lovely.
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Yeah, very good. If you're dealing with lots of different customer threads and they've really done some hard work on live chat as well.
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Yeah, and even things like hootsuite now as well. I mean it's a. Actually a lot of us use the basic version. There's quite advanced versions out there as well and allows you to send tasks to different people and all those sorts of things as well. So good for managing your kind of workflow with this as well. The other and kind of final thing you need at the center of your hub and your hub and spoke approach, this is social media monitoring. Now that could be anything from a kind of fully blown thing like brandwatch. Big fan of brandwatch. Really, really good social media monitoring tool. Not the cheapest tool, but the thing with these social media monitoring tools is you kind of. You pay for what you get to some extent. So they're monitoring all these huge amounts of channels and working out where your brand's being mentioned, what's going on in the industry. Someone needs to be looking at that and kind of doing something with the data all the way through to where you could use a free version of hootsuite and you could just add a column and it's a search column and I can search for my brand name in Twitter and it will just show me all the tweets. Now that's not going to work if you are a massive corporate, but if you're a small business, just using a column in hootsuite will do the trick. You need some sort of monitoring though, just to see what's being said, how much is being said. But actually some of the tools like Social Report will see the level of response you're getting in there anyway to these kind of things.
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We did an episode on this few episodes back, so check that out. There's some really affordable and very robust tools in there. From one man bands right up to big international corporations. There's something for everyone.
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So you need these things at the center of your kind of hub to manage the process. And what we all do is we'll try and update our content calendar on a kind of monthly basis so we have it kind of filled out at least three months ahead and then we'll try and get together once a month and we'll just say, right, what fits in there, what's changing? And so on.
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So I'm going to chip in here with an idea for all of you.
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Really.
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I think one of the interesting things about social media is measuring return on investment is a real challenge with it in a lot of cases. But there are some steps that you can take to really supercharge that.
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Really.
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I suppose this probably wouldn't relate to small organizations because what I'm going to suggest is quite a lot of work. But if you're a large organization, you know, getting a good measure of what that social media activity is actually achieving is really, really important. And it's simply the case of making sure your analytics is tied up well with all of your social media activities. So regardless of what the channel is, what's generating traffic to your website and conversions, Right. So you have to have your goals and stuff set up and you have to have your analytics set up and tell it which channels you're active in. But I go one step further than that. And for every single social media post I put out, I would actually go to the trouble of generating a trackable link. So you can target the particular link you push out on Twitter as coming from social media and the medium's social media and the source is going to be Twitter and the campaign that can could be, you know, what specifically you were, you were talking about, or you can use the keyword field within that analytics tracking. But by tracking it at that sort of level, it's lovely because actually you can roll everything up into social media as a, as a, you know, an overall overarching way of dispersing your content. But then you can also drill down and break it down into Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, you know, whatever channels you're active in and see what kind of click levels you've had from those channels. And it's yes, I know analytics will do this by default in a lot of cases, but it gets a little bit messy when other people have shared it and it gets reshared and clicks through. But actually if you've got that trackable link in there, it's always going to, it's always going to kind of come from the original sources. I think it's better.
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Yeah, well, okay, so to do that, if you just search URL builder, the URL builder will allow you just to fill in a quick form and that allows you to do this, you can do it manually as well, but the URL folder gives a nice little field to do that. Incidentally, in hootsuite, when you're writing a link, there is a little cog next to it and it gives you kind of some advanced settings. There is a drop down and you can automatically add the Google Analytics tracking code to anything that you're posting out for your hootsuite and you can quite easily quickly update and change that as well.
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Now, when you're working in a team, it's really important you are consistent with this because Google Analytics, if you add a value that starts with an uppercase letter and someone else adds it starting with lowercase, it'll track those two separate things and it makes a real mess of things. And the other thing I can tell you is once tracking code is in Google Analytics, it reports on it there forever and a day. So, you know, it's really important that you keep this consistent and agree. I always insist that they're always lowercase, like never any uppercase letters in the tracking codes. There is actually a very good Google spreadsheet.
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Yeah, I was going to say you.
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Can put drop downs, where you can put dropdowns and keep it consistent.
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We'll put it into the show notes.
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Yeah, I've set that up for a number of social media teams and it really, really helps. And it actually is quite nice to see all the different campaigns that they've been running. But it's a great way of keeping those values that you're using consist so that when you come to your marketing dashboard and look through a report, you really can drill down into the detail or look at it very top line. It's really very useful.
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It surprised me as well actually that in Google Analytics, for example, you see how much traffic is from Twitter, how much traffic's on Facebook and so on. How much of that social traffic was actually missed without putting tracking code in place?
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Yeah, it does. I think a lot of it gets.
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Reshared or in different places.
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Different places or people open up different tabs or they open up different instances and it spreads it around. But that, you know, I like tracking codes in analytics because it's, it's. Well, I always use the analogy when I'm explaining this to people. It's like, you know, every link to your website is like a door into the building. Right. So if you think of your website as a, as a building, as a destination, people are getting to. Every link is a, is a door. And what the Google Analytics tracking code does is it effectively enables you to line up three or four trays of paint. Yeah. So when people visit your, your house, they tread in those different, different paint pots and you get a lovely little trouse, you know, where they came, how they came into the house.
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I don't want people leaving paint footprints through my house.
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That's an analogy. No, physical paint actually exchanges places or gets on, gets on foot. Maybe it does. Maybe that's a new, maybe that's a new Google feature they'll be releasing soon, I think.
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Or maybe not.
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Yes, but that's, that's the analogy. And you know, knowing that somebody came through social media, that's one tray of paint. Knowing which social channel, whether it was Twitter, that's another one. And knowing which particular post. You know, if I've used one of the other, one of the other values, one of the things I would say a lot of people don't realize is that UTM tracking codes have to have at least three values in them. You can't just put, you know, social or whatever, it makes a bit of a mess of things. So do make sure you're using the Core 3.
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And remember, you can put these through URL shorteners as well. They still work. So if you want to tidy things up, it looks a bit of a mess. You could use a URL shortener if you want to use to do that as well. So that will keep things nice. So Hub and spoke at the center. You've got your processes and your tools and then people throughout the organization are enabled to create social media and manage and kind of put stuff out there as long as they adhere to the social media policy. And in a lot of risk adverse organizations what they'll do is they'll make people go, right, how are you going to approach social media? What are your objectives? What's your risk mitigation? All those kind of things. Right. You can now roll with social media. You can get on with it as long as you adhere to the social media policy so you don't need to come back for sign off of everything. But as long as it's within that policy, then that's fine.
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And that's a nice way of working, right? It creates a lot of trust, makes it a bit more fun, you can be a bit more creative with it.
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It also minimizes your opportunity of doing stupid stuff as well. I mean, you know, if there are brand templates to work with, if there is a tool that makes sure you're logged into the right account, all those things, it minimizes the margin for error and therefore just makes everything a little bit safer for everyone. As part of your social media policy, you have a social media monitoring guide. How often are we going to check it? And an escalation policy. What do we do when something goes wrong? Who's responsible for that? All that kind of stuff needs to be to be laid out as well. It's a great little website that again we'll put into the show Notes, which is called Social Media Governance. Social Media Governance has got loads of other people's social media policies. You can see what other people are doing, but bear in mind they might not be good. There's a lot in there that I've read that say what you shouldn't do, but they're not really saying what you should be doing. So I think a lot of them miss that as well.
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It's a great starting point though, right?
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That's exactly it. So just one last quick, quick plug while we're here. We are running a social selling course. So if you're actually involved in trying to build business and doing the kind of sales side of things, huge opportunity of using LinkedIn and other social channels to do that. And we're finding it a kind of ever popular course at the moment. So Again, go through targetinternet.com and you will find all the details of the course there. We'll put it in the show Notes. We've got a few dates coming up with that and it normally runs over one or two days. So depending how much time you've got, you can come along on that. So if you want to go through that with me one on, then book up on the social selling course. So good luck with all your social media efforts and we'll speak to you again on the digital marketing podcast.
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A
Thanks for listening to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.