Transcript
A (0:00)
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.
B (0:18)
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
A (0:19)
And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about social media process and planning. We are.
B (0:24)
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.