Stephen Covey said “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” With digital marketing, especially social media, there are new things constantly rising to the surface that are vying for your attention. To be successful it is important to have a social media strategy and to schedule your priorities. We all have our daily, weekly and monthly to-do lists. While there are many more than 5 social media tasks that need your attention, here are the ones that we think should be scheduled as priorities.
Manage an Editorial Calendar
Your editorial calendar should be as broad as monthly and as detailed as daily. What that means is you should have multiple layers of the calendar. You want your larger, monthly picture for less frequently created content and your daily schedule for more commonly posted content such as social media posts. It is recommended that your calendar be prepared at least a month in advance, if not quarterly, with room to add last minute content as needed.
Schedule Posts
Once your calendar is in place you will want to schedule your content to go out on various networks. Scheduling your content on a weekly or monthly basis allows you to spend more time on your priorities such as strategy and content development/curation rather than on tactical execution. There are a plethora of schedulers available to help with this task. We recommend researching the options and selecting the one that you feel most comfortable with. Some to consider include Hootsuite, Tweet Deck, Sprout Social, or Buffer.
Curate Content
When you curate content you are sharing news and information developed by other creators. Some companies love to do this while others find it rather tricky. Our advice to you is learn to love it. One of the fastest ways to isolate and turn-off your followers is to constantly be posting information on or about your company, product or service. Curated content helps build authority and provides a convenient place for your target audience to go for news from a variety of sources. You can easily curate content through RSS feeds on social networks to embed content on your site.
Listen To Your Audience
One of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience is to use the right language. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Too often businesses get bogged down with pushing out the message they want their market to hear; not the message their market wants to hear. When you use the right language, avoid jargon, and tell a good story, you will win your audience’s attention. Do your research and really understand exactly what it is that your target market wants to hear, understand how they feel about you and your product/service, and dive into their perceptions. Only then can you truly win them over.
Review Analytics
We live in an instant gratification society. And luckily for social media gurus, social media has no shortage of instant feedback. Prioritize the review of analytics so that you have a truly polished and deep understanding of what worked and what didn’t, what your audience engaged with and what they avoided. Analytics will help understand what happened and can guide you on how to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Schedule Your Prioritizes
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about the Time Management Matrix. The matrix has urgent activities in one axis and important activities in the other. Ideally we should be spending our time in the non urgent, important quadrant. However, when we don’t prioritize, most of us find ourselves in the not urgent, not important quadrant spending time on activities that distract rather than promote success. To avoid this pitfall, schedule your priorities and try to stay focused on those activities so that you can get the most out of your social media strategy.
