7 Ways to Keep Your Social Media Marketing Organized

If you are into social media marketing, you likely have at least 6 tabs open in your browser right now, believe me.

Social media marketing is overwhelming: We have to be everywhere, managing content, interacting with others, planning for the future and so much more.

So, how can you keep your social media marketing organized?

First, you need to realize that creating a unique routine for social media can help keep you organized and reduce the stress that comes with managing your own social media accounts. Maintaining a balanced life is key when it comes to productivity. But how do you accomplish it if your work is in such a cluttered area?

These 7 tips will help keep your social media marketing organized:

1. Create an Effective Marketing Calendar

A social media marketing calendar helps you lay out a schedule for your social media posts, blog, and email marketing campaigns.

CoSchedule is a solid solution for anyone who wants to tie different parts of digital marketing together, plan timely content for upcoming holidays and schedule recurring social media updates around on-site content. My favorite feature inside CoSchedule is the ability to create mini-task-lists around each project, allowing me to organize all the little things that need to be done before each content project can be promoted:

You can also store your social media calendar inside your blog dashboard by using a plugin. It’s a good idea to manage your blog content and social media schedule from a single dashboard.

2. Timing is key!

Going off of schedules, you need to also learn how to schedule all of your posts ahead of time. This doesn’t just save you time, it also allows you to move your focus to other parts of your job, all of which contributes to the organization that I’m talking about.

Start all of your plans on Monday, including all of the posts planned for the week. Some social networking platforms allow you to schedule (and re-schedule) posts to enable you to work on future projects, and they will go live automatically.

Use Wave’s Social Calendar to keep yourself organized and motivated: It even has the top awareness days and big holidays, making it easy for you to plan timely content far ahead of time.

Wave allows you to easily create micro-videos for each day of the week, timing them to seasonal trends and holidays. There are more tools allowing you to create social-media-friendly micro-videos so you can diversify your social media calendar.

3. Build Your Own List of Resources

When it comes to social media sharing, a good rule of thumb is to only share your own brand assets in 20% of your updates. The majority of content that goes live on your social media channels should be external industry resources. By promoting other people’s content, you build value, connect to influencers and give back to the community.

Having a solid list of industry blogs and media outlets that regularly publish high-quality timely content makes content curation easy. Build a unified RSS feed of your favorite niche content sources to refer to whenever you are working on your weekly social media schedule.

Cyfe is a great tool for the job. You can use its RSS widget to set up a separate content curation dashboard where you add all your favorite feeds. Cyfe also has a social media scheduling widget, so you can easily add those resources to your calendar from the same dashboard.

4. Build Your Own Media Library

As a social media manager, you need an image editing tool that will help you create images for posts on social media. This will help you create different images that you will need for a single post, it also helps you organize those images.

Canva is a great solution for your image creating needs because it allows you to create your own brand identity management library to make sure all your social media visuals are well-branded and have a unique style.

5. Make Interaction a Part of Your Daily Calendar

Communication is not complete if there is no mutual relationship between your brand and your followers on social media. To engage with your audience you need to learn the art of responding to all of the messages you get. Set aside regular time slots in your calendar to go through each mention, message and comment on Facebook and Twitter as well as interact on another networking site like LinkedIn and Instagram.

To make the process effective, make sure to close up all the messages, one at a time. That way you don’t lose it in the hips of unimportant messages.

6. Monitor and Optimize Your Web Time

In order to maximize the efficiency of everything you are doing – including your social streams, post requests, links, and emails amongst many other things – you need to know where you are spending most of your time, what can be optimized and what should be delegated.

Webtime Tracker is a nice Google Chrome extension that can help you discover which sites take the most of your time:

In order to not to get lost in all those tasks, messages and to-do lists, you need to set a time limit for each task you perform. You can also set an alarm that will help pull you back. If you don’t know how to do this, you can start with something like this:

• 90 minutes towards creating social media content, this should include personal and general posts.
• 60 minutes on scheduling posts for weeks to come.
• 30 minutes on each social media platform responding to all the mentions, comments and messages.

7. Create a Social Content Folder inside Your Email Inbox

One of your major roles as a social media manager is to gather all of the content your company creates, go through it, and create social media promotions. The problem is, as more content is coming in, how do you make sure every bit gets marketed to the maximum efficiency?

Using your email inbox to organize all those multiple tasks (and interactions triggered) is one free way to get organized. You can use email filters to set up a separate folder inside your inbox to keep your social media activity there.

If you don’t want to be stressed out or get overwhelmed by the social media activity, try all of the tips that I’ve listed above.

Are there any other social media productivity tricks you are using? Please share in the comments!