Your Daily Social Media Work Flow

Given the constant nature of social media, it’s easy to start feeling like you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off. Or maybe you find yourself paralyzed by the overwhelming number of options that social media presents. Without an organized work flow, it’s hard to know what that next step should be with social media.

Since the whole point of social media is to interact with people in real time, you won’t always be able to stick to your work flow, but at least having a process in place to reference will help you follow through on your goals and reach the outcomes you’re shooting for. Here’s a sample of what a day’s work could resemble for a person engaging in social media marketing.

1. Scan the Headlines 

Social media doesn’t sleep. By the time you wake up in the morning there’s already a lot happening in the real world, and consequently, online. In order to find out what’s happening in your industry or market, start the day off by scanning your RSS reader. Subscribing to blogs and news sources that are relevant to your industry is a good way to keep up with the times all in one place.

2. Share

As you scan the RSS reader, pick out the interesting content and share it with your social media followers. While you’re at it, see what your social media community is sharing. If you find something noteworthy, share that too by Retweeting or Sharing on Facebook.

These first two steps in the social media work flow can be done back to back. They don’t take long and they’re by no means difficult. It’s just a matter of blocking out that little window of time in your morning to do it.

3. Consult the Editorial Calendar

Step three assumes that you already have planned out the type of content you will be posting throughout the week in an organized editorial calendar. Check the editorial calendar to see what’s on the schedule for the day or week in terms of the type of content you’ll be creating.

4. Create

Fit this one in whenever you have a break in your day or need to back away from your other work tasks for a while. Whether it’s writing a blog post, writing an e-book, or recording an instructional video, make time every day to create your own content. Notice I didn’t say you have to publish every day. For example, you could write for 20 minutes a day and by the end of the week you’ll have put together a great blog post to publish.

5. Monitor

Find 15 minutes in the afternoon to check back in with your social networks. Using a CRM application such as TweetDeck, Hootsuite, or Seesmic, is the most efficient way to do this. You can set up your dashboard to display your Facebook activity, Twitter timeline, and any @mentions, Retweets, or replies on Twitter. You can also monitor the conversation going on around a certain subject by conducting a Twitter search. Identify some keywords that relate to the subject you’re interested in and search by those keywords.

6. Interact

Interact with your followers by responding to any Tweets or Facebook comments directed at you. If your Twitter search turns up some unanswered questions that you can answer, demonstrate your expertise and possibly gain a new follower or better yet, a new customer.

It’s fine to send out generic tweets and status updates, but the ones that are engaging and interactive are the most effective for building up your social media community. The idea being, if you interact with people online, those interactions should convert into real life interaction and eventually sales.

7. Recap

It’s a good idea to check in with your social media networks one last time at the end of the day. The lifespan of social media content is rather short. Meaning if someone posted something relevant, it will probably only be relevant for an hour or two. Therefore, if you go to bed and the next morning come across a tweet or status update that you wanted to comment on from last night, it’s probably too late. One last check-in at the end of the day helps you avoid that situation.

Between the demands of your job and the unpredictable nature of social media, you probably won’t be able to stick to your workflow exactly every day. But if you like to have some kind of structure in the otherwise unstructured world of social media, this should at least provide you with a framework for your daily social media activities.