Managing a social media presence can be a full-time job, requiring constant effort and a team-based approach to get it done. As the complexities of social media management continue to grow and change, just keeping your entire team working together and on the same page becomes a task in itself.
Luckily, there are a number of great tools and tips out there to help you spend less time managing your staff and more time working on your brand presence. Whether you are lucky enough to work in the same office or have a team spaced out across the country, these tips will help you virtually manage a staff of any size.
Schedule Your Content
For personal use, it’s often easy to get away with creating a quick tweet or Facebook post on the fly. For businesses both small and large, a more polished message often needs to be crafted.
To keep your brand’s voice consistent, developing a content calendar is an easy way to see just what and when you are posting to your networks. This will help you space out your sharing throughout the day which often helps keep customers engaged. Very quickly, you’ll be able to see what kind of content your network might be lacking and then make informed decisions on where you might need a little extra help. A content calendar can serve as a visual to-do list to keep your entire team up to date on what has been done and what is expected of them over the next few days or weeks.
Just because the idea for a great tweet or Facebook post strikes you in the middle of the night, it might not necessarily be the best time to share it. Pre-scheduling your content helps to guarantee that it is seen by as much of your network as possible. In addition to traditional pre-scheduling, Sprout Social offers something known as Sprout Queue. Now, you can add content to your queue on a continuing basis throughout the day and have this content published at times you choose. Alternatively, you can have Sprout Social’s ViralPost feature determine the optimum times to post, based on an algorithm that assesses your social media activity.
Assign Tasks to Team Members
With so much responsibility, it’s important to make sure your entire team can keep busy. By dividing up jobs and projects to your staff, you’ll keep everyone working and you’ll be able to spend more time managing your brand instead of your people.
For brands where interactions with customers make up a large portion of your engagement, ensuring that multiple team members don’t jump on the same question can be key. Whether you’re fielding questions or handling formalized customer service requests, making a member of your staff accountable from start to finish will keep your customers happy and make your team work even better together. Sprout Social offers a great set of tools to do just that.
Once you have added the other members of your team to your account, you’ll be able to assign tasks to them and add notes to make sure nothing is missed. Even after tasks are marked as completed, you can go back and look through them all to see what your staff has been working on. If you use Zendesk as your help desk solution, Sprout Social’s integration will make the entire process from identifying issues, creating support tickets and following up on resolutions quick and easy.
Know Your Audience
On a daily basis, you and your team may interact with hundreds of individuals; keeping track of all this information can be a burden. Providing a centralized place for your team to keep notes and contacts will help you understand your audience, keep track of customers, and take personal support to the next level. Whether you use a tool such as Google Docs for document collaboration or Dropbox for quick file sharing, developing a set of files that your entire team can access will save you time and energy.
As a social CRM tool, Sprout Social makes it painless to add contact information and notes about your customers. You can even see what social networks they use around the web. By automatically tracking your conversation history and allowing you to add notes and contact information to your followers’ profiles, relationships formed with your customers can be shared by everyone on your team.
Share the Numbers
One of the biggest tools that many overlook is also one of the easiest to implement. Social media management is not just about sending out content, it’s about seeing how that content works out in the wild.
Reporting offers a look into your progress on specific campaigns, shows you how engaged your audience is and provides you with a direction to head towards in the future. Sprout Social offers a wide range of reporting options that can compare Twitter accounts, show you detailed Facebook demographics and can even be branded to your company. While these reports are often sent to those outside your team, reporting lets your entire team see and understand how you’re doing at glance.
Sprout Social provides a host of features that can help you accomplish tasks faster in ways that better utilize your team. Whether you’re scheduling messages for your accounts, handling support ticket requests, or just trying to understand who your audience is, using these tools can make your job (and your life) much easier!
Have any other tips for managing your virtual team? Let us know in the comments!
This article discusses Sprout Social, our social media management tool for businesses. To learn about our editorial ethics and our commitment to objective coverage of the social media space, visit our About page.
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