Happy New Year! Congratulations on another year of business. Digital marketing is ever changing and the task of social media is being pushed more and more to the forefront of what businesses need to focus on. So, we thought it would be a good idea to share with you some of the key tasks you should be doing every day, week, month and quarter to keep up with your competitors and build a strong presence.
The day-to-day is the most important part of your social media strategy as it is where you can make the biggest difference to your social media and how it will help your business. There are eight main things that you should focus on in order to maximise the potential of your activity and they mostly revolve around monitoring. Let’s take a look:
- Check and update your posting calendar
- Reply to comments and questions
- Monitor your brand mentions online and react to them
- Discover industry-related keywords and threads
- Check what your competitors are posting
- Monitor industry news and hot topics
- Discover trending hashtags
- Monitor and comment on influencer’s posts
Ensuring that you keep up with these tasks daily will help you greatly and they don’t take very much time to do since they are mostly passive activities. Of course, you should be replying to any comments and questions on your posts fairly quickly and if your company has been mentioned online it is also good to share that news! The rest of the tasks can be achieved with simple monitoring tools that will enable you to quickly look through and find information that will help with your strategy.
Weekly tasks are also important and they usually take a little longer than daily tasks as there is more planning and analysis involved in what you will be looking at. This time is when most of your content planning will be taking place and when you’ll be taking an in-depth look at the results on your ongoing campaigns and comparing them to your competitors. These tasks are:
- Synchronise with other teams’ goals and upcoming activities
- Create a posting schedule for the week
- Identify your competitor’s best-performing posts
- Track the results of your ongoing ad campaigns
Your weekly tasks will enable you to analyse and react quickly to what is working for your business and adapt to changes in the industry. You will be able to see what types of posts your audience engages with the most and the best-performing wording for your ads. Doing this alongside monitoring your competitors and seeing how they are increasing their interaction will help you to vastly improve the performance of your social media and advertising strategies.
Every month, you should spend a day where you really drill down into the core of your campaigns and this is where your most intensive work will be undertaken. Of course, you will be checking on your performance weekly to make small changes but analysis you do monthly is where the biggest changes will be made to your campaigns. Here’s a quick summary:
- Collect monthly stats
- Analyse your competitor’s social strategies
- Compare your performance against your competitors
- Identify your previous month’s successes and integrate them into social strategy
- Define the next month’s ratio of educational and entertaining content to product content
- Research upcoming news and events that can be used to promote your product
Statistical analysis is a key strength for any social media campaign and one that is often missed out when companies take a casual approach to their strategy. It can be easy to focus on the content rather than the results of what you are doing and businesses will often be left wondering why their strategies aren’t working. This is where analysis plays into your campaigns as it will allow you to optimise your campaign and make decisions about what to do more or less of in the future. It can also be the most rewarding of all tasks and you have proof of the impact your campaigns are having on your business.