Social media marketing is a huge task, but with this social media checklist, you’ll be able to stay on top of your daily, weekly and monthly tasks. The checklist is divided into three sections:
- Daily Tasks – 7 items
- Weekly Tasks – 6 items
- Monthly Tasks – 4 items
If you find that your daily, weekly or monthly checklist changes often or that there are more tasks than what this social media marketing checklist offers, then feel free to make adjustments how you see fit. This is just meant to help give you a goal and help keep you focused on keeping up with the ever-changing world of online marketing. If we missed anything, please share it below in the comments section.
Social Media Daily Checklist
1. Reply to all comments, messages and mentions:
If you can reply with as many people on social media as possible, your company is doing better than 70% of brands. Your business reputation can depend on replying quickly and appropriately to all engagements. Also, an opportunity is available for you to build a relationship and develop trust. Responding instantly often keeps customers happy.
According to Salesforce, as many as five out of six brands are unable to answer customer messages. On average, only 1 in 6 messages get a response from the system.
Reply to everyone who reaches out. Even if there’s tons going on, taking the time to reply is still important.
There is a word of advice for the dreaded negative comment: Don’t be scared of poor feedback. Change your perspective about it. They can actually show you where your business needs to work for a better customer experience, as well as showing how much you care about pleasing your customers through strong customer service values and skills.
2. Check mentions with your brand name
The key to understanding your brand is what people are saying about it on social media.
You always want to know when an influencer has mentioned your name. Ignoring this can potentially blow the opportunity and create a reputation crisis for you. By monitoring brand mentions online, you can work to lessen the damage or negative statements.
People often forget to tag you (add an @-sign) on social platforms. One of the easiest methods to track mentions like this is to use specific brand monitoring tools that run such as Brandwatch, Hootsuite or Brand24 are great for tracking keywords and keeping on top of all the discussions where your brand is mentioned.
3. Posting new content
Content is still king in social marketing. Posting everyday new content on a regular basis will be the best way to get more exposure. In order to post new content, find out what is trending by using Google Trends and Buzzsumo.
Make sure your content is original.
4. Define the time for your posts
Grow your following and keep them engaged with relevant content.
Try using a social media scheduling tool like CoSchedule, Feedly or
Sprout to help you build out your content calendar.
Find out what post types perform best for you, what times of the day are best for posting and which days of the week will provide you with the best engagement levels.
A NeilPatel study found that people in the United States use social media on different platforms at various times of day.
The must-haves to follow for your posting if you want to get the better results:
Facebook (post 1-2 times per day)
- Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best times to post at 11 am and 1 pm – 2 pm
- During weekdays – 1 pm is the best time
- People engage less between 5 pm – 7 am
- The day to avoid posting is Sunday
Twitter (post 6-9 times per day)
- The best period for the posts is 9 am
- On Wednesday and Friday people react the most
- The best activity during working time Monday to Friday from 8 am to 4 pm
- 10 pm – 4 am is the least successful time
- No point to post on Sunday
LinkedIn (post 1-2 times per day)
- The middle of the week is the most active
- 8 am – 10 am and noon on Wednesday is the time of activity
- The most productive time is Thursday at 9 am and between 1 pm -2 pm
- Friday after 9 am more chances to success
- The period between 8 pm – 4 am will not bring engagement
- Sunday is useless to post
Pinterest (post 5-10 times per day)
- More activity weekly after 5 pm
- From 7 pm to 10 pm is the best time
- The highest engagement is on weekend
Instagram (post 1-3 times per day)
- Wednesday and Friday from 10 am – 11 am is the best period for posts
- Wednesday is the most fruitful
- From 9 pm to 6 am there’s no engagement
- No successful activity on Sunday
5. Visit Your Competitors’ Sites or check what’s going on in the accounts you admire
Sometimes, by watching what other brands are doing, your business can see how to take advantage of the social media world. By looking at your competitors, you will be able to figure out how they spend their social media marketing time. It can give you some ideas on what tactics to try next. For example, if a competitor spends all their time posting on Twitter and Instagram while neglecting Facebook, then you may find it beneficial to post more on Facebook.
If you have an account that you admire, check out their profile. See what they are posting about and if it is relevant to your target audience. You can see how many likes they are getting per post and the engagement of each post compared to other posts. This is a great way to see what content works best for your audience.
When looking at accounts you admire, do not feel as though your only choice is to copy whatever they do, though! If you do that, then what makes you different from the rest? The answer is simple: It’s original content with a definite style that works for your business and brand.
6. Discover and Use Trending Hashtags
The right hashtag can make a photo or video go viral instantly. You can easily find trending hashtags by using a free basic version of platforms such as HootSuite and Ritetag. Another option is to use the hashtag search from your social media checklist and see what pops up. If you want to get real detailed, you should also use special tools like Hashtagify, SproutSocial and others. It’s not recommended to go overboard with this:
- Twitter – 1-2 hashtags
- LinkedIn – 2-3 hashtags
- Facebook – 1-2 hashtags
- Instagram – up to 30
- Pinterest – up to 20
7. Monitor the keywords associated with your niche
With the use of a social listening tool, you can monitor for keywords and phrases that are associated with your industry. For instance, keeping an eye on keywords such as “accountant” and “tax” may reveal a lot of conversations on Twitter about accounting. This could be interesting information to use in your own tweet campaign.
Stay up to date with what’s happening in your niche, and you might find important discussions or conversations you want to join.
Using Google Alerts as a tool helps do this by making sure any time Google finds something related to the keyword which is being searched on it will notify you.
In addition to Google Alerts, tools such as KeywordTool , Kparser, Ahrefs will also be useful for you.
Social Media Weekly Checklist
1. Check analytics
Analytics is a critical tool that you need for SMM. It is useful in monitoring the number of people who read your social media updates, your engagement and other important data.
Keep an eye on your social media Analytics and make sure you’re seeing what you want to see.
If you don’t have enough time to do so, check out Sprout Social, HubSpot or BuzzSumo for great analytics tools that provide data on thousands of social media engagements.
Include in your social media checklist 5 metrics that are important to track:
- engagement (views, likes, comments, shares),
- volume (tracking the size of messages and people discussions about the brand)
- reach (shows the size of the content spread and the audience)
- share of voice (shares about the company in comparison with competitors)
- influence (the ability to impact others)
2. Define a SMM strategy for your company with your colleagues
It is very important to discuss strategy with your co-workers. It will help you bring more positive and creative results. Let’s say that you have a great idea for your new post, but it may not be the best idea and can actually pull down your business. Social media strategy sessions will allow you to speak about each idea, in a structured way.
The co-workers can help with the ideas on promotion, with the actual trends and the knowledge about the audiences. When you involve people from different departments, they will be able to give feedback on the implementation of your ideas from their working perspective. Some of the topics that can be shared and discussed are logo ideas, advertisement campaigns, cooperation with the community, content propositions, improvement of cooperation with the customers, and much more.
3. Plan your posts one week in advance
The ability to stay connected with social media is a key factor in authenticity, and this is why you should schedule your social media content for a week or more.
Schedule social media content at least 5 days ahead of time so that it’s posted at the same time every single day.
As stated earlier in the daily checklists, don’t forget about the best days and time to post to achieve the highest engagement with your audience. Every social media platform will have its own peaks of activity.
4. Engage with influencers
One way to create buzz around your product is to get influencers involved. Choose a few influencers in your industry and reach out to them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Shoot them a message about how your product can help one of their audience members and offer an article, guide, video, or other relevant incentive in return for the influencer sharing it with their audience.
5. Collaboration with partners
There is a need to develop strategies to work together with your partners in social media. You cannot do everything alone. This way, you’ll be able to grow and come up with new ideas beneficial to both of you.
Collaborating with peers and partners is vital so that you can continue to grow. For example, collaboration campaign of Burger King and McDonald’s was well received by the audience and had positive feedback. When companies decide to build marketing campaigns with their competitors, and it’s a well thought strategy, the results can be very successful. The customers react emotionally generating more engagement and more interest to the company.
6. Analyze and update your social media advertising strategy
Your social media ads are your face in the world. You have to stay on top of them and optimize, update, or create new ones when needed.
It is not just about what you post to your social media channels, but also how you reach out to followers through ad campaigns as well. Social media advertising can be tricky so it’s important that you analyze it at least once a week.
No matter what ads you launch, you should monitor the analytics and constantly compare the result with your initial goals.
Measure what value the ad brings to your company. Does it help you increase your sales or a lead in the market? Does it help to generate more traffic to your site? Does your brand awareness increase? You should also pay attention to CTR (click-through rates) indicators as well as correctness of your targeting settings.
Analyzing all these parameters will show you the audience involved and whether you need to change something in your strategy. If you don’t get the results that match your goals, you’d probably need to change your ad or your approach.
Social Media Monthly Checklist
1. Conduct a monthly audit of your social media
Gather the analytical information on your monthly KPIs. Each social media platform will have its own monthly KPI goals, but the list of the most common points to check every month are:
- The engagement of your audience, which includes the analysis of the reach of your posts and ads, as well as the clicks of the audience in each form (comments, likes, shares, etc.)
- The number of your subscribers and their activity. How many followers joined your channel this month, how active they are, whether there are any tendencies that lead to the increase of your followers base.
- The analysis of the connection of your social media pages and your site. The amount of traffic each platform generates to your main site.
- Comparison of parameters with the previous month.
2. Defining new goals
Monthly goals will depend on the general strategy of your business as well as the social media you will use for your campaigns. The main rule is that they should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely), as well as focused on activity, engagement, and audience. After all, the social media are first of all directed into the audience, so the goals will in part contain the ones you set for a week, such as collaboration, influencing, engagement, but in bigger scales.
3. Set up new experiments
Monthly social media checklist has the bigger deadline, which gives an opportunity to experiment on your social media platforms to get better results. The analytics you gather from all your metrics will show you the fields of improvement and the ways to try something new.
Depending on the traffic and conversion results on your pages you can come up with new offers to your customers. Again, depending on your brand goals, you can experiment with:
- Changing ways of presenting information to your audience
- Colors and designs
- Polls and reactions
- Targeted ads
- Trying new formats
4. Create a checklist one month ahead
Create a monthly plan in advance and then split it into smaller tasks for a week. This way, you’ll be able to split big projects and define concrete steps to follow. Some campaigns may require cooperation with other brands or involvement of other teams. This way, if you plan your month in advance, you have the time to set all small checklists and avoid delays at the end.
While setting a monthly plan and dividing it into weeks, you can decide to work each week on different aspects of your campaign. For example, dividing a month into 4 parts/weeks, you can set the main spheres of improvement:
- Working on traffic, engagement, your successful metrics, challenges, solutions, competitors.
- Working on strengths and weaknesses, your content, optimization, brand image.
- Working on your audience, trends and topics for ads and promotions.
- Working on your posts (schedule, content, etc), tracking, reporting and analytics.
Of course these are just basics, but depending on your needs, they can be adjusted or help you come up with your own ideas. After all, it’s you who decide which plan or template to use, whether you’re more comfortable with sticking to small defined goals or focus on global changes.
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