How to Use Your Project Management Tool to Manage Your Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a complex process with myriad moving parts. Ninety percent of businesses use social media to increase brand awareness, and while many businesses have just one or two team members dedicated to social media management, nearly half of organizations with 1,000 or more employees (45%) have 10 or more people dedicated to managing social media marketing activities.
As new social media platforms enter the scene, juggling the process of developing social media marketing campaigns, creating posts and images, and managing the ideal posting schedule across multiple platforms becomes increasingly challenging. That’s why, according to Buffer’s State of Social 2019 report, 85% of businesses use third-party tools to manage their social media marketing activities. If you already have a project management tool that your team knows and loves, why not manage your social media marketing activities with the same software solution? In this article, we’ll reveal how to use your project management tool to manage your social media marketing activities for seamless campaign integration. Why Do You Need a Project Management Tool for Social Media Marketing?
While you can certainly try to wing it — or resort to using an Excel spreadsheet to track your posts — successful social media marketing requires a careful plan and consistent execution. Without a project management tool to keep you on track, it’s far too easy to lose track of time or let important campaigns fall by the wayside.
With a project management tool, you can stay on track with your regular daily or weekly social media content across social media platforms while also efficiently executing one-off campaigns like contests or promotions. Project management tools also make team collaboration easy thanks to the ability to assign tasks and track progress. For example, you might be waiting for creative ideas from a designer. With a project management tool, you can check in on the status of the project and even send updates to other team members without ever opening your email inbox.
Finally, project management tools make it easier to integrate your social media marketing with other functions and campaigns. If the content marketing team is releasing a new blog post, the social media team is already up to speed and can have appropriate graphics designed, tweets prepared, and other posts ready to go for timely promotion. And with features like Gantt charts, you can visualize how the many pieces of a major marketing campaign fit together across content, social, advertising, and other functions. Paired with other useful tools such as social media share buttons that allow your website visitors to share your content with their social media connections with ease, effective project management is the foundation your team needs to become a social media powerhouse.
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What Features to Look for in a Project Management Tool for Social Media Marketing
If you don’t yet have a project management tool, choosing a software solution with the right features is key if you plan to use it for managing your social media efforts and improving team productivity. The good news is that many project management tools today have all the features you need for efficient social media management built right in. Here are a few important features to look for:
- Multiple views such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, task lists, and calendars: Being able to visualize projects and associated information in several ways allows team members to choose the view that’s most intuitive for them. Kanban boards are especially useful for ideation, as well.
- Built-in communication tools: With built-in discussions and chat functionality, you don’t have to open your email inbox to provide feedback or convey important project details to team members.
- The ability to assign tasks to individual users or groups of users: By assigning tasks to specific users, your team members will never wonder who’s responsible for what. And that means no more missed deadlines because a team member didn’t know they were responsible for a given task.
- File and document sharing: Like built-in communication tools, file and document sharing saves you the hassle of emailing graphics and other files back and forth with teammates.
- Roles and permissions: By limiting users’ access to the need-to-know projects and information, you won’t end up overwhelming team members with tons of irrelevant project information. Plus, your sensitive projects will be more secure, too.
- Integration with third-party tools: Integration with other third-party tools that your team is already using allows for easily sharing relevant data and information between tools — without tedious, manual updates across multiple tools. Integrations with social media management tools like Buffer can be helpful, or you can use a task automation tool like IFTTT or Zapier to create custom workflows to automate certain tasks, such as publishing approved social media posts.
There are also many specific features that are ideal for social media management, such as the ability to create recurring tasks (for those daily and weekly social media posts) and custom workflows to manage the creative process. Before choosing a project management tool, consider how you typically structure your social media campaigns and what features would be most helpful for streamlining your workflows.
How to Configure Your Project Management Tool for Social Media Marketing
Configuring your project management tool to manage your social media marketing efforts may seem overwhelming at first, but once you’ve taken care of the essentials and decided on a basic structure for your workflows, it’s a breeze.
1. Add relevant team members to your social media marketing workspace
If your team is already using a project management tool, this could be a simple matter of inviting them to a new workspace dedicated to social media management. If you’re setting up a new project management tool, then you’ll need to invite your team members via their email addresses so they can sign up and get in on the fun.
2. Set up daily, weekly, and monthly recurring tasks for each social media network
Depending on how many social networks your company is active on, you may want to create a project for each network dedicated to these standard, ongoing tasks. If different team members are responsible for managing different social networks, creating separate projects for each social network can help reduce information overload, as well.
If you’re using a central project for all recurring tasks across all social networks, it can be helpful to utilize tags if your project management tool offers tagging functionality. By tagging tasks with the relevant social network, it’s easy for team members to see what tasks are outstanding for each social media platform so they can take care of similar tasks at the same time whenever possible.
3. Create projects for all current one-off campaigns
Set up individual projects for each of your one-off social media campaigns — including those actively being executed as well as those in the planning phases. By keeping each campaign separate, team members can focus their efforts on a single campaign without being distracted by dozens of other discussions, tasks, and files that aren’t relevant to their work.
4. Establish a project timeline with due dates for each task
Your larger social media campaigns are probably more complex, with many additional subtasks and task dependencies to consider. To establish a functional project timeline, consider the lead time each team member requires for their individual responsibilities, and allow ample time for reviews, feedback, and revisions. Getting this step right can make or break your social media project management success, so don’t be afraid to ask your team for feedback in this process.
5. Upload all relevant files for each project and task
Help your team hit the ground running by uploading all relevant files for each project and task, saving team members the hassle of trying to track down the latest iteration of that infographic or the final draft of a blog post slated for promotion in the next few days. This step can take some time, because you might not have all the relevant files within reach, so get your team onboard to help get all the important assets uploaded and associated with the right projects and tasks. While this may seem daunting, once you’re done, you’ll have an easy-to-use, centralized database of all the assets you need to execute your social media campaigns — saving your team tons of time in the future!
6. Assign all current tasks to relevant team members
Assign every task to the appropriate team member. By assigning tasks to the team members responsible for them, you’ll eliminate all confusion about who was supposed to do what — and that means you’ll never face a missed opportunity or deadline because no one knew they were supposed to get something done.
In addition to assigning those responsible for completing each task, now is a good time to make sure that all team members, managers, clients, or other stakeholders have access to the right projects. You’ll thank yourself later when you need to ask for feedback on a draft or mockup from someone who isn’t engaged in the day-to-day nitty-gritty details. At the same time, don’t add team members to projects and tasks they’re not involved in and won’t require their input. Keep your team’s dashboards clutter-free.
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7. Establish a space for ideation
Now that you have your ongoing and active one-off projects set up in your project management tool, you can breathe a sigh of relief. But wait — what comes next? To ensure that your team always has a healthy pipeline of ideas for future campaigns, establish a space for ideation right inside your project management tool. As mentioned previously, Kanban boards provide an excellent framework for project ideation. Set up a board with a stage for ideas and suggestions, another stage for approved ideas, and a stage for ideas that are now in production, as well as other stages as needed for your team’s unique ideation process.
Not only does this keep social media marketing ideas neatly organized in a central location, but it also fosters a sense of ownership and gives your team their own space to express their creativity with unique ideas and suggestions. Other team members can comment on and discuss ideas, with everyone working together to fine-tune your next innovative social media promotion.
Once you’ve configured your project management tool to support your workflows, your social media marketing efforts will run like a well-oiled machine. Without the need to devote most of their time and energy into keeping track of who’s responsible for what, what tasks are due when, and the location of assets needed to execute a campaign, your team will be free to tap into their creative juices and flex their social media marketing muscles — and that means your campaigns will become more innovative, polished, and engaging to keep your audience coming back for more.
Author Bio: Stanley Lin, Product Marketing Manager at ShareThis, is responsible for leading the data company’s strategic growth efforts and executions. He carries a passion for creating buzz and igniting conversations around new products that people love, especially within the technology, e-commerce, and retail space. In his free time, he enjoys tackling the outdoors, staying active, and exploring all the delicious cuisines New York has to offer.
