Social Media Marketing Checklist

The breadth of social media marketing has become its expansive web over the years. As each social media platform pivots to be more business inclusive, every digital marketer’s job now must encompass fostering engagement and leads from the platforms.

Each platform has its unique advantages and disadvantages, but any business, whether tangible or digital, needs to have a presence online.

Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube: these are five different platforms that require their attention to be utilized to their fullest potential.

Seem like a lot to take on?

Luckily, whether it’s checking your inbox daily or doing monthly social media market research, we’ve developed a checklist for you to make sure you’re checking all the boxes to ensure your social media marketing campaigns are running at full velocity.

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Profile Setup Checklist

Here are seven items that should be on every social media marketer’s checklist:

• Creating your business’ profile on every relevant platform
• Build your audience on each platform
• Utilize a social media monitoring tool
• Set up other analytics

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1. Creating Your Profiles

Not every business needs to be on every single platform; however, if your target audience is diverse then it might make sense to cast a wide net on each platform.

Depending on your products and market, decide which platforms will bring you the most significant ROI and point your social media strategy in that direction.

If you have brick-and-mortar businesses in various locations that are far away from one another, then create a profile for each site to promote offers and content that are specifically relevant to that area.

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2. Build Your Audience

Building your audience on your social media profiles is something that you’ll do gradually over time; however, when you’re first setting up your profiles, you can speed up your profile growth by ensuring each profile is linked to:

• On your blog
• In email footers
• From different web pages and guest posts

These are simple steps to take to ensure that you’re continually adding followers to your audience on social media.

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3. Use a Social Media Monitoring Tool

If you’re managing several different social media profiles and topics on several platforms, then it’s a clever idea to integrate them via a social media management tool.

This way you can implement things like:

• A single inbox for all your profiles
• One feed
• Topic and competitor analysis
• Post scheduling

There a variety of tools out there so I won’t mention one; however, it saves time and resources by using them to carry out most or all your social media marketing initiatives.

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4. Additional Analytics

Whether you plan on doing advertising or not, it’s a good idea to set up things like Facebook’s pixel to glean insights about social media users on your website.

This can help you figure out where drop-offs occur and let you re-market to them at different points of your campaigns.

No social media marketing campaign is complete without retargeting.

Additionally, with Facebook’s rollout of the Explore Feed, your industry content may find itself disappearing from the normative feed.

That’s why if you're content marketing on social media, having information about users on your site will prove vital in targeting them on Facebook with promotional posts.

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Daily Social Media Marketing Checklist

The day-to-day tasks carried out by social media managers can be quite expansive. Here’s a distinct checklist to ensure that every job is carried out regularly and efficiently:

• Check your inbox
• Check brand or product mentions
• Re-share content
• Check your competitors
• Identify any daily trends
• Check your daily content
• Engage industry communities

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1. Check your Inbox

This is as universal step one as it gets. Social media has become one of the primary ground-zeroes for customer service.

Users and prospects alike usually inquire through private messages or direct mentions, so this is an excellent place to start daily social media tasks when logging on.

The quality and quantity of your responses matter here. All it takes is one ignored angry customer to begin a viral tumble into bad PR oblivion. Make sure your replies are thorough and extensive.

You wouldn’t ignore your customers if they were asking for direct customer service on your site, so don’t ignore them on your social profiles either.

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2. Check Brand or Product Mentions

People don’t just flood your inbox when they have complaints or praise for your brand. They speak about it freely on their profiles.

If you’re using regular platform insights or a social media monitoring tool, you can spot these mentions and react accordingly.

All comments - good or bad - should be responded to foster engagement and assuage any grievances customers may have.

Social media tools that use sentiment analysis allow you to filter by negative, positive, or neutral mentions which expedites the process.

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3. Re-share Content

If you see that people are posting your content, then re-share it to show that other brands or people are finding your content valuable.

This helps foster engagement with your brand and raise brand awareness.

It doesn’t have to be your content that you re-share. Anything you find relevant to your industry that will help or entertain your audience is fair game.

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4. Check Your Competitors

After ensuring that everything is okay on your end, it’s time to dive into your competitor analysis.

If you’ve set up a campaign in a social monitoring tool for your competitors, then you can filter by negative sentiment to see if they have any unhappy users for you to convert.

Filtering by positive sentiment can get you a better idea of what kind of engagement tactics or functionalities have their users in such a happy state.

It’s also possible that your competitors have a smaller audience than you, which means anything trending for them could be used for your more extensive audience to foster similar engagement.

If you’re checking Facebook, then you can check how much engagement your competitors have gotten in the insights section.

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5. Search for Trends

Viral content happens at a moment’s notice. Any daily social media marketing activities should always be predicated on using trends for your brand’s benefit as they have built-in audiences outside the normal scope of your own.

Remember, trends don’t have to be viral. They just need to be appearing often enough in conjunction with your content.

Word clouds are great tools to see microtrends within the topics you’re watching.

Incorporating these popular terms into your content is a wonderful way to build off trending topics about your brand or industry.

While this isn’t exactly a task that needs to be completed every day, it nonetheless merits a look every 2-3 days to ensure that you’re not missing any chances to create engaging content on the fly and boost your audience’s engagement on social media.

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6. Check Your Daily Content

Posts on social media platforms should occur at different frequencies depending on the platform:

• Facebook 1x a day
• Twitter 5x a day
• Instagram 1x a day
• LinkedIn 1x a day
• YouTube 1x a week
• Pinterest 4x a day

Don’t risk saturating your users too much in their feeds. Craft and schedule your content with care.

You should be designing your content schedule on a weekly basis; however, given the viral nature of trends and topics on social media, it doesn’t hurt to ensure that the piece you’ve scheduled for that day still makes the most sense barring any unforeseen trends.

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7. Engage Industry Communities

Social media communities should be a daily activity for any profile manager. They are suitable places to take part in discussions and offer expertise.

Facebook Groups and Instagram hubs that have plenty of comments go a long way in creating engagement from users that may not be aware of your brand.

Places like Quora, Facebook, and Telegram are great community hubs to help people with questions and promote content.

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Weekly / Monthly Social Media Marketing Tasks

Every day is a new adventure to make mistakes and learn from them. Every week is a chance to confirm your learning experience.

Weekly marketing tasks include:

• Scheduling content
• Tracking and creating new goals
• Adjusting strategy
• Reporting

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1. Scheduling Content

Some social media marketing teams like to schedule their content monthly or weekly. The process is up to you.

I prefer scheduling it weekly to allow for more flexibility regarding unexpected trends or the need to pivot.

Plus, you can evaluate your engagement success or failures on a week to week basis and adjust your schedule next week to reflect changes in your strategy.

A useful content schedule isn’t just filled with the latest and greatest of industry content. It capitalizes on diverse types of content to foster engagement with different sects of an audience.

Some users from your audience may want to stay on top of the hottest news while others may be in the mood for some industry related entertainment.

Mix and match to strike a balance.

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2. Tracking and Creating New Goals

Whether you’re using an aggregated dashboard, an array of different monitoring tools, or just checking the platform insights, tracking and setting new goals should always be on any social media marketer’s checklist.

Whatever your target engagement rates are, continually experiment with new ways to hit your goals.

Otherwise, what’s it all for?

Either you measure your success and try to improve, or the time is wasted as you have no barometer for success.

Validate your learning experience with measurable goals. If you fall short, adjust your strategy.

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3. Adjusting Strategy

If you’re continually proving with your social media marketing efforts - great! You’re king or queen of the mountain!

But for every aspirational marketer, there’s no such thing as the top. We’re always testing, experimenting, and looking for a competitive edge.

So even if you’re strategy is working, there can always be a way to build off your success.

For example, you wouldn’t think of BMW for their marketing campaigns. However, they gained a lot of attention in 2015 for advertising a promotion where anyone could bring in their old car and get a brand-new BMW...on April Fool’s Day.

Only one person was smart enough to try - and it turned out not to be a prank at all!

Here we have a globally successful company experimenting with new ways to gain good PR and business.

While normative marketing strategies are typically all companies like BMW need, they still felt the need to experiment and think outside-the-box and get some good PR.

Social media strategies are no different. Assess your plan at monthly intervals to see if there are new ways to promote and strengthen your brand.

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4. Reporting

Reporting makes the world go around. Well, at least the digital marketing world. Reports let the decision makers know what’s working and what’s not.

Whether they’re for investors, managers, or just team members, reports should happen at weekly or monthly intervals to quickly assess the difficulties of the last campaign.

The tricky part is identifying the KPIs that should be reported on versus the white noise.

These KPIs should be set up at the beginning of any campaign so that everyone knows that the critical metrics are to let you know if that campaign has been successful or not.

If you’re checking a few different social media profiles, then a tool with aggregated reporting makes a lot of sense.

If it’s just a few, then you can glean individual reports from the tools themselves via CSV.

Reports may be at the bottom of every checklist, but they might as well be bolded all the same.

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Conclusion

Each box in these checklists has its own merits. Any successful social media marketing campaign needs to be thoroughly thought out from top-to-bottom.

They require patience for testing, perseverance for struggle, and aptitude for implementation.

Good luck!

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