Are You a Social Media Team of One? This Toolkit Can Help

You do it all. From planning long-term strategy and reviewing your analytics to wolfing down a sandwich while you create images for Facebook with one hand and reply to people individually on Twitter with the other. No matter what social media hat gets thrown at you—designer, analyst, copywriter—you’ve got to be ready to wear it.

The good news is that you can handle it all (and you look great in hats). To help, we’ve compiled these best practices and resources that anyone acting as a social media team of one can use. We’ve grouped them into five buckets: preparation, organization, efficiency, education, and community support.

Preparation

Focus your efforts

You’ve got limited time and resources to make social media work for your business, so make sure you’re investing them where they count. This means not stretching yourself too thin trying to make a dent in every social network out there. Focus in on where your strategy is working best, and double down on strengthening those communities instead.

Resources:

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

Create a monthly and weekly content calendar

You don’t have time to waste sitting around wondering what you should post on Facebook next. Plan ahead and create a content calendar for the month. Consider any events your business may have on the horizon, holidays, and promotions or other campaigns. In a weekly content calendar, you can go into more detail about what exactly you’ll be posting each day on each network.

Resources:

Download our content calendar template:

Organization

Organize and monitor your followers

As a team of one, you won’t be able to keep track of everyone on social media—and that’s true regardless of whether you have 100 followers on Twitter or 100,000. Create Twitter lists for various groups (such as current customers, local reporters, or thought leaders) and then set up a stream in Hootsuite for each list. This way, you’ll be able to organize and group people together on Twitter while still seeing every Tweet in one place.

Learn how to get even more out of Hootsuite with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

Organize and monitor keywords and phrases

If people are talking about you, your competitors, or your industry on social—you want to see it. And the easiest way to make that happen is by setting up search streams in Hootsuite to track specific keywords and phrases. You may only be one person, but you’ll be able to monitor the conversations happening on social like a team of 20.

Learn how to get even more out of Hootsuite with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

Efficiency

Create multiple posts for one piece of content

This is an easy way to extend the life of a piece of content on social (which is especially helpful if you’re also the one responsible for creating that content). For every one piece of content you have, create at least three different posts for it.

At Hootsuite, we look at our best performing Tweets on a regular basis to determine what our audience is finding useful. We then create various versions of those Tweets and put them into a regular rotation, following these guidelines:

Vary the copy in the Tweet to find the sweetspot for what works with your audience
Make changes to the image attached to the Tweet until you find one that works
Alter the hashtags associated with the Tweet to reach new audiences
Mix up the time and day that you post so you are connecting with different segments of your audience—this is particular useful if you have a global audience

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Schedule posts in advance

Scheduling posts is the number one time saving tool for any social media manager, regardless of how many other people are on the team. Planning content in advance and scheduling it not only helps you maintain a consistent social media presence, it frees up time for the critical task of real-time engagement.

Learn how to get even more out of Hootsuite with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

Running low on time to even decide when you want to schedule all your posts? Hootsuite’s AutoSchedule feature can do the work for you and automatically schedule your posts for you. To enable AutoSchedule, just toggle the switch to “on” under the Compose box in your dashboard.

If you click on the “Settings” icon beside the switch, you can also set parameters for when AutoSchedule should schedule your posts.

If you want, you can take scheduling one step further—and save even more time—using Hootsuite’s bulk scheduling tool to schedule up to 350 posts at a time.

Learn how to get even more out of Hootsuite with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

Resources:

How to schedule messages in Hootsuite
How to schedule messages in bulk (up to 350 at one time)

Share content faster with Hootlet

You’re reading an article related to your business that you think your followers would love. But to share it with them, you have to copy the URL, open a new window in your browser, go to the social network of your choice, paste the link, write a message to go along with it, and then hit send. Our free Chrome extension Hootlet allows you to do this all in two clicks, without even leaving the original page. Boom.

Learn how to get even more out of Hootsuite with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

Education

Social marketing training

It’s hard trying to keep up with the ever-changing world of social media, especially when you’re doing it all on your own. Through Hootsuite Academy, you can take courses to help develop the fundamental social marketing skills you need to drive real business results—even as a team of one—for free.

Hootsuite platform training

Arm yourself with the right tools and you can manage social so effectively people won’t believe you’re a team of one. To help you master the Hootsuite dashboard, we offer free training that covers all the skills and best practices you need to know.

Community support

#TeamofOne Facebook group

One of the hardest parts about being a team of one is not having anyone to brainstorm with or seek advice from. The #TeamofOne Facebook group is dedicated to solitary social media managers and is an open forum for you to ask questions, give answers, and network.

Twitter chats

Another great way of connecting with other social media professionals is through participating in Twitter chats. #HootChat takes place every Thursday, and focuses on a different topic each week. It’s the perfect chance for you to brush up on your skills, learn something new, and connect with other people facing the same kind of challenges as you.

Resources:

A crowdsourced list of other Twitter chats that you can filter by topic
How to use Hootsuite to keep conversations organized during a Twitter chat

Learn how to make the most of the time you invest in social at Connect via Hootsuite, our virtual social media conference. Register for free to learn how to use social media at every stage of the buyer’s journey—from engagement and brand awareness, to driving leads and closing sales.

Connect via Hootsuite takes place October 5, 2016 at 8:30 a.m. PT/11:30 a.m. ET/4:30 p.m. BST

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