I manage the social media as a part of my role. It is a small percentage of my day so to stay consistent with my schedule I set aside 2 hours a month to plan and organize posts I like on Hootsuite. With the ups and downs of working in higher education, it can be easy to forget to reach out on a daily basis. Using a social media management system can help you to share your own content and build your brand by displaying what interests you value. Here’s how I would split up the time.

10:00  Review my annual social media plan – Make any adjustments and add in any new creative ideas around the events happening in my local area.

10:05 Scan through Feedly and look for articles that match the month’s theme and my brand’s values. I right click through the ones I like and write relevant reviews with a short link going back to the original post. Read through the articles, write a short summary, and find a relevant picture to represent it. Sometimes there will not be a picture that represents well enough, so I will often find a better article or create the picture myself using Canva  or find one on Photopin.

10:35 It averages about a minute per post to get the month scheduled for one post per day. Doing this grew the social media page by 300% over the past three years. It’s small, but steady, growth, and engagement averages around 27% percent of organic views, where organic reach for a page my size benchmarks at around 11%. So once I’m done I check to make sure every day is posted and review for typos.

10:40 For the rest of my time, I scan my social media feeds on Hootsuite and share relevant content from my community, specifically from other social media contributors within our organization, such as what’s happening in the Facebook groups, on our Listservs, or other events emailed to me.

10:50 Finally, I will add in a few posts supporting initiatives I have in my department.

When it comes to social media marketing, what you share from others should balance to four times of what you self-promote. Linking together is key to building a strong voice and vision with your social media brand.Finding time to consistently post is a matter of scheduling and automation. There are plenty of tools to use but Hootsuite is definitely tech I pay to have.

What are your biggest social media management challenges?