Social Media Plan: 3 Challenges + Templates to Solve Them
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If you’re responsible for managing a day-to-day social media plan, you know how hard it can be to juggle everything. Chances are at some point you’ve found yourself in this scenario:
You’ve built a strategy you’re so proud of, it can’t fail. You’ve found the perfect publishing tool and have all your posts scheduled for just the right time. Your community management is on point and engagement is through the roof. You’re tracking every metric and measuring the success of your strategy.
Yet no matter how organized you are, your day-to-day life is still more chaotic than anyone else’s in your company. You’re missing an image for tomorrow’s social post. Your team doesn’t understand the tone of voice or visual unity you’re trying to maintain on Instagram. You’re going back and forth with your client to get their approval on your editorial calendar. You need an edit on a graphic that was supposed to go live an hour ago.
Sound familiar? Trust me, we’ve been there. The good news is there’s a solution. Here are the three biggest challenges we’ve encountered managing the social plan here at monday.com and the templates we use to solve them.
Challenge #1: Keeping Designers Synced with Your Schedule
After you’ve finished planning your social media schedule for the week or month, the next step is to connect with your team of designers and copywriters. Your goal is to create beautiful images, infographics, and content to distribute across your social channels.
The problem is, keeping everyone up-to-date and getting your assets ready to schedule in your favorite publishing tool (Buffer, Hootsuite, or Coschedule) can quickly get out of hand. The asset you assigned isn’t ready. The designer doesn’t know what’s going live when. No one has access to nor understands how your scheduling tool works.
Moreover, a tool like Buffer or Coschedule doesn’t help your team sync on your editorial calendar. They’re perfect for scheduling and posting, but they lack the essential function of helping your team plan, collaborate, and execute together. Just like that, your perfect social media plan is collapsing.
The solution? Create a monthly schedule and share it with everyone.
Take a look above. In this template, we’ve outlined a weekly workflow that clearly defines the handshakes between different departments or stakeholders. It syncs everyone on where things stand and helps you plan a consistent weekly content schedule. See the number of posts, the titles, the publishing date, and the category. Your day-to-day job of social media planning just became way less painful. 🙂
Challenge #2: Your Social Team Doesn’t Know What to Do Next
Social media marketing isn’t only about publishing content on social platforms. Your daily tasks also include responding and engaging to comments, testing links on social networks, updating social media reports, social listening, answering Quora questions, and much more!
The challenge here is to manage your team’s workload and get everyone synced on who’s doing what. If you work with teams across multiple offices, cities, or countries, the potential for confusion is tenfold.
The solution? Create a weekly task list for everyone on your team.
Whether you are working in the same room as your teammates or across oceans, a weekly task list is the best way to get your team organized and synced. List out all your to-dos and assign ownership.
Challenge #3: Client Email Has Gotten Out of Control
When you’re working as a social media manager for one or several external clients, you can quickly find yourself in an endless back and forth of email exchanges. You need to get their approval, share your progress, update them on reports, and more. Again, the tool you’re using for your social media plan doesn’t include client management.
The solution? You need a centralized place to work with your clients!
You need more than a visual display of your tasks or a content calendar. You also need a place to communicate and share visuals. The communication feed in monday.com is a place to share visuals, upload documents, provide links, and start conversations. Everything is saved and easy to find when you need it. Clients will always know where everything stands so they don’t need to email or call you.
Social media marketers are organized. They just lack the one tool they need to centralize and connect everyone on their team. Rather than using Buffer, Google Spreadsheets, Dropbox, iMessage, and email, you can now say goodbye to chaos. You only need two tools: an awesome scheduling tool like Buffer, and an awesome execution tool like monday.com.