This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

The thought of managing the day-to-day communication that will be required with a social media strategy can seem daunting. Common questions:

1. How will we know what to say and when to say it?
2. Who’s responsible for publishing content to the profiles?
3. How do we measure our success?

It will be essential for your team to identify someone, or a couple of people, to serve as the community managers of your social profiles. They will be responsible for tackling the above three questions but there are some tools that can make these tasks easier than you think.

1^st: Create a content calendar:

The goal of the content calendar is to force the community manager and the brand team to plan a week or a month’s worth of content in advance. This calendar can be as simple or complex as you like. The process of creating a content calendar is to round off your brand team including a copywriter or two and sit down with a calendar. Discuss the month ahead and identify potential shareworthy events that will be happening:

• Your brand: Is your brand launching a new indication or releasing new information?
• Your industry: Is anything happening in the industry (an awareness month, a congress, etc. . .) that affects your brand?
• The public: Are there any holiday’s or current events that relate to your brand?

Make a list of all of these things, choose which of them are the most valuable to address and write content to compliment them. Next assign the content to corresponding dates on the calendar.

Tips for content planning:

1. Stick to your strategy: ask yourself “does this help us accomplish our social media goals?”
2. Be consistent: consistency in tone of voice, vocabulary, emotion and timing all create a better experience for your community
3. Have a call to action: make sure all of your content includes a call to action or the answer to “So what?”

2^nd: Use a community management service

There are several free services available that help you manage your accounts all from one place. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck, but HootSuite is also good –

These services help you:

• Schedule your content publishing down to the minute
• Alert you when someone talks to you or mentions you online
• Manage multiple social profiles in one dashboard

Hootsuite and SproutSocial offer premium accounts that are affordable and include metrics and analysis of your social engagement.

These services are easy to learn and simple to use. The first step beyond setup is to grab your content calendar and schedule the posts that you created with your team. Once they’re scheduled, the tool does the rest of the publishing work for you. It’s up to you to monitor the consumer response to your post and craft a reply to the requests from your community.

3^rd: Measure success and optimize for the future

Your content has been planned, and executed. Now it’s time to take a look back and see how you did. Key things to measure:

1. Conversion: the number of comments per post
2. Amplification: the number of re-tweets or shares per post
3. Applause: the number of likes, favorites, etc. . . per post

Simply measuring the ratio of the above items is not enough. A deeper dive into the posts that generated the most return and the posts that generated the least return will identify patterns of success and failure. These patterns can be used to optimize the content you share in the future. Ideally, you’ll look at these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis, but no matter what – be sure to have the insights from these metrics on hand while planning your next wave of content so that you’re optimizing the level of community engagement.