5 Habits of Successful Social Media Managers

Introduction

As a social media manager, you know what it’s like to live minute-by-minute. You’re always ready to put out fires, dive into social data, craft the next witty Tweet and, above all, keep your brand’s audience happy and engaged. You wear several hats and juggle a multitude of responsibilities all at once, and often in plain sight on marketing teams all over the world.

Those responsibilities will continue to grow as consumers’ social media usage increases year over year. Seven out of 10 Americans now use social to connect with each other while half of consumers have increased their social usage in the last six months alone. To keep pace with your audience’s behaviors, you need to be able to multitask and pivot to customer care at the drop of a pin.

Keeping up with the speed of social and consumers, however, is exhausting. The need to be always on can overwhelm even the best of social managers, leaving you feeling burnt out and unable to focus on your work. And in a worst case scenario, an out-of-control workload can take the joy out of the work you once loved.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right tools and support from leadership, you can create an environment with a manageable workload. Equally important is having a good set of habits you can rely on to help you do your best work possible in a sustainable fashion. As you take a moment to evaluate your own working style, consider adopting these five habits to help you find success in your current role and beyond.

Habit 1: Check (and re-check) your numbers

No matter how strong a social strategy appears to be, there’s always room for improvement. Make it a point to check your performance numbers and social metrics for everything including large campaigns and a single Tweet on a daily or weekly cadence. In the latest Sprout Social Index, 59% of social marketers said their performance to date is what influences their approach to social.

Regularly keeping an eye on your metrics can help you course correct when a piece of content is struggling and nip problematic strategies before they spiral out of control. For example: if you notice your content engagement is plateauing, you can immediately dig into why it’s performing poorly and adjust accordingly. You’re less likely to catch this problem if you wait until the end of a campaign or month to review those same metrics.

Frequently monitoring your social numbers also enables you to double down on the opportunities that can help you achieve your goals faster. Suppose one of your goals is to increase social engagement. If you’re keeping a close eye on your metrics, you can pinpoint which types of content are most likely to encourage Likes, shares and comments from your followers and which ones will dissuade engagement.

If you’re not used to checking your numbers regularly, try holding yourself accountable to other people. When you know other people are relying on your updates, you’re less likely to skip over or put off reviewing your performance metrics for later. Additionally, if you have access to a social media management platform like Sprout Social, you can set up custom reports to more easily track your most important metrics without spending excess time pulling metrics together from different places. Not only will you get a high-level overview of your performance across every social channel, you can also customize which metrics to include in your reporting based on your specific goals.

Tip:

Don’t wait for your next big project to put this habit into practice. Try starting with a small micro-habit you can incorporate into your daily schedule, like setting a reminder first thing in the morning to check your metrics before doing anything else. This doesn’t mean you have to spend hours sifting through the data. Rather, get into the habit of checking your numbers at a glance every day and then dig into the data if you notice unusual spikes in activity.

Habit 2: Be social!

With so much happening online, it’s all too easy for social marketers to get tunnel vision. But like any other organization, social teams don’t operate in a vacuum and the work we do has a direct impact on teams outside of the marketing department. In the 2019 Sprout Social Index, research found only 25% of social marketers shared social data with their product teams while 29% shared data with their brand and PR teams.

The best social strategies take into account feedback and ideas from teams all throughout the organization, not just those who work directly with social. Consider how 57% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn about new products and services. Working together with your product team, you can create an effective launch strategy to celebrate the release of a new feature or service and give your audience the content they crave.

As a social media manager, you’re also privy to the customer feedback and complaints left on a company’s social page. Instead of keeping this information to yourself, consider sharing it with the teams that will benefit the most from this insight. Your customer support team, for example, will want to hear if customers are experiencing unusually long wait-times or where there might be a breakdown in the service journey.

Social media has something to offer to every team, but only when those teams are made aware of and can access that information. Make it a habit to regularly share social insights with teams outside of your own and ensure everyone has visibility into what you are working on. Start with a 30-minute, informal coffee chat to get to know your colleagues on the product and sales teams before graduating to a more formal bi-weekly or monthly cross-team meeting.

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To make these cross-team meetings as effective as possible, consider asking all participants to prepare a couple of insights and updates to share with the larger group. Come ready to share a few high-level insights on how cross-team partnerships have performed on social, what types of content generate engagement and opportunities for future collaborations.

Habit 3: Prioritize and protect your time

Social media managers wear many different hats and some days, it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. After managing the Inbox, creating fresh content, meeting with key stakeholders and digging into social data, there’s not much time left in your work day.

To get the most out of each day, start by ruthlessly prioritizing your to-do list at the beginning of each week. Put all of your most important tasks toward the top of your list followed by everything else you need to complete before 5pm on Friday. Keep in mind: while you might not check off everything on your to-do list, by ruthlessly prioritizing your day you can ensure the most valuable tasks are taken care of.

One way to help you power through your to-do list is to timebox your calendar. With timeboxing, you allot a maximum amount of time (e.g. 60 minutes) to finish a specific task (e.g. responding to social messages). Once that time expires, you move on to the next task on your list. This ensures you’re not spending too much time on a particular action item and you’re not putting off unpleasant activities for later. After prioritizing your weekly tasks, determine how much time you want to devote to each task and consider creating a calendar event to protect that time from meetings and other distractions. Sprout’s own social media specialist, Olivia Jepson, has this to say about timeboxing: “By setting time aside to work on specific tasks, you can better prioritize and plan your days, weeks and months—and reprioritize when timely projects pop up unexpectedly (which is all the time in social).”

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Another tip to help boost your productivity is to establish focus time blocks, or an hour or two of uninterrupted time. Often set first thing in the morning or during the last hour of the workday, focus time can be used for anything like wrapping up an important assignment or cleaning out your inbox. What you use this time for is up to you, but treat focus time as an opportunity to make a dent in an unfinished project or to get ahead of your to-do list.

Habit 4: Step back and listen

Part of the social media manager’s job is to stay up to date and knowledgeable about what happens in the online space. That means keeping a pulse on pop culture moments, what your competitors are up to and even how people behave on the internet.

Staying on top of the latest trends serves several purposes. For starters, it can inspire fresh content and give your brand an opportunity to join in on a larger social conversation. With timely insights about your competitors, you can also pivot your strategy as needed and identify ways to differentiate your brand from the rest of the pack. Lastly, trend data from social can help you tailor your content to reflect your consumers’ expectations and which platforms your audience frequents the most.

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To avoid getting swept up in the non-stop news cycle and all the things happening online, it helps to treat this part of your job like any other research-based task. Give yourself a clear goal you want to achieve with this research; then determine which sources you’ll be using and give yourself a time limit to complete this task. For example: if you want to keep an eye on pop culture, you’ll probably want to check platforms like Twitter or TikTok first thing in the morning every day. Regardless of your goals, get in the habit of sitting back and listening to the social chatter around you; you’ll be surprised at what kinds of insights you’ll uncover!

Tip:

Trying to manually keep up with the pace of social is unrealistic, but what you can do is leverage tools like social listening to easily stay on top of the latest news and trends. Within the Sprout Social Listening product, you can set up Listeners to monitor the social chatter around a specific topic, brand or event and aggregate data like engagement, sentiment and volume all in one place. Above all, you can use Listening to uncover rising trends among your target audience and better understand what drives your customers’ behaviors.

Habit 5: Make space for mental breaks

As a social media manager, the number of responsibilities we juggle can oftentimes become overwhelming. When we’re not building out our brand’s social presence, we’re keeping a close eye on social trends that are subject to change on dime. And as the gatekeeper to a brand’s social profile, we’re often the first to deal with an unexpected crisis and frustrated customers.

This need to be always on can quickly lead to burnout, making it difficult for us to focus on the task at hand and show up for our jobs day in and out. You might find yourself unable to log off at the end of the workday or feeling like you have to check your phone constantly on the weekends. When burnout is left unchecked, it’s not uncommon to hear of social managers leaving the job they once loved.

While some things, like a crisis or unhappy customer, are out of your control, you can develop healthy habits to ease some of the stress you may be experiencing on the job. Consider setting up a weekly one-on-one with your manager to discuss your workload and use this time to surface any concerns you have about your bandwidth. If you find you’re someone who stays glued to your computer, set a daily reminder to get up and take a short five minute walk. And if you’re struggling to disconnect at the end of the day, try deleting your email and messenger apps off of your phone.

Tip:

If you’re finding it difficult to unplug at the end of the day, consider establishing a shutdown ritual to signify when you’re officially done working and ready to focus on your personal time. First, identify a good stopping time in the afternoon, like 5-6 p.m. Then pick an easy, repeatable action you can take to illustrate you’re done working for now, such as closing your laptop, exercising or taking your dog for a short walk. Having an end of the day ritual can help you transition from a work mode to home mode, giving your brain time to reset and relax.

Habits for long-term success

The role of the social media manager is demanding—you’re juggling multiple responsibilities and trying to meet all of your ambitious goals you’ve set for the entire year. But being a social media manager can also be incredibly rewarding. The Tweet that goes viral, the customer interactions that bring a smile to your face, the creative challenges that push you to your limits; those are the things that make the job worth it.

The trick is knowing how to balance the demands against the rewards, and establishing a set of habits that both protects you against the stressors of the job and fuels your productivity. By incorporating these five habits into your routine, you’ll not only find success in your current role but also set yourself up for opportunities to grow your career.

If you’re ready to keep the momentum going and take the next step in your career, check out our free guide and template, Always Be Growing, to help you start working toward your goals today.