7 Simple Social Media Checklists to Boost Your Efficiency

As a marketing manager, you have a ton of work to do. Between projects, reports and more, trying to manage social media (which is a lot of work in and of itself) can put on a lot of stress. You have to check in on your campaigns, approve graphics, pull analytics, and the list goes on. Having a checklist in place can help you ensure that you’re getting all your work done promptly and you’re not missing any critical steps. Since we’re such believers in checklists, we created seven social media checklist templates for you. There are printable and editable versions for each one, too, making it easy to manage everything you need to get done. So what are you waiting for? Start reading and using your free checklists now.

Download Your Social Media Checklist Bundle

Your Social Media Checklist Bundle includes seven unique checklists:

• Daily Social Media Checklist
• General Management Social Media Checklist
• Social Media Campaign Checklist
• Social Media Audit Checklist
• Quarterly Social Media Analysis Checklist
• Social Media Crisis Communications Checklist
• Social Media Strategy Checklist

Each checklist comes as a PDF and Word Document so you can edit and adjust each one to fit the specific tasks you need to complete.

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Why Are Checklists Important?

Checklists are essential for any manager. Actually, that’s true for almost any position, which is why they are so critical to today’s work environment. In fact, Atul Gawande, author of “The Checklist Manifesto” talks about how to the world is so busy and complicated that we need a checklist to keep up with everything. He’s literally a surgeon, too. If he needs checklists, marketers probably do as well. Checklists help by:

• Keeping you on track and organized.
• Ensuring that you don’t forget something in the process.
• Help you maintain consistency.
• Help delegate tasks to the rest of your social media team and ensure that they are also getting their work done.

Still don’t believe me? Take a look at a day in the life of social media manager Mario Moreno (a global social media manager for a massive retailer): And that’s just one day! Not to mention, that’s just social media. You’re probably balancing other things on top of your social media management. In summary, get yourself a checklist, there’s too much going on with your day-to-day work not to.

Create Checklists In CoSchedule With Task Templates

You can move all of your checklists into one place with Task Templates from CoSchedule. Getting them set up in your calendar is easy. Select the task template icon: Add in the tasks from your checklist and assign them to a person in your calendar with a due date: Title and save your template once it’s ready: Ready to try managing all your content + social media marketing on one calendar and build your own checklists with Task Templates? Create your free marketing calendar or schedule a demo now.

7 Social Media Marketing Checklists For Managers

Okay, we’ll stop being a dead horse here. You can see that checklists are essential for social media managers. So, let’s dive into each one we've included in this post.

A Daily Social Media Checklist

First on our list is a daily social media checklist. It looks something like this:

Finish Any Outstanding Tasks

The first part of any social media marketers day should be to finish any outstanding tasks from the day before.

Check That Posts That Are Publishing Today Are Ready To Go

This step in your daily checklist involves three parts:

1. Ensure that any accounts tagged in your posts are correct. The last thing you want to do is send out a post that links to the wrong account.
2. Make sure any links in your posts are working. Broken links are no good.
3. Double-check for spelling errors. Simple mistakes can leave a lasting (and unfortunately, negative) impression.

Review Any Meetings On Your Agenda For Today

Meeting to discuss an upcoming campaign? Do yourself a favor and review your notes and research before you head in.

Check The Status Of Upcoming Graphics and Videos

If upcoming posts still don’t have the images, graphics, or videos they need, check in with the teams responsible for creating them. This is especially important because if you and need to make edits, you don’t want to be adding visual content at the last minute.

Review Any VIsual Media That Needs To Be Approved For Your Social Channels

If graphics or videos are waiting for approval, make your edit notes and get them back to their respective teams in a timely manner.

Edit Upcoming Content For Each Social Media Channel

If you have a writer crafting social copy, review every post before it’s published.

Approve Any Content That Is Ready For Publish

Once the graphics are uploaded, and the content is edited, you can approve your posts to publish to your channels. Ensure that your social media publishing tool has approval features to make sure everything that publishes is actually ready to go.

Engage With Thought Leaders

There are thought leaders in every industry. Set aside time each day to engage with them, and find new people to follow. Share advice, tactics, and more to help develop that relationship. You never know when they might call for a favor. Plus, engaging with thought leaders can help keep you on top of the latest trends in your industry and increase your authority.

Reshare Content From Partners and Influencers

If you are working with a partner or influencer, show their content a little love by sharing it to your channels. This can also help fill gaps in your social media schedule if you’re running out of content ideas.

Update Your Social Media Calendar

Your social media strategy lives and dies by your calendar. Which means that it should always be up to date. Check in every day to ensure projects, messages, reports, and meetings haven’t moved dates.

Engage With Potential New Customers

Social media is all about engagement. With companies all over the social media sphere, it’s easier for customers to have their voice heard by the organizations they love (or hate). This is a task that would be easy to pass down to another team member if you don’t have time to respond to every request.

Read Industry News

Interacting with thought leaders in your industry is not going to be enough to keep you on top. Reading articles and the latest industry news can help you fill that gap though. Subscribe to blogs and follow social accounts that share relevant news about your industry. Use tools like Feedly or Flipboard to help find the latest news.

Curate Content For Your Social Media Channels

It can be tough to create enough content to keep your social channels full. Fortunately, content curation can help fill those gaps. Look for stories that your customers and fans would enjoy reading and add them to your publishing tool. Back to Table of Contents

Social Media Management Checklist

Another checklist in your bundle is a general management checklist. These tasks are ones that usually fall to management alone and should always be a part of your list. It could look something like this:

Check The Workload Of Your Team

Check in with your co-workers periodically to make sure that they aren’t overwhelmed with their workload. (Or worse they don’t have enough to do). If they are overwhelmed, try shifting tasks so they can regain their balance and get caught up.

Monitor Upcoming Campaigns

If you’ve got a big campaign on the horizon, you may want to make sure that everything is on track to be completed by the intended launch date. Make it easier on yourself and your co-workers and commit to having all the graphics, content and videos done before launch, so you have time to review and get edits completed before things start to publish.

Check Incoming Messages

There are three reasons that as a manager you would want to check in on the incoming messages from your social media channels.

1. Checking incoming messages may help you spot a crisis before one starts. If you can step in and help calm down an angry customer before calamity ensues, your whole organization will thank you.
2. You can help manage customer engagement.
3. You might even uncover some positive reviews of your product that you can reshare.

Prepare For Upcoming Strategy Meetings

As a manager it’s up to you to steer the social media ship, so preparing for those upcoming strategy meetings is going to fall on to your plate. One way to stay on top is continuous research to help you see what’s going on in the social media realm.

Prepare Reports For Upper Management Or Clients

Your reports are what show the success (or failure) of your work. Your reports should be easy to read by anyone in your company. They should include any metrics that show that you reached or missed your goals and a brief analysis on why something did or didn’t work.

Monitor Competitor Channels

The saying keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer comes to mind here, but having your competitors in the back of your mind can give you that extra drive to be better and do more. Back to Table of Contents

Social Media Campaign Checklist

Campaigns come up frequently in social media, so it’s vital that as a manager you have a process to follow that makes it easier to crank them out and get them published. The following checklist can help you do just that.

Brainstorm A Theme With Your Team

You have to create a lot of campaigns in a year, and as they say, two heads are better than one. Round up your social media team to help you brainstorm the theme for your next campaign.

Outline The Dates For Your Campaign

Three major dates need to be outlined for any campaign:

1. When you need to start working on creating content.
2. When your campaign goes live.
3. When your campaign ends.

Determine Your Audience

Depending on the theme of your campaign and the message you want to send, the audience you are targeting may shift a little bit. You also need to determine what message you need to share with them that would resonate and grab their attention.

Set An Ad Budget (If Necessary)

If you decide that you are going to add any paid ad promotion to your campaign you need to set a budget. Outline how much you are going to spend:

• In one day.
• On one post.
• On the total campaign.

Outline Necessary Image And Video Needs

The next step is to outline any necessary image or video needs that you might want to add to your campaign. Include things like:

• Videos for each channel.
• Infographics.
• Photos for each channel.
• Cover photos.
• Profile photos.
• Anything else your team might need.

Once you have those initial requests, send them to each team to determine how much time they would need to complete them.

Assign Deadlines To Team Members For Projects

Each member of your social media team, as well as your graphic designers and video production crew, needs a deadline that they need to have their work done. Set them early, so you have time for edits and changes before your campaign launches.

Choose Your Hashtags

Decide as a team if you are going to use any unique hashtags to identify your campaign on channels like Twitter and Instagram. If you decide to add your hashtag decide on spelling and spacing in advance.

Write Post Copy

Either you or your social media writers now need to write copy for your campaign. Use our Social Message Optimizer to create the best content for every channel.

Shoot/Design Visual Content

Once your message copy has been created direct your designers and video producers to create the necessary visual content for your campaign.

Edit Content

After your writers have created that initial message copy, go through each post and check for:

• Spelling errors.
• Grammar errors.
• Accounts are tagged correctly.
• Hashtags are spelled correctly and used on the right channels.

Approve Graphics/Videos

Once your designers and producers are done with any necessary images or videos, review each one to make sure that it is ready for publishing.

Check Links

Another thing to check off your list is to ensure the links in your posts are leading to the right places. You may need to check that each one of your posts has been run through a link shortener (if you use one).

Upload Messages To Your Publishing Tool

Once everything is approved, upload your messages into your social media publishing tool. Ensure that each message is paired with its appropriate visual counterpart.

Schedule Your Campaign

Your next step is to schedule your campaigns. Once you have your posts uploaded, turn your campaign live.

Measure Your Results

The last step in your process is to measure the results of your campaign. Remember, you can make it easy by using CoSchedule’s Social Campaign Report, where we’ll do all the work for you. Back to Table of Contents

Social Media Audit Checklist

Once a year you’re going to run a social media audit. It’s tedious but necessary. A checklist will help you ensure that you don’t miss a step in your auditing process.

Review And Secure All Your Social Media Profiles

Make sure that your profiles are up to date and all of your passwords are stored in a secure location like LastPass or 1Password.

Analyze The Performance Of Each Of Your Social Media Profiles

Check your data to see if your social media profiles and their messages are connecting with your audience and producing engagement. If not, it may be time to ax them.

Review Your Publishing Schedule

Check your schedule and see if the amount of content you posted to each channel was enough to generate engagement. If not, consider adding or back off the number of times you post on a channel.

Run An Audience Analysis

Using the same resources you did to develop your first audience, review your demographic data to see if you are still attracting the same audience.

Complete A Content Analysis

Review what content types did and didn’t connect with your audience on each social media channel.

Run A SWOT Analysis

Determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that your organization currently faces on social media.

Review Goals From Previous Year

Determine if you and your social media team met the previous year’s goals. Back to Table of Contents

Quarterly Social Media Analysis Checklist

Each quarter you’re going to need to check in to see if your efforts are producing the results you want. In other words, you’re going to need to run a quarterly social media analysis. Here is the checklist you’ll need to make sure you get everything done.

Decide Your Time Period For Analysis

What dates are you going to gather your data from? If going quarter by quarter, you’d be looking at a three-month period for each one.

Create Your Report Template

Create a template with sections for every piece of data you need to gather. This can help ensure that you don’t forget to collect data for a specific section from one quarter to another.

Gather Data

Using your reporting tools, gather the data you need.

Analyze Your Data

Look for trends, patterns and other consistencies that can help you interpret what your audience wants to see from you. You should also be looking for data that shows that your team is (or isn’t) on track to meet their goals.

Prepare Your Report

Place data into your report and provide a summary of overall trends and patterns for upper management or your client.

Send To Client Or Upper Management

Send the report to whoever needs to see it. Prepare and respond to any questions that may come from your client or management based on your report.

Decide If Your Strategy Needs Adjustment Based On Analysis

Based on your report and the data you gathered, adjust your strategy to ensure your team meets the goals that were set for them. Back to Table of Contents

Social Media Crisis Communication Checklist

As a  manager, you need to be prepared at all times for a communication crisis. This could stem from your work or something that happens within your organization. Either way, you need to be ready. Here is the checklist you’ll need.

Pause All Social Media Campaigns Immediately

The minute a crisis happens, pause all of your social media campaigns immediately. No post should go out until you’ve spoken with upper management.

Check In With Upper Management To Determine Next Steps

Meet with the other managers to decide what steps the company needs to take.

Determine What Kind Of Messaging Should Be Used

Work with your public relation team to decide what type of language and messaging should be used to respond to the crisis.

Respond Individually To People On Social Media

If a flood of mentions and comments come in during a crisis, take the time to respond to them individually, but only after messaging and language has been determined by management.

Issue An Apology From The Company

The first social media message you send after the crisis has occurred should be an apology from the company.

Edit Campaigns For Content That May Inflate Crisis Again

Edit your campaigns to ensure they have no mention of anything related to the crisis, or why it occurred.

Resume Campaigns

Once the crisis has passed, resume your campaigns again. Back to Table of Contents

A Social Media Strategy Checklist

The last checklist on this massive list of checklists revolves around your social media strategy. Like your audit checklist, this list is used maybe once a year or once per quarter to review how things are going. Here is the list of things you’ll need to do.

Review Last Year’s Strategy

Determine what did and didn’t work from your strategy and why. Throw out what didn’t work and revamp or keep what did.

Research New Trends And Ideas

Keep your strategy fresh by researching the latest emerging trends and ideas that might work for your organization.

Review Your Target Audience

Decide if this is still the audience you want to be attracting to your organization. If it is, make sure that your audience profile is up to date. If it isn’t, decide who your new audience will be and create a new profile.

Review Your Business Objectives

Talk with your CMO to determine the new business objectives that have been set, so your team can create goals based on them.

Set Goals

Set your goals based on your business objectives.

Establish Your Metrics And KPIs

Determine the data points you need to track in order to prove that you are meeting your goals.

Determine Tactics

Decide which tactics your team is going to use on each social media channel to meet your goals.

Map Out Seasonal Campaigns On Social Media Calendar

Use recurring sales or seasonal campaigns and plan them out in your social media calendar in advance.

Establish Your Reporting Schedule

Determine how often and when you are going to report on the progress of your social media strategy and goals to upper management or a client. Back to Table of Contents

See How Easy Checklists and CoSchedule Can Help Improve Your Efficiency

You now have the tools you need to help get your work done even faster than you were before. Each one of these checklists can be edited to fit your schedule. Once you’re ready to increase your efficiency even more, try CoSchedule. Our state of the art marketing calendar will let you control every aspect of your social media all from one place. Plus, don't forget Task Templates make it easy to build reusable checklists for all your social media tasks. Get started free or sign up for a demo today.