5 Things You Should Do In Your First Week As Social Media Manager

We’ve all been there. The new kid in the office with absolutely no idea about who anyone is or where to even begin. Getting started with a new job can be an intimidating endeavor for anyone, including new Social Media Managers. While it’s understandable that you may want to jump right into your role, it may be best to refrain from posting any messages out there via social right away. Instead, allow yourself some time to get acquainted with everything in the company and make sure you get these things done in your first week. It’ll set you up for a much smoother transition and make you more knowledgeable about where to go!

Find Out Where The Brand Stands

Before making any decisions on how to go forward with the brand’s social media operations, you should first get to know how everything is currently performing and how it has been going in the past. So, we recommend going ahead and getting started on a social media audit where you can identify what is working, failing and which social media channels can be improved.

You’ll be gathering data from all sorts of sources, so make sure to bring all your data into one clear spreadsheet to make your life a whole lot easier. There are many social media audit templates available online that you can download to help you get started. We’re fans of this template by Smartsheet that gives a pretty clear overview of what channels you have, and how each is doing in regards to growth. The template mainly focuses on the number of followers on each channel, clicks, and referral traffic that gets generated.

After getting to know the overall results, the next step is to dig even deeper and get some insights into the channel-specific metrics. Make some new sheets in the file and take note of the metrics that matter to your brand for each channel. Each one has a lot of different data available for you to choose from, so customize your file as you see fit to reflect those differences. We urge you to focus on the information that you actually will interpret. It’s better to focus on a few factors that you classify as your most important key progress indicators (KPIs) than to fill your file with numbers that mean absolutely nothing to you!

Listen to Your Followers & Customers

This builds directly on top of your social media audit, just from a more customer-centered starting point. Keep looking into the history of your brand’s social media channels and try to identify what kinds of content worked best. If there is a post that did exceedingly well in comparison to others, ask yourself what made it so special. Were posts like it also successful? Was it user-generated content or branded content? The point is to figure out what made it unique and what you can attribute its success to so you can recreate that magic.

Each social channel differs in the level of engagement it gives, so don’t go comparing a post that was posted on Instagram to Pinterest with each other. Instead, focus specifically on what kinds of posts do well per platform. Each channel will have its own specific benchmarks for you to compare all the posts to; stick to those!

While you are looking into what different types of content works, you should also spare some thoughts on who is seeing that content. Dig a bit into your customer demographics and what topics they are interested in. In fact, most of the social media channels have this information readily available to you, like Facebook or Instagram Insights. Maybe you’ll find that Facebook performs better for males, while Instagram gets the attention of your female followers. All this data on what works best for each channel and for which target audiences will give you valuable insights that you can use to develop a solid content strategy in the future.

Next, it will be rewarding to find out about the customer sentiment about your brand. Basically, this is a textual analysis of the chatter that people leave online about your brand, letting you know whether people feel positively or negatively about it. Figuring out how people feel will help you to develop a goal to work towards, like improving customer sentiment by 5% over the next year. Then you can start working on a strategy on how you can improve the overall sentiment and realize that marketing goal. At the start, the best places to look are at the comments under all your posts on the various social media channels. You can also do a search on posts that have used your brand’s hashtag, or tagged your account in their posts. Also, study the reviews left behind by customers. This will give you insight into what your unique selling point is and where your customers feel that the brand provides the most value. These are definite aspects to work into your content on the social channels!

Find out the Trends in Your Industry

Considering you’re now a social media manager, it goes without saying that you’re highly likely to be interested in all the news that goes on. There are always new developments and trends to keep up to date on and you’re probably already doing a great job in staying informed. But, maybe this new job is in a whole new industry for you. Doing social media for a B2B company is widely different from B2C for instance. To ensure you’re not left behind, you should identify trustworthy news sites operating in your new niche. Take some time to sign up to a lot of relevant newsletters in the industry. That way, you’ll have the news come straight to your inbox so you’re always the first to know about the latest updates and developments that you can use for your brand’s strategy.

Besides social media and tech news outlets, you can also take a look at your competitors and even sign up for their newsletters as well. No matter what industry you’re operating in, there is someone out there offering the same or very similar as you are. So go on a hunt and figure out who these brands are! Peak at their social media channels and see how they use them. What works for them? What doesn’t? How can you do better? A competitor analysis like this can give you a good idea of where you stand in comparison to all the others operating in your industry, and also inspire you on possible paths to take.

Start Drafting Your Plan of Action

So far, all the tasks outlined revolve around research and we think that’s a great thing. Good decisions should be based on data, right? But now that you’ve gathered everything together about your brand and surrounding it, it’s time to put it into writing. Create an overall report not only for yourself but also one that you can share with your coworkers highlighting everything that you’ve discovered. Oftentimes, points of optimization can fall into a blind spot for more seasoned workers. It isn’t until someone studies the company with a fresh eye that points of improvement can be identified and worked on. That’s why you should make sure that anyone can easily understand what you’ve put together.

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Outline your objectives and elaborate on your ideas on the things that you think can be improved when it comes to the brand’s social media channels. Getting a plan of action like this will not only show higher management just how enthusiastic you are about your new position but also gives you the opportunity to get the green light to go forward on what you propose. This is the opportunity where you can start talking budget and really set things in motion. Sharing your ideas in your first week will already help you to plan out your next few months and bring some excitement about what’s coming up for you!

Get To Know How Work Gets Done

Another thing that you can get busy with is getting acquainted with how things are done there. There’s a big chance that the brand has existing templates for tracking and reporting on the social media performance. Get access to these templates and see if there is any way you can improve them or if there are any changes you would like to make to them. Think about weekly and monthly reports, social media content calendars and the like. If these don’t exist, go ahead and make your own! These will be used time and time again and adds some structure to your tasks right away.

If you create new templates or reporting formats, it’s also a great idea to make what we call a ‘system’. Think of it as a very detailed instruction manual on any task you can think of. Share this with your company to ensure the proper execution of the tasks. Having clear instructions that people can go back to and look at will go a long way in improving overall efficiency in the company!

Most importantly, have fun! This is the start of a whole new adventure for you, so make the most of it. Getting to know your coworkers is just as important as getting to know the brand and the working processes. You’ve got this, we believe in you ;)!