GETTING STARTED
A few things to consider before starting a new social media page.
Make Time
Being a social media page manager often takes more time than expected on the onset. Remember that for some people, social media management is a full-time job. It’s important to make enough time to do the job right. These are the tasks you’ll have to be prepared to do if you decide to create or manage a social media page:
- Begin. You’ll want to form social media goals and strategies. Clear goals make it much easier to make everyday decisions and know if you are on track.
- Listen. It’s important to know what others are talking about on social media so that you can join the conversation. There are helpful tools out there for social media monitoring, and some of them are free like Hootsuite and Social Mention.
- Respond. Followers will respond to your social media posts or reach out to you directly and you need to take the time to respond in an appropriate manner, whether that means replying, liking, commenting, direct messaging, or emailing people.Promote: You probably started your social media page to promote your events or your department/college/organization. You’ll have to specify a portion of your content just for thoughtful
- Promote. You probably started your social media page to promote your events or your department/college/organization. You’ll have to specify a portion of your content just for thoughtful self promotion.
- Participate. Get involved in the conversation.
- Curate. Discover and share content from other sites and sources. You’ll need to find many sources to take inspiration/information from, and it takes time to read it all.
- Research. Possibly the biggest challenge you’ll have as a social media manager is consistently producing engaging and creative content. You’ll want to look up articles about new types of content, research other accounts for inspiration, and decide when to use those ideas.
- Craft. Once you find something to share, you’ll have to figure out how to talk about it and make sure you are staying true to your social media voice and tone.
- Post/schedule. You’ll need to continuously post new content on your social media page. Scheduling your posts ahead of time using a free tool like Hootsuite or Buffer can save you some time, but thoughtful scheduling takes time.
- Build community. Spend time chatting with other social media managers on campus and find ways to connect your social media page to other UT pages to strengthen our online community.
It can be very helpful to dedicate an intern to social media management but if the plan is to use intern time, then you’ll have to make sure you can keep that intern position in the future.