Social Media Manager Daily Checklist

Social media managers have a lot on their plate – and when you’re doing any kind of regular SMM, which can be busy work, you need to make sure you’re covering all your bases and balancing your time in the best way possible.

It’s no surprise that such a diverse marketing channel as social media, with all its potential, has just as many things to remember when considering everything that goes into a single day’s work as a social media manager. 

You’ll be relieved to hear, then, that this checklist was created with you in mind. You can run this checklist at the start of your day to free up some headspace and drop that nagging feeling in the back of your head that you just might have forgotten something.

Plus, Process Street uses API integration to make it easy for you to hook this checklist into over 1,000 apps you already use, like Buffer and Mention.

Having a solid process which checks all of the boxes for what needs to be done that day and runs over each task in a clear, concise format is invaluable, and you could save so much time and money using this checklist as part of your social media management process.

So, let’s get started.

First up, make sure to check your social editorial calendar. This should be one of the first things you do each day as a social media manager.

Checking your calendar puts everything into perspective and immediately, at the start of your day, gives you a good look at the current state of the game.

Have a look at what content is going live today, and any that has gone live since you last checked; it’s likely these posts will have buzz and require maintenance in later tasks. Looking at scheduled posts and checking for upcoming milestones or deadlines will allow you to prioritize and plan the rest of your day more strategically.

Your inbound messages represent your customers (and potential customers) with a problem or a need that you have a duty to fulfill.

This is your opportunity to build a relationship and increase trust, so responding to inbound social messages should be a priority.

Make sure to check all social platforms; we’ve included a list of the most common as sub-tasks below. Feel free to edit this template to include or exclude platforms as you need.

Not all of your inbound mentions will be properly tagged in the post; a lot of the time people just mention your brand without thinking about how to make sure you see their post.

Social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite are great for tracking keywords and keeping on top of all of the conversations (opportunities) where your brand is mentioned.

Whether you’re running a 3rd party tool or pulling the searches manually, check each of your social media channels and tick them off in the sub-checklist below.

Brand advocates are like local influencers – their reach may not be as far, but the trust they command can equal and often surpasses that of top influencers.

Something so simple as favoriting a comment or replying to a post can send a powerful message and do much of the work in converting followers/customers into brand advocates.

But why stop there? Consider how you can leverage organic conversations and simultaneously generate viral traction whilst building brand advocacy. Each interaction is an opportunity.

By following and checking the sub-tasks below you should be able to push your brand advocacy that little bit further. Always consider how you can turn a question into a conversation, or make your response count for more than just a stagnant copy-pasted box-check on your to-do list.

As well as engaging with potential brand advocates, you should be making every effort to engage with new customers on a daily basis.

You can use the same social monitoring tools to pinpoint and lock-onto specific keywords that signal purchase intent and make your move to either profile or engage with the prospect.

For example, if one of your products is an HDD recovery tool, you might want to monitor for instances of the phrase “lost all my data” and reach out to these users with an appealing exclusive offer.

Encouraging conversation and comment around your social pages is a reliable strategy for organic (and potentially viral) growth.

Simply ending a post with a call-to-action along the lines of “Comment your favorite XYZ down below” or “Let me know what you think I should do for my next video in the comments!” can go a long way for a little extra time spent writing up the post.

It’s almost always possible to include a prompt like this at the end of your post, but it’s important to keep the content relevant and consider what value that you are trying to add.

Check for empty slots and make sure posts are scheduled to go live at the most optimal time for that particular social platform. 

When to post is a question of where your target audience is, and what kind of lifestyle they lead. It’s likely that 24-year-old students in GMT+8 will have different browsing and engagement patterns than age 50+ retired CTOs in Eastern Standard Time.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t look to existing studies for answers. Based on extensive aggregated research done by CoSchedule, you can use the infographics and sub-tasks below to make sure you’re sharing optimally.

For Facebook:

• For Instagram:

For Twitter:

For LinkedIn:

For Google+:

The meat of social media management is content sharing. Of course, engagement is the secret spice, but you have to first curate strategic content to maximize engagement.

Now, you’ve already checked out your calendar, and likely already have most of the week mapped out ahead of you, so it’s time to focus on curating fresh content.

So, consider how these proven psychological elements can inform your content curation. Ask yourself:

• Are you leveraging social validation?
• Are you sharing good, “positive” news?
• Are your posts aesthetically pleasing?
• Are you building relationships with your audience with each post?
• Does your content reflect your brand message?
• Is there an emotional appeal?
• Is there an attractive narrative?
• Are you leveraging current events/controversy/gossip to maximize virality?

Considering all of this, you should be curating or creating enough fresh content on a daily basis to keep the schedule running smoothly. Are you curating enough content? Use the sub-checklist below as a metric:

You can use a tool like Quuu to curate your content automatically. Check out this getting started guide for using Quuu together with Buffer.

Social media is a great way to get a quick rundown of your competitor’s game state. You should always be aware of your competition across all social platforms, as it helps you to keep your content relevant as well as offering a window into unique, highly focused marketing strategies.

Use this sub-checklist as a guide to what you should be looking for:

You should edit this task with your own links to saved searches or lists that display competitor activity; that way you can easily check on known resources as part of your recurring process.

Social media is a dynamic landscape, and platforms can come and go in the blink of an eye. From Myspace to Ello, social networks are appearing, disappearing, and changing constantly.

That’s exactly why it pays to keep up to date with the latest news about the social network industry. There are many places you can go for consistent, high-quality news:

• Social Media Today is a hub for social media updates, and a great place to learn about algorithm changes.
• Social Media Examiner aggregates sources from top thinkers in the field.
• Adweek’s SocialTimes delivers all the breaking news in a concise, insightful package.

With all that in mind, you should be taking time each day to:

• SproutSocial – Social Media Checklist
• BufferApp – Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly checklist
• BufferApp – A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager
• CoSchedule – Marketing Manager’s Social Media Checklist
• PostPlanner – A Checklist for Social Media Marketing That Actually Helps
• SmallBusinessForum – Daily, Weekly, Monthly Social Media Marketing Checklist
• HootSuite – Social Media Manager’s Daily Checklist
• RebekahRadice – The Only Social Media Managing Checklist You’ll Ever Need
• AdWeek – A Complete Checklist for Social Media Managers (Infographic)

• On-Page SEO Checklist
• Technical SEO Audit
• Product Launch Checklist
• UX Audit
• Google Analytics Audit
• Influencer Outreach Checklist
• Keyword Research Checklist
• Affiliate Onboarding
• Advanced Content Promotion Checklist
• Find Almost Anyone’s Email
• Submitting Content to Social Bookmarking Sites
• Daily Mention Tracking for Content Promotion
• Creating a Database of Influencers using Buzzsumo
• Scraping Broken Links with SEOSpider and Ahrefs
• SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process
• Accepting, Formatting, Editing and Publishing a Guest Post