This is the 4th post of a series I have written providing some help and advice to answer the question: How much will social media cost me? Make sure you read the full series – ‘Social Investment‘.

This is an area that is largely dismissed in the scheme of things. It is however, a very necessary part to maintaining your consistency in ‘showing up’ for your audiences, and staying relevant.

While strategy and content creation are crucial, the administration of how these two display themselves across social media means that your admin and systems need to be spot on. I call this “skilled” admin. This isn’t just a matter of drearily ticking boxes of scheduling content and running a report each month.

There is much more that goes into maintaining your social media plan and keeping it in ship shape.

Who’s involved in the skilled social media admin?

This will hopefully be a mix between your in-house marketing manager, social media manager or other company representative who works in conjunction with your agency.

Many of our clients don’t get too involved in this side of management of their accounts. Although, this is mainly because we have a good file sharing system in place – they are clear about where everything is and what we do each month.

Some of the tasks involved in this function

These are some of the tasks we have listed in our Asana project folders, just to give you an idea of the range of tasks or aspects that need to be managing on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis:

1. Managing the Content Bank. (Monitoring archive dates; campaign milestones; context of time-cased content; avatar based content; image rendering; link breakages; etc.)
2. Content scheduling. (Using the content that is categorised within the Content Bank to schedule out relevant content to the specific platforms based on an agreed timeline according to being regularly ‘available’ to your audiences.)
3. Planning specific content at specific times (in line with strategy and campaign planning)
4. Editorial and content calendar management. (Keeping an eye on when new, fresh content should be coming in or when events are coming that need to be promoted)
5. Monitoring the performance of content (versus the newsfeed algorithms, as well as engagement and targets based on strategy objectives)
6. Running reports each month, quarter and year – to review high-level objectives  against channels (website, social media, email)

Investment of time and money

Much like content creation, the hours spent each month on these tasks are vastly underrated. I would say that you need to attribute at least 6 to 8 hours per month to skilled admin (depends on size of your content bank, number of social profiles and how much content you generate).

If you have someone in-house who can build this into their weekly workload (say 2 to 3 hrs per week) – then great! If not – then you need to allow for this within your planned budget for investing in some outside help with your social media. From an agency perspective this would look like approximately £250 to £450 per month.

Confused by how much there is?

If you are stuck and not sure how to make your social media admin more efficient, I’d love to help. Why not check my online diary and see if there is a convenient time for us to have a free 30min conversation and see where I can help.

Remember to read the first three blog posts in this Social Investment series:

“Social Media Investment”(#1) | “Invest in a Strategy” (#2) | “Content Creation Sweat” (#3)