Social media is just part of an overall marketing strategy, albeit quite a large part in this day and age. Managing your social media accounts is incredibly time consuming when it’s done manually, and it’s almost impossible for one person to keep on top of all the tasks on the numerous social media pages.
What you need is one of the reporting and project management tracking tools that help you to keep track of the tasks in your social media campaigns, as well as analyse and tracking the results of your campaigns. Wrike is an IT project management software that works just as well for managing a project on social media as it does tech projects. It incorporates a web based scheduling software with charts, task management, visual reporting, intuitive interfaces, real-time collaboration, activity and workload views, time tracking, financial management, and even a free project management app (Android and iOS) for mobile devices.
Wrike also comes in ten different languages, so it can be used internationally; there are also different price and payments plans to suit different sizes of company from all industries. It is fully integrated with a number of different business applications such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft Project and Excel, as well as having an extension for Google Chrome.
With all these benefits it’s easy to see why Wrike is perfect for project management, but how can you use it for your social media marketing and management?
The strength of this project management tool is in its ability to plan, track and analyse your social media campaigns using the very same tool that you’re using to basically run your company.
How To Use Wrike For Social Media?
Planning your social media campaigns
Before you get started on the implementation and execution of your social media campaign, you need to ensure that you have a solid, and actionable, plan in place. It’s important to have a step-by-step process to follow if you want the best results.
To create a plan in Wrike, make a new parent folder called “Social Media Campaigns”. Then, in this main folder, you can create a new project for every new campaign that you run. In the explanation area of the project you should write down the specific brief and plans.
Wrike also suggests some points to jot down (including platform, goal and duration etc.) before creating a task for each and assigning each one to the relevant person in your company.
Tracking your social media campaigns
Tracking the completion status of tasks and the results of your campaigns is imperative to ensure a successful social media campaign.
Keeping on top of the completion status of tasks allows you to make sure the project is progressing on time, and you can use the results of your campaign to see what worked and what didn’t; the results can then be used to plan and strengthen your next social media campaign.
There are two ways that you can track your campaigns with Wrike:
- Track specific metrics with custom fields
- Track completion of tasks with dashboard widget
When you are tracking specific metrics through Wrike’s custom fields, you use Table View to see how your specific metrics are performing.
For example, the most useful custom fields that you may want to track for social media are:
- Projected time vs. actual time spent
- Projected budget vs. actual budget spent
- Goal metric vs. metric achieved (e.g. number of new followers)
- Page engagement
- Reach
Your dashboard widget is there to enable you to see the progression of your projects through planning, doing and completion stages. The best way to do this is to create a custom dashboard with as many fields as you need to track your projects comprehensively. This allows you to keep an eye on the different tasks in your projects and how they are getting on; you can also give access to your clients so they can check how your team is performing with regards to their timeline.
For example, if you are preparing for a social media promotion for a new product that your company is launching. You can call the main project “[New Product] Social Media Promotion”, and then under the parent project you would create tasks such as “Photo Shoot for [product]”, “write content to promote [product]”, “create social sharing content for [product] promotion” etc.
This way you can keep track of everything that is going into the campaign and what its status of completion is.
Wrike is an excellent way to track the performance and progress of social media campaigns, and it’s simple to clone the process (if it works well) in order to implement it on all your social media campaigns, too.
[Recommended reading: Social Media Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide To Success]
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[Image credits: Flickr, The Art of Social Media by mkhmarketing, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0, other images are from their respective Social Media Revolver articles.]
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.