How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process + Webinar Recording

How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process is a workshop that the HeyOrca team presented at HeyOrca's inaugural workshop series; Life In Social. The session covered how the HeyOrca Marketing Team integrates Agile principles into their social media process. Keep reading to discover key-takeaways from the session and watch the recording!

By now, you've likely heard of the term "Agile Project Management." If you're unfamiliar with what Agile is, here's a nice summary from the folks at Atlassian:

"Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches."

When the Agile methodology was first created in 2001, it was created with software development in mind. Since then, it's been adopted by teams with varying functions across almost every industry imaginable. Marketing and social media teams are no exception.

Why? Because it works!

Let's dive into how HeyOrca's marketing team takes inspiration from the Agile methodology to operationalize their social media process.

Table Of Contents

• "How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process" Workshop Recording
• Key Takeaways from the "How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process" Workshop

• What is Social Media Ops?
• Agile Principles to Succeed in Social Media Operations
• Agile Roles for Social Media Teams
• How HeyOrca Uses Agile Events for Social Media Management
• Productivity Tools for Social Media Operations

• Additional Recordings from Life In Social Workshop Series:

• Design Your Ideal Agency: A new Approach to Grow in 2021
• The Top 5 Facebook Ad principles Social Media Managers Need to Know
• How to Create and Present Social Media Reports That Matter to Your Clients
• How to Run an Inclusive Social Feed Tomorrow

"How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process" Workshop Recording

https://youtu.be/qaqQiuR1m5g

Presented by:

• Joe Teo - CEO at HeyOrca
• Casey Russell - Customer Success Manager at HeyOrca
• Datis Mohsenipour - Director of Marketing at HeyOrca
• Aaron Fulk - CEO at Lillian James Creative

Key Takeaways from the "How to Operationalize Your Social Media Process" Workshop

What is Social Media Ops?

As social media managers, we are very used to fighting fires and reacting to things. Social Media Operations is a systemized approach to social media management that is agile and collaborative.

In other words, operationalizing your social media process is achieved by creating a repeatable, collaborative, and adaptable way to get your job done faster, together.

Agile Principles to Succeed in Social Media Operations

In order to succeed in adopting Social Media Operations in your team, you need to have a core understanding of the Agile principles that inspire this approach:

1. Individuals over processes
2. Outcomes over outputs
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Respond to change over following a plan

Agile Roles for Social Media Teams

The four roles needed for an Agile social media team are:

1. Content Strategist - Determines content direction and measure of success
2. Project Manager - Ensures timelines and delivery are on track
3. Content Creator - Creates content that aligns with project direction and deadlines
4. Subject Matter Expert - Provides insight on the business, topic, and brand voice

Don't have four people on your social media team? No sweat. You can assign multiple roles to one individual.

At HeyOrca, the Marketing Director takes on the Content Strategist and Project Manager roles, while the Social Media Manager acts as the Content Creator and Subject Matter Expert.

How HeyOrca Uses Agile Events for Social Media Management

There are four Events that take place in Agile. Here's how HeyOrca applies them to their social media management process:

1. Content Planning
2. While meeting to plan campaigns, feature releases, and content publication briefs, the team will discuss what social media content needs to be planned as part of those projects.
3. The team also meets weekly to review items from their Social Media Backlog (list of content ideas)

2. Sprints (short projects)
3. The HeyOrca team plans social media content in weekly intervals, AKA sprints.
4. The Content Strategist plans what content should be featured for the week using the Event Strips feature in HeyOrca's visual social media calendar
5. The Content Creator then schedules the posts in HeyOrca using content from the Social Media Backlog
6. Once a month, the team dedicates a sprint to schedule "standardized" content for the coming month. IE: Weekly quotes

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3. Content Stand Up Meeting
4. The Agile Methodology typically involves brief, daily stand-up meetings to discuss a sprints progress and any roadblocks the team may be facing
5. HeyOrca opts to use daily Slack communications in place of stand-up meetings as it works better for their team (Remember: people over process)
6. The team also uses the inline feedback feature in HeyOrca to communicate feedback on specific social posts

4. Content Retrospective
5. The Retrospective meeting is set at the end of sprint to discuss key finding and improvements that could be made in future sprints.
6. HeyOrca's Marketing Team meets weekly to review key takeaways and improvements that were identified through daily content stand up meetings

Productivity Tools for Social Media Operations

Aaron Fulk (CEO of Lillian James Creative) and Joe Teo (CEO at HeyOrca) recommend the following productivity tools for Social Media Teams:

• HeyOrca (social media calendar + client approvals + collaboration + reporting)
• Calendly (scheduling)
• Canva (photo editing)
• Slack (team communications)
• Asana (project management)
• Pipedrive and Dubsado (CRM)
• Mixkit (stock media)
• Grammarly (grammar checking)
• KeyHole & AgencyAnalytics (reporting)

Additional Recordings from Life In Social Workshop Series:

Design Your Ideal Agency: A new Approach to Grow in 2021

https://youtu.be/l0eUOvRNVsg

Presented by:

Karl Sakas - Founder of Sakas and Company

Key Takeaways:

• Find your spot on the "Agency Growth Style" continuum, to help you make better forward-looking decisions.
• Get a simple yet powerful way to organize your agency's services, to help you connect with the right clients (and deliver the work more profitably).
• Understand why you and your team often struggle today… and get a new way to think about agency roles.

The Top 5 Facebook Ad principles Social Media Managers Need to Know

https://youtu.be/p9lSg_GCpvw

Presented by:

Krystal Hobbs - Founder of Reflective Marketing

Key Takeaways:

• Start with Your Client's #1 Goal
• Your campaign type will depend on your client's goal, so make sure you are super clear on what they want to accomplish. There can only be 1 primary goal!
• Don't Fall Down the Data Rabbithole!
• Know what metrics are most important to diagnose performance issues, and ignore the rest. It's easy to get lost in the data!
• Broader is Better.
• Facebook's ad platform is more intelligent than ever, and most of your success will depend on giving Facebook flexible parameters to work within.

How to Create and Present Social Media Reports That Matter to Your Clients

https://youtu.be/xRzm9YWvGhY

Presented by:

Alexandre Boudier - Head of Marketing at Keyhole.co

Key Takeaways:

• 8 tips on how to create a great social media report
• What you should include in the report
• Free Social Media Report Template to customize for your agency

How to Run an Inclusive Social Feed Tomorrow

https://youtu.be/FXFmoxHgraY

Presented by:

Matthew Tsang - Co-Founder at AndHumanity

Key Takeaways:

• Why Inclusive Communications matters
• The proper way to measure the inclusivity of your communications
• Tips that you can implement to be more inclusive in your Social Feed tomorrow

Now that you've discovered the steps needed to operationalize your social media process, you can save even more time managing your social media content! Try HeyOrca free for 14 days and see how you can streamline your social media publishing and client approval process