Get Organised! How to Structure your Social Media Work

Always passionate about helping you work smarter, not harder, we’re continuing our mini-series on how to be more efficient with your social media work this week.

Hopefully you’ll be able to use this collection of posts to really skyrocket the effectiveness of your social media work, getting better output for less input!

In other words, getting your social platforms to perform better without you having to slave away for hours!

Last week we talked about batching tasks, in particular how to group your social media content creation process together, so that you are ideally batching either a week’s (or better, a month’s) worth of content all together at one time.

This is far more effective than creating individual posts, one at a time, 3-4 times a week.

Instead, you sit down on a Monday (or whatever day) and churn out the whole lot while you have all the tools, equipment and headspace for the task at your disposal.

We’re now taking this idea forward and in this blog post want to outline some of the other ways you can make this task batching system even more efficient.

In particular, by having a social media script and a clearly defined filing storage system!

That’s right guys, it might sound a bit boring, but this week’s post is all about getting organised and here’s why…


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 Why is Organisation So Important?

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Ok, so its probably fairly obvious, but y’know, we don’t like to take anything for granted here at Social Puffin, so here’s a short word about why organisation is important, especially in terms of social media work.

Largely-speaking, organisation is important because it saves you time, makes the work you are doing more focused and helps you track, monitor, record, evaluate and repurpose content more easily too.

It also helps you keep a clear mind, stay on task, stick to the strategy and generally feel less flustered.

In essence, being organised is going to make your work more effective, efficient and easier!

And who isn’t onboard with that?!

Build a Social Media Script!

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So now that we’ve ascertained being organised is good if you want to be more effective and efficient in your social media work, we need to look at the ways you can do just this.

One of the first ways is to create centralised resources that keep all the information about your social media content neatly organised together.

This means content is easy to search, schedule, evaluate, refer back or repurpose.

And one of the top ways we suggest doing this, is through the use of a social media script.

In essence this is a word document (or a Google Doc or an Apple Pages sheet) that lists information about all the content you are batching i.e. it contains all the information you need to know about the content you are creating for that week or month.

Ideally, information points you should include in this document are… the name of the image or visual asset, the caption going with the visual asset or image, any hashtags being used, as well as the platform i.e. Instagram, the content is being published to.

We also suggest including the date or the time that the content will be published on any particular social platforms.

As discussed, you want to refer to your social media schedule for this information, rather than plucking it out of thin air!

With all this information, your social media script will then collate everything you need to know about your social media content within the date parameters you’ve outlined i.e. a week or a month.

It will centralise this information and make it easy to schedule (which will come to in next week’s post) as well as simple to find, reference, track and repurpose.

It will also help you ensure your imagery and captions are sticking to the strategy and working within the remit of your content themes, which we’ve outlined in other posts we’ve covered on these topics specifically.

Create an Image Folder!

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Along with your social media script, we also suggest creating a folder into which all your imagery and visual assets linked to that script are kept.

This is, again, a great way to organise your social media and keep it all together.

Having a folder that houses all the visual assets you’re using within a set date period (one which matches your social media script), will again make it clear and straightforward when you come to schedule content, or when you need to reference, record results or repurpose it.

If you are editing images, or using images with overlaid logos or icons, then you can have a few different visual asset sub-folders here that store the images at different stages of their production process.

Get a Structured Storage System!

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And now we come to the topic of where both your social media script and your visual asset folder should be stored.

Because, needless to say, we don’t just recommend having them hanging around on your desktop or cluttering up random Dropbox folders.

Instead, we suggest you get organised and create a structured, yet simple system here that works for you.

We’re going to go on to suggest an outline of a structure you may wish to adopt – we use it with many of our clients, who find it very helpful  – but we also understand there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach here.

As such, you may well come up with a system that works better for your team depending on the infrastructure and resources you already have in place.

And that’s great.

The main point here is just that you get a system – however it looks – and make sure everyone in your organisation not only knows it exists, but knows how to use it too!

Oh and make sure it’s a cloud-based system too!

How to Structure your Storage: An Example

Social Puffin - Workflow Folder Diagram

As we said above, this is just an example, but if you’re looking for ways to structure your internal filing system when it comes to your social media content, this might just help you out.

This is actually the system we use across multiple clients, as well as in our own work, and we’ve found it fits most teams really well, so why not give it a shot?!

Essentially, within your internal filing system – whether that’s iCloud Drive, One Drive, Google Drive or any other variety of cloud-bases storage – you should have a social media content folder.

Within this folder we recommend you have folders named as years i.e. 2020, 2021, 2022.

And within each of these, we recommend you having 12 month folder i.e. Jan, Feb, Mar etc.

Now within each of these monthly folders you can now drop your social media script and your visual asset folders for all the social media output you will publish within that month.

Et voila!

For each month of the year, you’ve now got a complete and well-structured system for not only finding out what you posted, but also for recording the results of those posts, as well as repurposing them down the track… hello to more time-saving!

PIN IT TO PINTEREST!

So there it is, our complete guide to getting organised in your social media content creation process.

We hope this post has been useful but, as always, if you have any questions on this don’t forget to drop them into the comments box below or to send us an email ([email protected]) and we’ll be pleased to help you out.