In the lyrical words of The Boomtown Rats: Tell me why, I don’t like Mondays, tell me why… Well we’ll tell you why, you get into work after a relaxing weekend and you’re thrown into a week long worldwind of emails, tweets and posts, until Friday evening comes around and you can breathe again. Monday is a tough day for everyone and we get it, before social it was emails now it’s tweets/posts/uploads/mentions AND emails. So we’ve put our heads together to create the winning Monday morning combination for any social media or community manager.
A simple yet effective way to manage your time is with a checklist. So just short of quoting Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto, here is your one stop Monday morning Twitter checklist.
1. First in first served
You shouldn’t have 2 million tweets to answer on a Monday morning, if you do - maybe it’s time to think about weekend monitoring or extra help with answering users. Look back, starting from Friday evening and checking through to Sunday - remember you scheduled content for the weekend, are there any replies or comments? Even if your approach to social monitoring means you check in every now and then over the weekend to make sure there are no high priority customer queries without an answer, it’s good practice just to look over again.
Prioritize your tweets, make sure all the questions and queries have an answer first. Then begin with the relationship building tweets for example a tweet reading “@SocialBro you are awesome for tweet analytics” doesn’t necessarily need a response, however it’s nice to recognize the warm and fuzzies, after all, love makes the world go around.
2. Hunting and gathering
Curate content from your followers. We’ve said before but we’ll say it again, Twitter is a fantastic source of quality content if you know how to find it (hint, hint: Twitter lists!) Industry professionals and influencers are not difficult to come across on Twitter. Use public Twitter lists or create your own and add your influential users to it. Your followers are not only a great source of content, but by sharing their posts you’re acknowledging their influence in the industry.
Browse your lists of a Monday morning to discover great content for scheduling during the week! We recommend scheduling a few days in advance and continuing to share topics/opinions/articles in real-time throughout each day, so as not to lose touch with what’s happening in your industry.
3. What’s the buzz?
If like all social fanatics you juggle a personal and professional social media life; you love reading social media tips and how to’s but you can’t go past a good Buzzfeed quiz, you’ll love this point on the checklist. Like reading the Sunday paper, take at least 30 minutes to check out the trending topics. Browse Twitter, did you miss anything? Is there anything happening in your industry worth commenting on? Additionally, you can use Google search to filter a topic by custom dates, check out the latest news in your industry browse different articles that catch your eye and soon you’ll be back in the the know.
4. Capturing bright ideas
Following on from the above, if you publish your own content, has your browse ignited any great ideas for blog content this week? Check your editorial schedule to see if there are any ‘right now’ topics that your audience will be interested in. Remember to keep it relevant to your audience and in line with your tone of voice, #WhatJayZSaidToSolange may be of interest to you, but is it relevant to your users?
5. Keep the conversation flowing
Finally, we’re at the end. You’ve untangled your Twitter jungle and it’s smooth sailing here on out. Continue to monitor your Twitter activity throughout the day and whenever you get the chance remember to chat, chat, chat and be social… after all that’s what social networks are about, right?
