Using a To-Do App to Stay on Top of Your Social Media Tasks

August 24, 2014 by Christine

Managing social media is a demanding, time-consuming job — and it never seems to end. Just when you cross one to-do off your list, two or three more are added. Whether you work alone or on a team, a number of tools are readily available to help you stay on top of your social media tasks. Below are a few apps we love.

The Hit List – The Hit List is a $50 task management app for Mac users with a free demo version to try. Use The Hit List to breakdown your workload into projects and tasks. Though it’s primarily designed for managing tasks, it’s also up to the task of creating a content calendar. For example, each task can have numerous subtasks, and all tasks can be assigned both a start date and an end date. The app integrates with Reminders, ensuring that you never forget what’s coming up next. You can also tag each task, time your tasks, organize your tasks in standard and smart folders, and much more. The built-in timer is particularly useful as you can keep track of exactly how much time each project actually consumes.

HubSpot’s Editorial Calendar – Willing to give up your contact information in exchange for an editorial calendar spreadsheet template? HubSpot’s editorial calendar is a free Excel spreadsheet. Use this as a template to get your blog post ideas on paper and on the schedule. If you work on a team, upload your completed content calendar to your favorite collaboration tool so that everyone is on the same page. This spreadsheet contains fields for everything from blog post titles, content type, keywords, and due dates. It’s a good choice for individuals and small teams. However, as your content strategy grows, you may want a more robust solution.

Asana – Asana is an online project management app that’s free for up to 15 users. If you work on a social media team, this app is a good online collaboration tool with robust calendar and social tools. It even has a built-in editorial calendar template. Granted, the template is quite basic with its “Going live this week,” “Upcoming Posts,” and “Ideas” fields, but it’s a good start. The beauty here is that once you create an editorial calendar project and fill it with all of your tasks and subtasks, you can assign tasks to each team member as you see fit. From there, everyone will be aware of what everyone else is doing. You can also attach files to tasks, comment on tasks, and sync your Asana calendars with your Google or iCal calendars.

WorkFlowy – Intuitive, simple, and free (for up to 500 lists), WorkFlowy is an online app for making collaborative lists. If you want somewhere to store your ideas or brainstorm with others without a lot of fuss, WorkFlowy is it. The philosophy of WorkFlowy is simplicity. Each list is easily collapsible, yet it can contain dozens, if not hundreds, of related sublists, and sublists. For example, you might start with two lists: Work and Personal. Under Work, you might have 5 lists such as: Meetings, Social Media, Training, Print Media, and Administration. Under Social Media, you might have: Blogging, Contests and Promotions, Whitepapers, Market Research, and Analytics. Under Blogging, you might have: Keywords, Ideas, Editorial Calendar, Guest Blog Sources, and so on. Once you have a hierarchy set in WorkFlowy, your ideas, outlines, tasks, and information are just a few clicks away. WorkFlowy supports tags, too. In fact, it works best with a good tagging strategy in place. For example, you could set up tags such as Urgent, Later, and Someday to prioritize your social media tasks in WorkFlowy. Finally, you can share specific sections of WorkFlowy with others, making it an interactive organizational tool.

These are but a few examples of the many tools available to help you manage your social media workload. Start with one of the free versions and start working more productively.

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: grosocial