Design your own Social Media Routine

Why should you have a routine?

While you may schedule some of your social media content in advance. Content alone is not sufficient. You also need to be engaged with your content and engaged with your audience.

You should be curating content, posting both adhoc and authentic content as well as your scheduled content – this sort of thing can be done easily and without being too time-consuming if you have taken the time to design out a proper routine. As part of our social media planner – we encourage you to design out a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly routine for your social media.

Why should you design your own personal routine?

While we will give you a couple of example routines it is important that you design your own personal routine. This is because:

1. It will take into account the social media platforms you have chosen to focus on (rather than all of them).
2. It will take into account your social media goals, visibility goals and business goals and what ever other goals you are working towards.
3. It will make the routine achieveable – taking in account your availibility, your normal routine and other commitments.
4. It will take into account your key focus, while still keeping the things in the background ticking along.
5. It can be flexible. If your routine is not working for you, you can do a self-diagnosis (after all you designed it) and work out how to fix it. You can experiment and test different things to come up with a perfect routine that suits you – personally!

What should you include in your routine?

Start by looking at your goals. What are you trying to achieve and what is your strategy for achieving them? Let’s take a classic example to work through by way of example.

Goal: I want to increase my Instagram following and get more referrals from Instagram.

Depending on your content strategy you might be choosing to post to your IG feed more regularly. This might be daily. This might be 3x a week. This might be 1x a week. Your routine should reflect this.

You might be choosing to try something new or boosting your other content on Instagram such as your Instagram Stories or using IGTV where you might be more willing to do off the cuff authentic content. Therefore it might be more realistic that you will post daily on IG stories. Alternatively, you might decide to ignore Stories and IGTV completely and focus on a beautifully curated feed.

Your goal strategy can be broken down into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activities.

Daily Routine

If you are looking to grow your IG following you should have on your routine – daily engagement. This will include responding to likes and comments, liking and commenting on other people’s content/feeds and UGC, using explore and hashtags to find new and interesting content.

You might schedule 10 mins a day to deal with this at a peak/high engagement time. Alternatively if all your social media activity is on IG (because you have a particularly visual business or this is where the majority of your engagements are) you are more likely to allocate a larger chunk of your time for intense engagement.

Weekly Routine

Thinking about the same goal – think about what you can do on a weekly basis to help you achieve your goal.

I normally use my weekly routine for planning out my social media and blogging routine for the week ahead and reviewed the week just gone. This includes things like drafting and scheduling content, taking photographs and working on my todo list.

Some of the weekly activities associated with the example Instagram goal includes planning ahead. This will include photographs, Instagram feed, writing my captions, hashtags and calls to action and any promotions.

Include in your regular routine a weekly slot for forward planning.

Monthly Routine and Quarterly Routines

Again, your monthly and quarterly routines should be aligned to your goals. These routines are likely to include things like planning upcoming campaigns, content and competitions that require more forward planning. It is also likely to include reviews and reflections of your social media activity – what are you doing, what works what progress are you making etc utilising a review of your monthly review and social media stats as part of your self-diagnosis.

Need help setting your social media campaign goals and planning your social media content? Why not grab a copy of our Social Media Planner.