How to Manage Your Social Media Team Remotely?

Many social media teams worked remotely even before the pandemic hit. But these days, there’s more to the story.

Remote social media staff are almost certainly experiencing more stress than they used to be. Their content strategy has been shaken up, and they may be hesitant to meet up to get on the same page about it.

To stay productive, social media managers need to talk through remote work best practices. While many of these are common across roles, some deserve special consideration by social media teams:

Revisit Your Content Calendar

The most important job for your social media team is to publish content for your business. Coordinating content development can be tricky when different time zones, work hours, and social media platforms are involved. Misalignments can be avoided and solved by developing a comprehensive content calendar.

This calendar will show when pieces of content are scheduled for, what topics they cover, and who is in charge of each post. Reducing guesswork minimizes mistakes and makes everyone more productive.

Use Project Management Software

When working with any sort of remote team, you need to have a central hub to manage deliverables. A project management platform is how the rubber of your content calendar meets the road.

Use it not just to track projects on specific progress, but to host your content calendar, style guide, team roster, and whatever other documents your team needs to get work done. Set expectations on who’s responsible for updating what fields and when.

Project management software is critical for communication on remote teams. Activity feeds keep conversations about content accessible to the entire team. These tools also let social media staff share documents and photos, as well as brainstorm new topics and talking points for their campaigns.

Ditch the Timecards

Many managers worry about their remote teams putting in an honest day’s work. Measuring output rather than hours worked takes the stress off of everyone. Instead of worrying about hour logs, let their content’s performance do the talking.

For your social media campaigns, set deadlines to measure progress. Pieces of content should be submitted by a certain time and date. For longer projects, such as channel audits or keyword research, set checkpoints for review and potential pivots.

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