The global pandemic has forced not only the marketing industry, but the whole business world to work remotely. With the new work arrangement came numerous challenges. Managing a remote social media team was quite a challenge even under normal circumstances, let alone now that every member works from a different location. What every team leader wants to know right now is how to successfully run a team? By now, most of them have figured out how to get remote staff to communicate and work together. However, they need tips and tricks to remain dynamic in unusual circumstances. Without further ado, here are some of the best remote work practices for managing social media teams.
Keep In Touch
One of the greatest challenges of remote work is the lack of communication. As soon as employees leave the office and start working from home, they gradually lose the team spirit that once united them. Moreover, with the pandemic and homeschooling, working parents find it hard to stay on top of things at work. If you want to maintain effective communication, then you have to give your team members the latest communicative tools. For example, internal communication software or tools such as Slack or Zoom can help your team keep in touch. Thanks to any communicative tool, they not only can communicate but also work together and become even closer as a team.
Track Progress
Keeping a close eye on your team members and their performance helps you make adjustments and improve their productivity. Since your remote team deals with social media, they spend hours every day on social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. It’s their job, who can blame them! However, as much social media is entertaining, they are also distracting. Therefore, your team might struggle with productivity. For this reason, you can introduce tracking tools to help your team with not only time but also task management. These tools show how much time they spend working on assignments. If it takes too much time to complete a task, then they slack, or they have some other task-related problems. With the tools, the team is more likely to work harder since they know their work is being closely monitored.
Draw Up a Schedule
When managing a remote social media team, you should do what you can to make your job easier. Since you and your team have a lot on your plate, drawing up a schedule would be a good idea. Come up with something like a social media content calendar. Of course, you can’t plan every content piece you and your team will post shortly. Nonetheless, you can make a short term plan for only a few upcoming weeks. It will help you and your team stay focused and meet deadlines. The best part of this is that you don’t have to spend lots of money on high-tech planners. You can use a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep all plans in one place. Don’t forget to give access to other team members so they can include their own topics and analyze published content. Also, make sure you update the schedule every week or so.
Introduce Approvals
As a team leader, you have to know your team to the core. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses allows you to successfully manage the team. Remote work is a huge challenge for everyone. All the more so when you have team members that are new in this business and can’t really work independently. Walking over to their coworker’s desk and asking for help isn’t an option for them anymore. That is why you have to find another way to make sure their work meets all clients’ requirements. Introducing approvals is the easiest solution. You, as the manager, and a few other, more experienced team members can take some time and go through their work. Although approving other employees’ work adds up to your already long list of responsibilities, it helps avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.
Be On the Lookout for Brand Mentions
One of your team’s responsibilities is the close monitoring of social media. At all times, you have to know what interactions are taking place around your brand on social networks. For this reason, your team can use alerting features to receive notifications every time a customer mentions your brand online. This way you can check it out and react accordingly. Being on the lookout for brand mentions helps you handle sensitive situations before they blow out of proportions. If your brand goes through a major social media crisis, it’s highly unlikely it will fully recuperate from the damages. To avoid this situation, let a few team members keep an eye on social media and don’t let any mention go unperceived.
In the end, managing a remote social media team doesn’t have to be stressful. Sure, it comes with challenges of its own. Still, with these tips, whatever management challenges remote work throws your way, you will overcome it in no time.