Social media managers in the public sector have a lot to do. There are countless posts to create and schedule, accounts to moderate, comments and inquiries to respond to, campaigns to plan, and social ads to manage. And that’s focusing only on the social media side of things—many social media professionals have responsibilities that extend to managing website content, coordinating community initiatives with other agencies, and even writing press releases.
So with most social media professionals having too many tasks and not enough hours in the day, it helps to leverage modern tools that streamline and automate day-to-day tasks. With that in mind, here are 11 tools and resources that government social media managers can use to make their lives a little easier.
If you’re a social media professional and you work in the public sector, there’s a good chance you’re already very familiar with Government Social Media. Founded by Kristy Dalton, this organization has grown to become the largest network of government social media professionals in the U.S. Its sub-brands include the Government Social Media Organization (which has a great blog) and GovGirl, and it also runs the annual GSMCON and S4SCON conferences. For social media managers looking for insights, information, training—or sometimes just a fun group to trade memes with—this active online community is an indispensable resource.
Another fantastic online resource is The Moz Blog. As with the Moz products, the focus of the blog is largely on SEO, but it occasionally publishes some very insightful articles on social media. More importantly, however, Moz has created a comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Social Media that delves into key topics like understanding the value of social media, measuring performance, and adopting best practices. For those who are relatively new to social media, this is a tremendously valuable resource, but even social veterans will find value here.
Feedly is a great tool for staying on top of must-know information from social media and news organizations. Through the Feedly dashboard, you can—as with many other solutions—follow social media accounts and hashtags on different platforms and get alerts whenever something new is posted. But what makes Feedly truly interesting and useful is that you can combine these social media updates with other forms of online content, such as news articles from specific publications, the latest videos from YouTube channels, Google alerts, and RRS feeds. So if you want to follow an important story as it evolves, you can see the most crucial information in a single dashboard.
Much like an SEO research tool such as SEMRush provides keyword insights and suggestions that can be used to increase organic traffic to a website, BuzzSumo can be used to create great social media content and boost engagement. By simply entering a keyword, you can see what sort of content other organizations are successfully sharing and refine your own content strategy based on these engagement metrics. In addition, Buzzsumo can also be used for managing online crises, improving digital PR, and even tapping into influencer marketing.
Alongside BuzzSumo, Google Trends is a great tool for understanding what sort of information people are searching for and engaging with. Moreover, it doesn’t just provide a global and national view of search queries—you can drill down and see how popular a particular search term is on a state or city level. So if you’re trying to understand if there’s an appetite for particular kinds of content in your region, Google Trends is a great place to start.
For the busy government social media manager, Loomly can be an incredibly useful tool. First, it’s a social media management tool that allows you to create content calendars, schedule posts, share content for approval, and measure the success of your campaigns. Second, it’s a creative tool that guides you through the creation, labeling, and optimization of posts. And it lets you see previews of posts, share mockups with colleagues, and even get inspiration through RSS feeds and Twitter trends.
Canva is an online design tool that lets you design anything from flyers and posters to tickets, coupons, and invoices. It’s useful for social media managers because it allows them to easily generate sophisticated digital collateral like social graphics, posts, banners, web ads, and infographics. For instance, to create a sleek infographic, all you need to do is select one of Canva’s great templates, and then customize it to suit your organization and message. Templates are highly customizable—you can adjust images, elements, text, videos, and backgrounds. There’s even a free version of Canva, but features are fairly limited. Luckily, the Pro version is only $9.95 per month!
With video becoming a crucial component of just about any social media campaign, it’s important for social media managers to have an easy way of creating high-quality videos. That’s where Animoto comes in. Animoto is a simple but powerful video tool that takes much of the heavy lifting out of video creation. It lets you upload your photos and videos (or use content from Animoto’s stock library), and then edit the footage, as well as add text, music, and voiceover. It even allows you to add a logo watermark and adjust the aspect ratio to suit the particular social channel you’re looking to share it on.
For busy government departments who deal with a lot of public records requests, GovQA is a fantastic tool that streamlines responses and takes a lot of the busywork off your plate. No other software facilitates as many Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as GovQA. The tool not only simplifies record request responses, it even allows you to be proactive and deliver information before it's requested, and instantly see duplicate requests so that you don't end up repeating work you've already done. And GovQA integrates with Pagefreezer—simplifying records management and FOIA requests even further!
Of course our own product would be on the list! Pagefreezer’s social media archiving solution captures and preserves all activity on your social media accounts in real-time. This means that every edited post and deleted comment is retained and viewable through the Pagefreezer dashboard. So if you’re suddenly faced with an Open Records requests or litigation arises from an online conversation, you’ll have easily-exportable, defensible records of your social media content. Moreover, Pagefreezer allows you to monitor your social media accounts in real-time and receive instant alerts when profanity or other inappropriate language is used.
Pagefreezer assists government organizations in the monitoring and archiving of social media content. To learn more, simply request a demo from one of our solution advisors.