Whether there is a small-but-mighty team behind your government social media pages or multiple offices with far-reaching field teams, getting a handle on access, content, and public engagement can be a challenge. Your pages need to be secure and well-managed. Your content needs to be timely, effective, and informative. Policies and procedures on the legal and compliance side of things need to be in check. Of course, all of those challenges must be addressed with resource constraints and budgets in mind. A few tools and strategies can help.
Secure & Centralize Social Pages
Start with organized and secure access points for all your government offices and agencies across major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter). It’s a good idea to have more than one person with native admin access to each social platform. Beyond that, you’ll want to be intentional about contributor-level access and moderation functionality, and use a social media management platform with the ability to create custom access permissions via page and user management features. This is especially important for communications professionals and teams working on and overseeing content for multiple pages and social media channels within a single or multiple adjacent agencies who will need to jump into and out of different pages and channels to schedule and approve content regularly.
Getting everyone the right level of access also creates efficiency. Organizing content in spreadsheets or sending images and captions over email or in other types of docs can really slow your team down. The ability to organize everything in one place, where everyone has the level of access they need (no more, no less), is a game-changer. A social media management platform can help here, but you’ll need one specifically built for the unique needs of government so it offers the right user management functionality, customizable access permissions, archival, and other features uniquely useful for organizations operating in regulated industries.
Plan What You Can
One of the tricky things about social media content planning and execution is balancing posts that can be planned ahead with spur-of-the-moment content opportunities. To do so, start with a blank-slate calendar. Look at the events, holidays, and concrete dates happening over the next couple months and slate in posts where you need them. This might include: Upcoming holidays, fun days and observances, announcements, a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a fundraiser, or the anniversary of a special event or milestone. Do a second planning pass where you look at less-concrete (i.e. more evergreen) content and slate those posts in, knowing their post date and time can be a little more flexible if needed. Then leave room for some more spontaneous content, slating these in by concept or topic. Now, look for opportunities to humanize the work your organization does. Cross-reference ongoing initiatives and loosely slate in posts from different people or about members of your organization or the community to bring a human element to your pages.
Now, take a step back and look at the bigger picture, thinking about what you have planned in its entirety. What percentage of your content is informative? What percentage of your content is meant to be fun and engaging? What percentage of your content features people (quotes from real humans, photography, interviews, stories)? There are no magic numbers when it comes to how your content categories stack up against each other; what’s important is that you find balance and that your content relates to your audience and aligns with your organization’s goals.
Recruit Field Teams to Capture Content
Those authentic, human moments are what take your content strategy and execution from good to great–but you can’t possibly be everywhere at once. You’ll need to resource people in different areas of your organization to capture content and submit it to communications teams to curate and finalize it before scheduling and publishing it. Leveraging field teams to gather content can significantly enrich your social media channels. These individuals are your eyes and ears on the ground, offering unique perspectives and timely photos and videos that can make your social media presence more dynamic and engaging. Encourage teams to share images, videos, and stories from their work.
This requires two important things: Buy-in from at least a handful of people across your org, and a simple process that makes it easy for them to send you the photos, videos, and quick info you need to make great social posts. To get both, start with a couple people you suspect might be willing to help. Explain how helpful it is to have photos and videos from out in the field, and how it helps the comms team show off the great work offices and teams are doing out in the community. Then, provide an easy way for them to send you what you need. Once a few people start to submit content, it becomes easier to get others to join in on the effort.
Establish Easy Workflows
If you have multiple people submitting content, writing and editing posts, or your comms team is centralized across several offices, departments, or even unique agencies–a few simple workflows can save a ton of time and resources. A simple content workflow might look like four logical stages: First, someone captures and submits an image with some notes for context; second, someone turns that info into a social post, then schedules the post for published and submits it to an approval step; third, a moderator with the right level of access approves the post; and lastly, the post is automatically archived.
In addition to making it easier to delegate and assign content creation to staff at multiple levels of experience, simplifying the approval process (and even providing the ability to skip an approval or two, when appropriate) ensures that your content remains dynamic and timely while adhering to necessary oversight.
Keep Information & Feedback in One Place
One especially nice thing about using defined workflows for sourcing content, writing captions, editing posts, approving, scheduling, and archiving is that everything stays in one place. You don’t need to spend time chasing photos, context, captions, and feedback around emails, messages, spreadsheets, and other documents.
Using a dedicated platform ensures everyone has the information they need in one accessible place, plus the access permissions they need to contribute in a meaningful way. Social Assurance for Government is a social media management platform that can accommodate all this, by the way. Setting up content workflows and tailoring them to the needs of your organization and users is super simple and cost-effective.
Automate Archival
For government social media, keeping a record of social media activity is not just good practice; it’s often a legal requirement. Automatic archival saves time and ensures compliance by systematically capturing and storing social media content, engagements, and interactions. This not only helps in responding to records requests, but also provides a valuable historical record of your agency’s communications (both inbound from the community and outbound) without the logistical and resource challenges of attempting to do it manually. By automating this process, your organization minimizes the risk of missing or incomplete records and frees up the team to focus on creating importance and engaging communications.
A Better Way
Managing social media presents a unique set of challenges for governments, but with the right strategies and tools, it can also be incredibly rewarding, aligning community members behind initiatives, engaging citizens, and keeping everyone informed. Social Assurance for Government is here to help, with social media management and archival solutions that streamline social media planning, collaboration, content creation, scheduling, moderation, and archival for government agencies large and small. Follow the link below to get in touch and learn more about how to put this powerful technology to work for your teams.
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