How to Streamline Your Social Media Workflow Using Tags and Filtering

All social media managers know that switching off is hard to do.Between social media planning, managing scheduled posts and engaging with the community, social media managers often work more than a standard 40-hour workweek, and burnout is a real concern. One common thread on advice columns for social media managers who feel overwhelmed is to find ways to streamline workflows.Not to worry, we've got you covered.Kristen, HeyOrca's community manager, tags social media posts by category to help her easily find templates, drafts and scheduled posts. Tags are a feature in many social media management platforms, and using them properly makes it easy to categorize and organize the massive amount of content that is scheduled on a weekly basis. By filtering posts by their tags, Kristen can easily find what she's looking for:

"Tags give me the power to declutter my very bulky calendar. If you're not utilizing the tagging feature on whatever platform you're using, you're not realizing your full potential."

Tagging takes a little planning and strategizing to get started but will save you lots of time down the road and will really streamline your social media workflow. We'll show you how to choose the best tags for your content, and offer you some tagging tips and tricks to streamline your workflow.

Best Practices To Streamline Your Social Media Workflow Using Tagging

So you want to start tagging, but you're not sure where to start.Tags should be a reflection of your overall marketing strategy. You are juggling multiple clients, audiences, types of content - and all of these need to be factored into your tags. When developing your tag names, start by coming up with broad categories on a whiteboard or using sticky notes, and break those categories down into subcategories.For example, Kristen has set up four broad categories for our HeyOrca content: OrcaChat, Content, Culture, and Miscellaneous.

Using culture as an example, we use the "culture" tag to label any post or asset related to internal company culture, such as our staff doing their thing or having fun after work. A large part of our culture is the company dogs, so we also have a "dog" tag, and since our dogs are recurring stars, they each get their own tag. Kristen's dog's name is Jojo so, course, there is a "Jojo" tag. When tagging one Jojo's posts, Kristen will use all three tags.When Kristen needs to filter her posts, she can decide how specific she wants to dig. She can easily view and find all culture posts, or limit the search to dogs or Jojo. Jojo demands a lot of airtime on our social media.[caption id="attachment_7734" align="aligncenter" width="300"]

Jojo, doing what he does.[/caption]You can also tag posts to be in more than one category. If we were using an image of Jojo for a job post, the post could be tagged both Jojo and hiring. You would then find this post easily by setting your filter for those two tags.

Tagging tips and tricks

The more you use tags, the more ways you will discover to use them to streamline your workflow. Here are just a few ways Kristen saves time and headaches by using tags and filtering to assist with social media scheduling.

Identifying Gaps in your Schedule / Missing Posts

When your social media calendar is full of scheduled posts, sometimes it can be difficult to identify any gaps in your programming. Filtering by tag in a calendar view allows you to see if you have scheduled the right amount of any given type of post per day. For example, if you like to post three curated posts a day, filtering for the curated tag will allow you to visually identify if there's anything missing.Another valuable use of this technique to ensure you are properly implementing your social media curated-to-owned ratio. By filtering down in calendar view, it will be easy to see how many curated or owned posts you have scheduled, allowing you to make quick changes.Filtering also allows you to check if all the required posts for a specific event, such as a Twitter chat or event, are actively scheduled for when they are meant to be.

Twitter Chats

If you ask Kristen, she'll tell you that running our weekly #OrcaChat is a whirlwind of activity and requires a lot of planning. To allow her to focus fully on engaging with the community during the chat, Kristen schedules content ahead of time.Posts she categorizes with tags include reminders, invitations, thank yous, and the questions and answers themselves. She also keeps templates saved for each these categories to speed up the process. Having these posts tagged makes it easy to find and schedule them for the right time in advance of each chat.

Documenting your tag structure

You may know your tags in and out, but that doesn't mean others will pick them up quickly. Document your tags for when new members join your social media team, or you need to give a client or other stakeholder access to your social calendar. Having your tags documented not only gets everyone up to speed quickly but makes you look organized and professional.Rather than simply listing all your tags, be sure to showcase how all the tags are related. A simple way to do this would be to develop a tag tree like the one in the previous section and share it with all relevant parties. By presenting your tags in an easily digestible format and giving your team and clients the power to filter posts, you'll save them time and they will thank you for it.

Strategize now, avoid burnout later

Who knew that such a simple exercise as tagging could have so many applications? By determining the pillars of your content and coming up with and using relevant tags, you'll save yourself lots of headaches down the road.Social media tags are just one way to help reduce your social media workload. For other tips on how to avoid social media burnout, here are a few articles that offer practical advice for managing time and stress:

• How To Avoid Burnout: 8 Tips For Social Media Marketers by Kelvin Claveria
• 6 Effective Ways to Avoid Social Media Burnout by Robin Camarote
• Why Ditching Social Media Speadsheets Will Save Your Sanity