Tools to Help You Manage Social Media for Your Jewelry Brand
Now that the New Year has arrived, you probably want to establish better habits for planning, managing, and executing your jewelry marketing, including your social media channels. Joy Joya YouTube channel subscriber Kenny recently asked if I could recommend some best practices and tools for improving and streamlining a social media strategy, so I’d like to focus this episode on my recommendations.
Do you often find yourself deciding on your jewelry brand’s social media post content the day that you’re going to post it? If you’re currently following this approach, then you’re likely experiencing one of two common problems: either your feed looks unplanned and lacks visual cohesiveness, or you’re missing out on opportunities to connect your social media strategy back to your overarching business and marketing strategies. To squeeze the best results from your social media marketing efforts, you’ll need to be planning your posts at least two weeks in advance but ideally one month ahead of time.
January presents a perfect opportunity to sit down with a calendar and notebook and brainstorm everything you foresee happening in your jewelry business for the next six months: promotions, events, shopping holidays, new product and collection releases, product features, and special milestones. You’ll also want to set some attainable goals.
With this brainstormed list, you can decide how all your marketing efforts – like your email campaigns, your social media posts, your blog posts, and more – can communicate everything that should matter to your customers in a unified way. Once you’re done with this brainstorm, you should be left with a clear framework to guide the focus of your social media posts. You’ll be able to source photos, videos, and other content ahead of schedule, and you’ll feel relaxed and confident about your premeditated approach.
The good news is that you don’t have to do this alone. A number of excellent tools exist to help you facilitate the planning, managing, and scheduling processes. I’m going to share some of my favorite tools here.
Asana – my favorite general project management tool
Are you at the beginning of your content planning process? Are you brainstorming ideas and delegating various tasks, like photography, caption writing, and research to your team members? Do you need to set deadlines for yourself to hold yourself accountable?
Asana is not specific to social media, but it’s one of my favorite project management tools, since it allows you to plan and collaborate in many ways, and you can configure it to meet your needs. You can set your social media goals, communicate those goals to other team members and stakeholders, and then work with everyone involved to figure out how to achieve those goals far in advance.
If you’re collaborating with others on your social media feed, you may also want to maintain a shared folder with media like photos, videos, and graphics; use Dropbox or Google Drive for this purpose. In addition, you can create a collaborative Pinterest board that can be used as a moodboard for ideas and creative direction.
Sprout Social for analytics and insights
In order to create the most effective posts, you’ll need to know when to post, how often to post, what your competitors are doing, and which opportunities exist for your brand. Tapping into the data can provide you with insights into these topics. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that not only helps you uncover insights from your social data, but it can also enable you to plan, organize, and schedule your posts.
Planoly or Later to plan and schedule your visual content
You could certainly use a tool like Sprout Social to plan and schedule your social media content across multiple social media platforms, but most jewelry brands I work with prefer to use a tool like Planoly or Later, both of which make it easy to curate an Instagram feed and make it look visually cohesive.
If most of your website traffic and leads aren’t already coming from Instagram, then this feature might not be as important to you. However, I find that the majority of jewelry brands do need to have a consistent visual look. The only downside of Planoly is that it does not allow you to plan and create unique content for Facebook, since it’s designed for Instagram planning; you’d need to auto repost your content from Instagram to Facebook or use a different tool to manage Facebook.
Later, on the other hand, allows you to plan and post to both Instagram and Facebook. I find that the decision to use one or the other or a completely different tool depends on the jewelry brand’s individual needs and goals. If you’re not sure which tool is right for you, then you should definitely try the free version of all the available tools until you find one that works best.
Be honest: how far in advance have you planned your current social media marketing strategy? Which of these tools have you tried? Are you excited to try a new approach or tool in 2021? We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:
“The Jewelry District, Episode 35: Jewelry Industry Predictions for 2021“