Tools to keep your 2023 socialgov year on track

Contributed blog by Angie Ramirez, Freelance Writer at Government Social Media

As crazy as it sounds, this blog post is 100% NOT sponsored.

As a government social media professional myself — who is constantly running out of time and who wears many…many… hats — I’ve become somewhat of an expert in working smarter, not harder. 

Setting SMART goals (and staying on top of those goals) is something that I pride myself on. But when I’m deep in the trenches of my day-to-day workload, it can be difficult to think strategically, benchmark my progress, and look ahead. That’s why I’ve spent the past five years developing my handy dandy toolkit of the best programs to keep my socialgov goals on track all year long. 

Asana

If you check out just one program on this list, let it be Asana. Asana is a great task management system that enables you to stay on top of your to-do list, collaborate with team members, assign projects, and more. At the City of Tampa, we recently did a deep dive into different task management systems that can improve the workflow for our communications team. We eventually landed on Asana because it’s one of the most customizable programs out there.

Above, you can see a screenshot of my current Asana “tasks” board. I created each of the above columns and labeled them “to-do,” “doing,” “in review,” and “done.” Each of the cards represents a task. You can create your own cards, name them, add details and even add a checklist of sub-tasks. Alternatively, a task can be assigned to you by someone else on your team. Once I start a task, I drag it over to the “doing” column, then the “in review” column (if applicable), and finally, the “done” column. This system allows me to easily track my progress as I juggle different assignments — because we all know that socialgovs wear A LOT of hats. 

Another great feature I love is that you can add team members to a card if you are working on a project together. The cards expand and allow you to leave notes, upload documents, make comments, and more. You can add deadlines to the cards and set up rules to auto-populate tasks. For example, I have my Asana set up to create a task for “pull monthly social media report” on the last day of each month. 

At the City of Tampa, not only does our Communications Department use Asana, but we’ve also onboarded PIOs from different departments. Having employees across the organization on Asana makes it easy to get a birds-eye view of all the projects across departments, preventing siloes. Having the PIOs on Asana also allows us to collaborate across departments to reach our year-end goals. 

Alternatively, another great task management program I’ve used and love is Trello. Whether you use Asana, Trello, or another application, a task management system can significantly improve your workflow, help keep you organized, and help you achieve your goals throughout the year. 

Canva

From creating social media graphics to videos, animations, presentations, and more, Canva has long been my best friend for all things design. Whether you’re a professional graphic designer or a complete novice, Canva makes creating simple. With countless pre-made customizable templates, a vast library of stock photos and videos, and a user-friendly interface, Canva can save you so much time that it almost feels like cheating.

But, not only that, in recent years Canva has added some pretty amazing features that can help improve your workflow. At the City of Tampa, we use Canva for teams to collaborate on simple design projects like social media graphics. Our graphic designer set up a brand kit containing our brand logos, colors, and fonts that everyone on the team can access (see the screenshot above). He also designed simple brand templates that anyone on the team can customize to create social media graphics, print flyers, Facebook event page banners, and more. You can also set up an approval workflow for quality control and brand consistency.

Even if you are using Canva on your own, this tool has many features that allow you to work smarter, not harder. Ultimately, Canva can help you stay on top of your to-do list and achieve your goals by creating beautiful designs simply and quickly. 

Protip: You can now also use Canva to schedule social media posts. Learn more here.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a one-stop shop for all things social media management. Its features include scheduling social media posts, pulling reports, social listening, and customer service. 

Sprout has many valuable features for government social media professionals. For example, suppose your agency receives a lot of direct messages (DMs). In that case, you may be interested in the SMART inbox, which consolidates all notifications, allows you to assign team members messages requiring a follow-up, and enables you to set auto-responses for frequently asked questions.

At the City of Tampa, I use Sprout Social primarily for reporting. You can pull reports by platform, social media account, or across all channels simultaneously. The reports are professional and contain all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to showcase the impact of social media, including engagement, growth, reach, top posts and more. 

One of my favorite reporting features is the “tag report,” which allows you to tag specific social media posts under a campaign. For example, we recently launched an anti-litter campaign called #KeepItCleanTampa. To track the engagement and reach of this campaign, I tagged each social media post from the campaign and pulled a report during a specific time frame. This ability allows me to stay on track with my goals and share the impact of social media with leadership. 

By pulling monthly social media reports, socialgovs can track their performance throughout the year, identify any trends, and stay on top of year-end goals.

Social Blade

While Sprout Social is my favorite social media reporting tool, it does come at a price. Social Blade can be a great, FREE solution for agencies working on a limited budget for pulling simple reports and tracking social media performance. Not only can you track your agency’s accounts, but you can also track competitors, neighboring municipalities, or other similar agencies of your size for benchmarking purposes. What I love most about Social Blade is that it’s a free way to see historical data, like followers and engagement rate. The graphs easily visualize data over time, allowing you to keep track of your growth SMART goals. 

Crush those goals!

Now that I’ve shared my top tools for staying on track, I want to leave you with a parting piece of wisdom. 

As a government social media professional, I’ve fallen into the trap of keeping my nose to the grindstone just to get through the day-to-day. Keeping an organized to-do list, setting SMART goals, and tracking analytics felt like time-consuming tasks that I simply didn’t have time for. But over the past five years, I’ve learned just how important it is to stop what I’m doing and build in that time to set goals, track progress, and share results with leadership. 

By using these tools, not only can you make your life easier, but you can also document just how much value social media brings to the table. 

The new year is just getting started, so now is the perfect time to integrate these tools into your workflow and crush those goals! 

Angela Ramirez (Pitts)

Freelance Writer - Government Social Media LLC

Angela Ramirez (Pitts) is the Communications Strategist for the City of Tampa. Her primary responsibilities include managing the City’s social media profiles and assisting the Marketing & Communications department with all external communication needs. Angela helped grow the City’s Instagram profile from less than 1k followers to over 100k in 5 years. She also helped the City of Tampa become one of the first municipalities to join TikTok. Her work in social media has been featured by national outlets, including CNN Politics and Smart Cities Drive.

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