Kevan Lee
Yesterday
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This post originally appeared on the Buffer blog.
You spend part—maybe all—of your day on social media, hopping from network to network, checking analytics, planning ahead, and performing the sundry tasks of a social media manager.
Would it help to know that you’re not alone with keeping such a varied schedule? That your time on social media is shared by others?
I was curious for myself whether my social media manager workload and workflow were similar to someone else’s. Do we perform the same tasks? Do we create similar content? And, perhaps most importantly, do we take the same amount of time to do the same tasks?
Here’s what I found.

Inside a Social Media Manager’s Schedule

Social media tool Socialcast compiled the times and tasks of a typical social media manager schedule and placed them into this interesting infographic. Clearly, social media managers can put in a full day’s work.
Hectic schedule 730x1079 A day in the life of a social media manager: How to spend your time on social media
Morning:
  • Check email
  • Reply and retweet
  • Post to social media
  • Publish a blogpost
  • Curate content
  • Followup with internal team on ideas
Afternoon:
  • Write a blogpost, create content
  • Inform team of importance of social media and tools
  • Revisit and followup on social media sites and profiles
Evening:
  • Review stats for the day
  • Sign up for chats, webinars, and events
  • Schedule social media messages for overnight and early morning slots
  • Check email again
Does this to-do list resemble yours?
Of course, there are many different ways to come at this matter of social media management. Finola Howard shared on LinkedIn about her daily social media habit—a schedule that takes just one hour each day to complete.
Here’s how it works:
  1. Vet new followers on Twitter using SocialOomph. Follow those who fit; ignore the rest.
  2. Measure what’s worked. Note your best-performing posts in a spreadsheet or other file so you can reference later as you hone your content.
  3. Schedule tweets and posts for the day. Finola uses Buffer to keep her queue filled up.
  4. Find unique content for each channel—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
  5. Respond and engage. Spend 15 minutes of the first hour here. Consider dipping in for 15 minutes at lunch and at the end of the day, too.
  6. Monitor engagement levels of fans and followers. 
Still another way to go about it is Neil Patel’s streamlined social media strategy. His quick and simple schedule for saving time on social media looks like this:
  1. Use social media management for posting
  2. Spend 30 minutes each day on social media scoping, i.e. finding good stuff to share online
  3. Assign customer service requests to a customer service team
  4. Check analytics weekly or every other day. Use your social media management tool for analysis.
Ready for still another view on the social media manager time schedule?
Here’s a take from Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Consulting. His infographic takes into account pretty much every element that could ever come into play for a social media manager.
social media manager workweek infographic 730x1825 A day in the life of a social media manager: How to spend your time on social media

What we learn from these different schedules

These examples of social media manager schedules vary wildly. Some take all day, morning to night. Others take one hour.
How can we reconcile this?
I think we’re looking at two different types of schedules here.
There are social media managers who manage full time.
There are social media users who manage part time.
I’d imagine we’d still find some overlap between the two: full-time social media managers who create blogposts, for instance, or part-time social media managers who do spend a majority of time on social.
In general, though, you likely know where you fall on this spectrum. Is social media marketing a full-time, 40-hours-per-week job for you? Or do you perform social media management in addition to wearing several other hats?