As a government agency social media marketer, you have a lot of demands on your time — and limited resources to deal with them. So, it’s essential you focus on the social channels that deliver the biggest impact for your organization.

But this is easier said than done, with platforms regularly popping up and dying off.

Jameil Weldon, Social Media Manager for Mecklenburg County, NC, understands this challenge better than most. Her agency runs approximately 75 accounts across 16 platforms. In a recent Social Media Strategies Summit session for public agencies and government, Jameil shared her insights on identifying the right channels for your agency, incorporating:

• Key data points to use when making big brand decisions
• How to evaluate platforms based on your target audience(s)
• How to make a compelling case for your leadership

Here’s what she had to say.

Consider Optimal Posting Cadences for Each Platform

Each social platform has its own ideal posting cadence — that is, the number of times per day (or per week) you should be posting to generate maximum engagement.

Helpfully, Buffer collated those cadences for all the top social channels. Here they are:

In other words, a marketer managing accounts across each channel should post 100+ pieces of content per week, which is clearly unrealistic for all but the largest teams.

To make matters worse, you need to keep up with regular algorithmic changes. “If you’ve been on social media for more than three days, you’ve probably noticed that platforms are changing all the time,” Jameil notes. “If you don’t have the time to manage those platform changes, you might not have the time to start a new account.”

Audit Your Existing Accounts

The first step to figuring out when to adopt (or ditch) a social channel is to find exactly how many accounts you currently use across all your agency’s various departments and programs. This means counting every account on every platform to give you a complete picture of the landscape.

You also want to know how many administrators or content creators you have for each account. And you should also be honest about how often you’re realistically able to check in with and post on each of those accounts.

All of which should help you answer the question: How many accounts can we effectively manage?

“That is all about the number of people that you have, the number of accounts that you have, and how frequently you can monitor and post, and how many people you have helping you,” Jameil explains.

👉 Learn more: Your Step-by-Step Guide for Running a Social Media Audit

Dig Into Account Audience, Performance & Goals

Next up, it’s time to figure out what’s going on with each of your existing accounts. Specifically, ask yourself:

• What are our goals for each account? For instance, are you trying to drive web traffic? Educate your audience? And who, exactly, are you trying to reach?
• How well are your accounts performing? “I like to look at trends from quarter to quarter to see how things happen,” says Jameil. “What post stood out, which post did not stand out, and are there things that we should or should not replicate?”
• Are you reaching (and engaging) the right people? In other words, do your online audiences align with your real-world audience? And are your followers participating in the conversation through likes, comments, and shares?
• Is your content accessible? “If you don’t have alt text or closed captions, you are leaving out a part of your community.”
• How much effort does it take to run each account? How many team members are required to get your messaging across on each platform? Do the results justify the expense?

Running through this process should help flag up the platforms delivering the highest impact for your agency (plus those not generating any kind of return).

Considerations for Scaling or Shrinking Your Accounts

Successful social media marketers are constantly looking for new opportunities — whether expanding to a new platform or shifting away from an account that just isn’t performing.

With that in mind, Jameil shared her best practices on scaling or shrinking your agency’s social media footprint.

Targeting New Accounts & Platforms

There will be times when you’re weighing up the possibility of starting a new account or targeting a new platform. Before making a decision, try to answer the following questions:

• Do we have the time to dedicate to keeping this page active and maintained?
• Do we have the staff to do the work?
• Do we have enough content to make sure that we have a regular cadence of information on a new platform?
• Does our target audience use this platform?
• Do we have a plan in terms of what we want to achieve with this account?

Reducing Your Number of Accounts/Platforms

If you’re not reaching your social media goals and lack the resources to make positive changes, it might be time to think about scaling back the number of accounts or platforms you operate.

While ditching an underperforming account can feel like an admission of failure, Jameil stresses that it can also offer wide-ranging benefits, such as:

• Streamline customer service. “Instead of people having to go to multiple locations to try to find you and figure out who to talk to, they know there are a handful of places to go instead of 10 to 20.”
• Narrow your focus. “If you’re not spending a lot of time trying to make ‘fetch’ happen, you’ll have more time for successful accounts.”
• Increased ROI. “If you’re not spending time on an account that is not giving you what you want, give yourself the chance to spend that time with more successful accounts.”
• More bandwidth. “You might even give yourself so much breathing room that you decide it’s time to expand to another platform.”

👉 Learn more: 13 Ways to Boost Your Social Media ROI

How To Drive Strategic Change

Decided it’s time to switch up your social strategy by adding or removing accounts or platforms? Here are Jameil’s top tips to make it happen…

Get Leadership Support

Leadership buy-in is crucial if you’re looking to drive through key strategic changes. Jameil recommends the following approach to make your business case:

• Understand what your leadership team values. “What are the things that really move the needle for them? What are their pain points? What is something that you can solve by creating or deleting an account?”
• Refer to your strategy business plan. “How do any of the accounts that you either want to create, get rid of, or keep and grow relate to your strategic business plan?”
• Align changes around your mission and vision. “You’re thinking about words like ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’, and how your accounts help you to meet those.”
• Look at your long range plan. “What do you hope to achieve on this account in six months, one year, five years?”
• Mention financial impact. “If you need to terminate an account, think about the fact that it saves money. You’re saving staff time. If you use an archiving service, you may be able to lower the amount of documents that you are archiving every month. If you use a content management system, every seat is another license, which is going to cost more money.”
• Discuss your KPIs. “If you’re taking out one of those outliers that has really low reach or impressions or engagement, then this is going to bring all of your other KPIs up.”

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Jameil stresses the importance of backing up your case with cold, hard data. Or, as she puts it: “Show the value — or the lack of value — of any platform that you’re considering.”

For instance, you might consider:

• How much reach you’re generating
• Whether you’re reaching your target audience
• What sort of engagement you’re generating

She gives the example of a now-shuttered Facebook account. A three-year snapshot showed big drops in impressions, engagements, and link clicks…

…while an account audit revealed an inconsistent posting strategy, often leaving months between posts.

To make matters worse, the agency’s main accounts were generating twice as many impressions in a week as this account saw in three years.

Digging into the data made it easy for Jameil to convince her leadership team that it was time for something different.

Refer To Your Communications Policy

Your agency likely has some sort of policy governing how public-facing social media accounts are created and used. This policy can help you make a case for creating new accounts or shelving old ones.

For example, the City of Charlotte has its own communications policy that requires any social media action plan to “ensure that a business case has been made to warrant the public resources being devoted … and that its objectives are consistent with the city’s community engagement strategy.”

If you don’t already have a policy, now’s the time to make a case for creating one.

“Go ahead and tell your leadership that this is the industry standard,” Jameil insists. “Not just in government, but across social media management, you need to have a policy. This helps you to set clear expectations and standardize those expectations so that everyone who is creating content on social media on behalf of your organization knows what the expectations are.”

Create a ‘Social Media Policy Continuum’

Jameil also recommends creating a “social media policy continuum” that dictates who within your agency is allowed to create new accounts. Here’s the version she created for Mecklenburg County:

As you move from left to right, agencies get greater freedom to set up new accounts, albeit within set guidelines around acceptable and prohibited use.

For her part, Jameil says Mecklenburg County’s place on the continuum is somewhere between fully centralized and the middle area. It’s up to you to decide what makes most sense for your agency.

Set Clear Guidelines for Terminating Accounts

Deciding which accounts to maintain or shelve shouldn’t be a political consideration.

Rather, you should define clear guidelines for reviewing accounts. For example, Jameil and her team created rules for social accounts within Mecklenburg County and King County. If an account hits all the following criteria…

• Two years of declining impressions and engagements
• Lack of alignment with county and departmental communications goals
• Account is not monitored
• Account is underutilized (i.e. no original posts for at least 60 days)

…then it’s time to say “goodbye.”

Be Empathetic When Communicating Account Closures

Okay, so it’s time to pull the plug on an underperforming account.

While that may be great news for you, the department or program that owns the account may not feel the same.

“You do need to come in peace if you’re telling someone it’s time to terminate their account,” Jameil insists. That means offering something in return, such as a regular mention on your agency’s other accounts, or a place in social content planning meetings.

Next Steps: Create a Long-Range Plan

Not sure where to start with adding or removing accounts or platforms? Jameil recommends developing a long-range plan to guide your next steps.

And, helpfully, she’s even created one for you:

Today

• Do we have a policy? Is it updated annually? Does it take into account potential changes? Does it cover account creation and deletion?

Quick Wins

• Find some abandoned accounts, claim ownership, and get them out of there.
• Identify people who already help who can help more. “Build your capacity out.”
• Identify people who have lost interest. “There may have been people who said they were really excited when they started six months or three years ago, but now they’ve lost interest. That’s an easy way to get a quick win and get that account out of here.”

This Month

• Start your social media audit. “Start small. You don’t have to audit your entire social media program at once. Just start with one account. Learn the audience there. See the content types that are successful and unsuccessful. What can you increase? What can you decrease?”

This Year

• Complete social media audit.
• Create a new social media policy. “There are so many examples out there that you definitely do not have to start from scratch, which is amazing.”
• Create new strategies for each account. “If you have departmental administrators, make sure they’re creating those account strategies, because they’re the ones who are running the accounts. What do they think the account should look like based on their data and knowledge of the audience?”
• Make a case to add new resources. “People, software, things that can make your life easier and that put you on par with some of your comparable organizations.”
• Terminate accounts, as necessary.

“Just start somewhere,” Jameil urges. “Your next step doesn’t have to be the final one.”

Interested to learn how leading public agency and government communicators are using social media to reach and engage their audiences? Register for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pixabay.