All social media managers are busy – and government social media managers are busier than most. From creating content to managing approvals to responding to comments, it can often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. But choosing the right digital tools can make a world of difference.

Which tools should you use, and how?

To answer those questions, we gathered a panel of government social media marketing experts, moderated by Danielle Eurich – Senior Social Media Specialist for Adams County Government, CO – and featuring insights from:

• Amanda Chamba, Social Media Lead for Seattle Public Utilities, City of Seattle
• Emily Haney, Social Media Manager for the City of Lincoln
• Kristen Livengood, Public Information Officer for Monroe County, Florida

Read on for their key takeaways on discovering high-value digital tools, learning how to create efficiencies, streamlining the onboarding process, and much more.

Which Tools Make the Biggest Difference for Day-to-Day Tasks?

There are literally thousands of tools out there. So which tools should you use when it comes to managing day-to-day social media?

First up, here’s an at-a-glance roundup of our panelists’ recommendations:

Now, let’s take a deeper look at their responses.

Amanda at Seattle Public Utilities recommends two types of tools:

1. A social media management system
2. A platform for handling social media requests

When it comes to social media management, Amanda has used a couple of different options. Still, she favors Sprout Social: “It has easily become my one-stop shop for all things social media. I rely on it all day, every day while I’m at work.” She uses Sprout for everything from scheduling posts to tracking comments and sentiment to collaborating with her team on approvals.

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For requests, Amanda uses Microsoft Forms because it provides the “biggest overview of what’s needed for a piece of content,” such as the topic, CTA, and links to existing content. “As an idea is formulated, it lets us know what is baked, what is needed, and steps to move forward.”

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As a one-person social team responsible for 24 departments, Kristen at Monroe County admits she has to be “ruthless” about saving time. To that end, she “relentlessly” uses Canva, the freemium graphic design tool: “I use it for designing, for pre-design, for branding, for consistency across the board.”

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In particular, Kristen saves time by creating templates in Canva, such as preparing “boil water” notices ahead of hurricane season.

🤓 Further reading: Learn more about crisis planning in Critical Messaging in Critical Moments: Social Media in Emergencies.

Kristen also uses one of the most popular AI tools for marketers, ChatGPT, to edit and “tighten up” messaging and generally bounce ideas off.

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Speaking of ChatGPT, Emily at the City of Lincoln says it pairs well with Smartsheet for project management. “That’s how we’re now getting citywide social requests and all of our team’s on it, so we can see what everyone’s working on.”

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Integrating the two platforms opens up functionality like:

• Automated content generation
• Project data summarization
• Text translation
• Project update analysis

Ensuring Tools Strengthen Your Overall Comms Strategy

It’s all too easy to choose tools that fix a short-term problem you’re facing right now, rather than picking something that supports and improves your overall communication strategy.

Amanda recommends focusing on “function stacking” when you’re researching different software options. Take Sprout Social as an example. When Amanda was looking for a new social media management platform, she found that Sprout also handles things like:

🔗 Link shortening, allowing them to get rid of their Bitly account

📱 QR code generation, freeing up another subscription

📧 Coordinating and commenting on edits, saving time on emails

All of which means Seattle Public Utilities is getting a lot more than “just” a tool for scheduling posts. “Research what your need is in the short term, but also find out if there are ways it can help with other things to improve your digital communication strategy,” Amanda advises.

Meanwhile, Emily says the City of Lincoln analyzes four key questions when looking at a tool that will hopefully become a long-term solution:

• What specific goals are we trying to achieve? For instance, when they were evaluating a new social media management platform, their goals were to strengthen emergency communications, centralize communications in one tool, and streamline their approval workflow.
• Can multiple people use this? Similarly, is the tool beneficial for more than one project?
• Does it scale? For example, can you add extra seats if your team grows?
• Will your team use it? If not, you won’t see a return on your investment.

Evaluating Free vs Paid Tools

Choosing the best tools would be much easier if you had a substantial budget to work with, but few government agencies have that luxury. So which free options are worth considering – and when should you splash out for a premium alternative?

For Emily, free is the default option: “If we’re going to pay for something, it has to be something that is really gonna add to what we’re doing. The paid version really has to earn its place in our workflow.”

As such, she has experience using a bunch of free tools. I’ve summarized her recommendations here; we’ll take a deeper look below.

One tool that particularly impressed Emily is the social media management platform Metricool. The free plan allows you to schedule posts across eight social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (LinkedIn and X/Twitter are only available on paid plans, though). It also offers a color-coded social media content calendar for planning future posts.

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She recommends Later for marketers who create a lot of Instagram content: “It has a really good visual aesthetic for planning and thinking about what your grid’s gonna look like.”

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From a project management perspective, Emily suggests trying tools with generous free plans like…

• Airtable
• Asana
• Trello

…and she also advises anyone at an agency that streams lots of meetings to check out the YouTube Summary Chrome extension from Glasp: “It’s great if you don’t wanna sit there and watch an hour-long meeting – let’s be honest, most of us don’t have time for that.”

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Of course, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually outgrow those free tools, in which case you’ll need to start shopping around for paid options.

Emily says your first port of call should be to find out whether your agency already pays for a similar tool that your team can be added to. “That’s how we ended up using Smartsheet for our project management tool. Our city was already paying for it, so it’s not coming out of our budget.”

Beyond this, she has two further pieces of advice for choosing paid tools.

First, assess the impact: will it save you more than a few minutes a week? And will it help you demonstrate the value of your work to leadership?

Secondly, can you pilot it (i.e., start a free trial)? “If you’re like me and you have a couple different departments who are ultimately gonna be using it, I would have them also pilot it, just so you can get some real honest feedback.”

Using Digital Tools to Engage Underserved Communities

A key goal for any government agency on social media is to reach and engage specific online communities. Digital tools can help with this.

For instance, Kristen notes that Monroe County has a large population of residents who speak only Haitian Creole or Spanish. While she has native speakers on speed dial, she can also leverage free digital solutions like Google Translate during content creation: “I have the computer do the work for me, but then I have a native speaker always go and look at it afterwards.”

Accessibility also extends to communities that lack access to technology. For example, Kristen notes that during one Hurricane season, she used Canva to create flyers for a local Amish community, detailing key information such as where they could obtain supplies.

Meanwhile, Amanda stresses the importance of using plain language in social media content. For Seattle Public Utilities, all content must be written at no more than a fifth-grade reading level to boost accessibility – that means no industry jargon or technical terminology. “We try to make our content as straightforward as possible so that even if you aren’t a native English speaker, you can understand what’s being communicated.”

Your colleagues can help here, Amanda says. Try asking people from outside your team whether your messaging makes sense without any additional context.

Similarly, AI can make your life much easier. Amanda recommends uploading a PDF to ChatGPT (or a similar platform) and asking it to rewrite the information for a fifth-grader: “AI can be a great way to make that process more efficient with plain language.”

Collaborating With Other Departments to Choose Tools and Manage Budgets

With many government agencies, there could be dozens of internal teams, each with its own stack of social media marketing tools. Not only does this hamper cross-department collaboration, but it can also be significantly more expensive than having a handful of enterprise-level subscriptions.

Amanda knows this situation well. In total, the City of Seattle has 42 departments. Of those, about half used no social media management tools, while the others were split between Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

The solution was to create a committee to understand what each team liked and disliked about their current tool. That way, they could decide which platform is best, then reach out to negotiate pricing.

Similarly, they explored ways to split subscriptions between departments with stable budgets and those reliant on levies or grants. For example, Amanda’s team – Seattle Public Utilities – has onboarded the Department of Neighborhoods to its existing Sprout account, with the utilities department covering most of the costs due to its larger, more reliable budget.

“It’s about starting those conversations, talking with each other, figuring out what everybody needs, and understanding that those needs will be different,” Amanda says.

🤓 Further reading: Boost efficiency with our roundup of 11 Time-Saving Tools for Small Social Media Teams, find out more about your audience with our Top 29 Social Media Listening Tools for Your Best Audience Insights, and make smarter strategic decisions with our Top 10 Social Media Analytics Tools.

Are you seeking social media marketing tips, insights, and best practices for government social media? Register for our next social media conference!

Featured image by Freepik.