In a previous blog post, I made a big song and dance about having a social media strategy in place for your business. However, even the best strategy will hit the rocks if you don’t practice this one, all important habit.

Regular as clockwork, every fortnight, I suggest you have a social media review, brainstorm and planning meeting.

Perhaps you’re smacking your hand to your forehand now and exclaiming, “Not another meeting! That’s all I need”. Well, true, meetings in themselves are not always a good thing. Endless reports and unclear agendas never make for a very productive use of time. However, I do believe if you use meetings principally to make decisions and to push plans forward then they should be part and parcel of your long-term business success.

Your Meeting Objectives

The principle objectives of these meetings are to:

· Keep an eye on your major marketing objectives for the year

· Take better advantage of up-and-coming local events, seasonal occasions

· Review your recent social media performance

· Brainstorm ideas, content and improvements

· Pre-plan what resources you’ll need to produce photography, graphics, new web pages, blog posts etc.

The 10 day Cycle

Why fortnightly you may ask? Well back in the days when I was a software development project manager, I found out that if you had weekly planning meetings, it seemed like overkill as people felt like they didn’t have enough time to execute the discussed tasks from the previous meeting. Give people a month, and we found there was a lower sense of urgency which resulted in poorer outcomes over time. However, when we ran planning meetings once every ten working days, the team were most productive as this time period offered the optimum sense of urgency and comfort.

What if you’re the only person working on social media in your business?

Well you may think “how am I going to have a meeting with myself?” In this case, I’d suggest feedback from a third party can still be enormously useful, so why not arrange it with your reporting manager, or someone else in the business who could provide some support with getting some of the more complex tasks done. Perhaps your Operations Director, or a few of the General Managers in your hospitality business could get in involved. If you’re the owner of the business, perhaps you could involve someone more junior, who’s good on the ideas front. If no one else can get involved, you could still find a time once a fortnight to shut off the email and find a quiet space to work through the above objectives. Even as a solo activity, I believe it will be a very worthwhile exercise.

If you don’t already run regular planning meetings for your social media, perhaps now’s a good time to start. If you do take on this idea, I’d love to hear how you get on and if this way of working helps you to increase your productivity.

For more about improving your marketing performance, you can also check out the final chapter "Getting Results" in my book, Build Your Tribe which is available in Kindle and print format on Amazon.

One Habit That Will Radically Improve the Quality of Your Social Media