Event cancellations, public service updates, road closures — these are just some of the things municipalities deal with on a daily basis. Let’s also not forget communicating and engaging with citizens!
Add in monitoring social media performance, and you can see the big need for a social media management tool.
But the real question is: how do you know which one to select? We walk you through what to look for and how to make the process a little easier.
Organize all your departments from one place
At the end of the day, cities and counties need social support for all of its departments. Between public works, parks and recreation (and a lot more!), it’s important to look for a tool that allows you to easily manage accounts and users across teams.
This could look like:
- Allowing certain users to manage multiple teams and social accounts
- Viewing social performance across departments – and all in one spot
- Organizing social accounts for quick and easy publishing
Social News Desk (SND) gives you the ability to do these things and more. It’s built to work across large (and small) businesses alike, while giving visibility into the different departments — and allowing you to post quickly across accounts.
Chris Shadrock, Communications Director for City of Boerne, TX, knows firsthand the importance of customizing user access.
“By making the switch to SND, each staff person now has their own login and administrators can determine how much access was required based on need,” Shadrock says. “Social News Desk has proven to be very easy to use for staff at the City of Boerne.” You can read more here about how SND has helped this Texas city connect with its citizens.
Focus on what matters the most to your workflow
With more social publishing options and software than ever before, what capabilities should you look for? Here’s what features we’ve seen matter most to municipalities:
- Publishing & Scheduling: Posting news events, city happenings, and staff updates are just a few ways your organization can use social media for visibility — and having a way to quickly schedule content is key. Seeing a bird’s-eye view of all posts across departments is even better (did we mention there’s a tool for that? It’s called SND’s Publishing Calendar, and you can do so much more than schedule content — like creating social post reminders for the team).
- Approvals: Lots of planning and events can happen across departments, and it can be easy to get wires crossed. Being able to designate users to approve posts before they go out can make everyone’s life easier.
- Reporting: So much data, so little time! You’ll need a social management tool that shows performance not only for one account or platform, but for all. You can see what posts tend to do well — or not so well — after just a few clicks within SND’s Reporting Suite. Let us do the hard work for you!
- Social Listening: Monitoring conversations within the community is very important — and luckily, there are more ways to do that than ever before. A surefire way to get a pulse on your community? Monitoring Nextdoor. And, you guessed it: you can do that right inside SND, too.
Lean on real people for social media support
There’s a lot to navigate when it comes to social media. Let experts help! Having a true support team that not only answers questions, but also gives best practices and guidance, will help you in the long run. In the end, it should come down to a team you can trust — not robots.
The City of Ballwin, Missouri, was able to get up and running with SND quickly all thanks to their responsive support team. Megan Freeman, Marketing and Communications Specialist and City Clerk, says SND’s support team was helpful in getting her colleague onboarded. “He’s a police officer who does this as a secondary feature of his job, and he was having a couple of issues figuring out his account,” she says. “He was able to email in with a question, and you guys were super helpful in getting back to us and figuring out what was going on.”
Want to learn more about SND and how it can help your city or county? Get in touch: support@socialnewsdesk.com.
