Webinar Replay: Social Media Success for Small Teams

Transcript:

Sarah Loyd: Good afternoon. Welcome to our Social News Desk webinar, Social Media Success for Small Teams. 

We have a great panel lined up today to share their experience managing social media with limited resources. And if you have questions today, please drop those in the questions box.

Before we get started, just a little bit about us. Social News Desk is the only social media management software that’s purpose built for critical communicators. We were founded in 2010. We’re celebrating our 15th birthday this year, and since then, we’ve proudly supported America’s largest news companies, cities, government agencies, school districts, universities and businesses who require powerful, always on social media tools.

Social News Desk helps organizations save time with a one stop shop for social media publishing, take control of their entire social footprint in a single easy to use dashboard, stay informed and engaged with the community around them with social listening tools, demonstrate value to stakeholders with powerful reporting, and gain peace of mind with our always ready human support team.

And just a little bit about me. I’m Sarah Loyd. I’ll be your moderator today. I’m the Head of Product Success and Evangelism here at Social News Desk. I’ve been with the team for 10 years now, and prior to joining SND, I actually managed social media and worked in several newsrooms. I was a Social News Desk customer before I joined the team.

So long time fan, long time part of the team here. It’s a thrill to work here and feel free to connect with me there on LinkedIn. And now let’s introduce your panelists. We’ll start with Brooke.

Brooke Roshong: All right. Hi everyone. My name is Brooke Roshong. I am a communications and marketing supervisor for North Ridgeville City Schools.

We’re about 25 miles southwest of Cleveland in Ohio. Our school district has five buildings, Pre-K through 12. We have about 4,800 students. About 37,000 citizens in our city. I am a team of one person. It is just me for our district. I have four main social media platforms that I use Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.

I’m grateful that I only have one account on each platform. A lot of districts have different accounts for each building. We only do one account overall. So that’s awesome. I do a lot of social media, obviously videos, photos, press releases, event planning, website, all communication for district and staff and community members.

So gets to be a lot, but I love it. 

Sarah Loyd: So yeah, you sound like a busy lady. Yes. And Erin, can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself too? 

Erin Mudie: Sure. My name is Erin Mudie. I’m the Director of Marketing and Communications for the City of Princeton in Texas. We are about 43,000 people and we’ve doubled plus our population growth that much since the last census.

So we’re very busy. We’re the third fastest growing city in the United States, and we have a team of two myself. And then I’ve got a specialist that lives in Social News Desk, basically. So we run a Facebook, Instagram, X, Nextdoor. Everything. And then we handle the website and all communication internal and external goes through our department.

It’s a lot, but it’s a lot of fun too. 

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. Yeah. And thanks for being here. Next up, we’ll hear from Jessica. 

Jessica Henderson: Hey, I am the media and community relations specialist in Lee County, Alabama for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. We have, I think the population in the last census was 176,000. And I heard the other day we’re at 181, I think.

I handle all of our social media across the board, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, all of it. Our website, our event planning, you name it, press releases, if it’s going out it probably came through me. That’s that dreaded other duties as assigned to start some pilot. Yes, very much I’m planning an HR thing for tomorrow, actually.

Sarah Loyd: Oh my goodness. Alright, and speaking of which, Kara, please tell us about yourself.

Kara Raftery: Hi everyone, my name is Kara Raftery and I’m the Communications and HR Manager for the City of Leavenworth in Washington. We’re much smaller, we have a population of about 2,400 people, but we are unique in that we are an Old World Bavarian themed town, so we see about 3.

6 million visitors annually. So that brings me unique challenges for our small city. We are currently on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor. We have the city account, but we also manage our community pool account in the summer. And yeah, so internal, external communications and HR. We are never dull here at the small city.

Everyone’s Oh, how’s your slow season? And you’re like, Oh, is that happening? No one told me. So it’s really exciting. Lots of things changing and yeah, I’m really excited to chat with you all about social media and I’m a team of one. Hopefully we can share some helpful insights for everyone else here at the team of one today.

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. Thank you so much, Kara. And yeah we’ll jump in the format today is I’m going to ask a question and then our panelists are going to jump in and answer. And again, if you have questions that you’d like to ask the panelists, we will have some time for that at the end. So please put those in the questions box today.

So first up, we’re going to discuss a few things around your daily workflow and overall social media strategy. So first up, how do you prioritize your daily social media tasks, such as creating content, monitoring your platforms, responding to comments and analyzing performance? 

Jessica Henderson: Okay, I’ll go first. Mine is the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Whatever happens to be the, “oh my god, I have to handle this right now” moment, obviously going to take the priority and everything else is just going to fall on the back burner until we can make it happen. We, because we’re law enforcement, every now and then there’s going to be an incident, and it could be a good one, it could be a bad one, you never know.

And all of a sudden, Facebook will explode. And my priority shifts immediately. To checking those comments, prioritizing, keeping an eye on those so that we can go from there and know what the next thing is. 

Erin Mudie: So we have an editorial calendar. It’s a rolling 12 month calendar so we can plan for observation days or, different things, events, things that we have and we know that are coming and we need to push.

So we’ll, we work a month ahead so we can schedule all of those out. So when it comes to the daily tasks. There’s not as much shifting around for us because we’ve got the big, the bulk of the stuff out of the way. To Jessica’s point, a lot of times, and it’s always public safety they throw a wrench in our plan.

It’s usually a couple times a week, so we’ve got to move some things around, but because we plan ahead, we can flex.

Brooke Roshong: I think for me being in the school district, I use my summers very strategically. Not having kids for an entire two months is wonderful. We love our kids, of course, but I can really focus and get a lot more done in the summer. So usually that’s when I look ahead and I plan on using Social News Desk.

I kind of plan the entire year ahead when it comes to all those appreciation days. Principal day, lunch hero day, bus driver day, whatever it is. I have our list of those. So usually in the summer, that’s like my main go to is I kind of work through all of those. And then the good news when it comes to school for the most part is a lot of our things.

It’s just like highlighting great things that are happening in our buildings, which can be pretty evergreen. I try to keep it as timely as I can, but there are, we’ve had days where we have three different things going on at once and I don’t want to post it all at the same time. So then I do spread things out and use flashback Friday and all of those hashtag kind of things that I can to try and make sure I get everything posted in a, as a timely manner as I possibly can.

Kara Raftery: I love how organized everyone sounds right now. So I plan my day. I plan my day on the daily. No, so I actually meet every week with my supervisor or city administrator and we prioritize all of our messaging for the week. So if anything’s coming up, we work back from the year to the month to this week.

And then I have learned to set up blocks of time every day that I am either answering to incoming messages from like our hello account for our email. Or responding to social media comments that come in, especially after we know a post is going out that may be a hot button topic. I always schedule half an hour to make sure I’m checking our social media accounts to see anything like that.

So daily, I highly recommend time blocking so that it’s very intentional and you can plan accordingly. Not that. We can always plan accordingly for public safety if things arise, but yeah every day is a new day, but time walking has been a real time saver for me so that way I’m checking our platforms and making sure I’m not missing anything that comes in.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, I love that idea. Especially, if you have your social media posts scheduled in advance and know when you might have a little bit of blowback or comments that you need to respond to. That’s a really great idea. All right, thank you ladies. Next question: What are your favorite tools or platforms to manage social media and tell me a little bit about what you love about them?

Jessica Henderson: Let’s state the obvious. It’s Social News Desk. Since we started using Social News Desk, it’s made my life a million times easier. Because instead of having to go to every single individual platform, and that was just not possible.

LinkedIn, we weren’t even on. We had an account, or a page, but I just, I couldn’t do it. So once we switched to Social News Desk, it made it so much easier because I can go to one spot. And just handle it and schedule it in advance because now with Facebook’s whole 29 days in advance Nonsense.

Nonsense. I’ve already got our holiday stuff scheduled for the entire year. It’s handled. It’s off my plate. I love it. It makes it so much easier. 

Erin Mudie: I agree. Again, we use our editorial calendar. So we work a month ahead. We can plan our content out. I think I’ve said before, it’s set it and forget it in the sense that okay, it’s already taken care of.

I love that. I can log in and double check and make sure, okay, we’ve got this post going out. And it’s given us a peace of mind that allows us to do more, honestly, because we just take that time block. Kara said, we take a block and okay, this is what we’re doing for these two days.

We’re going to put everything in Social News Desk. And go. I also like the fact that SND allows us to schedule comments. And if we have an event, it frees us up at the event. To focus on what we’ve got to do there and know that we’ve already scheduled comments for something. Hey, check out the band or don’t forget this.

It’s all already. It’s all already ready to go. 

Brooke Roshong: I think that’s my favorite part of Social News Desk is being able to comment and respond to messages from within the platform. As a school district, I get tons of messages from Facebook daily. Do we have school today? Because kids in the winter never want to come to school.

So it’s really nice to just be able to go there and reply to all of them quickly. And then same with Instagram we get a lot of things from kids there too. So I enjoy that I don’t have to keep logging into different places and can open up one dashboard and do everything there. And it’s been a real time saver for me.

Kara Raftery: Social News Desk is great. Yes. 

Sarah Loyd: Thank you guys. You’re making me blush. I really appreciate you guys saying that. I’m glad to hear that social news is helping you guys out. So let’s go ahead and shift about actually creating content and building engagement. So if you ladies don’t mind sharing what types of content resonate most with your community?

This might be post with graphics, videos, live updates, or even things like public safety alerts. 

Erin Mudie: I’ll go first this time Jessica. So obviously for us I can tell you graphics and video go a long way. Prior to my arrival, we really did not have a lot of video that was going out and we’ve been more intentional about trying to highlight our departments and even make these little how to videos.

And people love that and they love to share it for us. We did branded graphics this in 2024. We started every graphic had our logo on it to continue to make it recognizable. So if there’s a traffic alert, it looks the same every time. So that allows us to grow and allows our residents to recognize us as the source of information for the city.

So that’s been big and then also we have fun. So fun reels and other things like that. We get a lot of shares and interaction with that as well.

Sarah Loyd: Erin, you were telling me earlier, you guys had a real that went crazy viral. 

Erin Mudie: Yes. On Instagram. It was about our fire departments PSA about frying turkeys.

And right now it has more than 7. 6 million views. Yes, it’s been fun. Yeah, or don’t get out your turkey fryers as a case. Our fire department says don’t do it.

Jessica Henderson: I think what’s interesting with us is that it’s not video. Video has not done very well for us at all. Even when we had a TikTok and I would get some interaction, but it wasn’t nearly as much interaction as I get on just photo posts. That’s the thing that we get the most is when I can post a photo.

Of just something that’s happening around our office or around the community that our guys are involved in. That gets so much more traction and just seems to be something that more people relate to. Because it’s oh, these are real people, they really are in our community, we really can see them doing things.

And then, honestly, as far as getting views, the worst thing is when we have a missing kid. But luckily, our community spreads that far and fast very quickly. When that happens. And we do, we have a graphic that we put the kids’ information in very quickly so that we can get it out as fast as possible.

It’s a template I’ve built that I have access to our investigations department has access to if it’s the middle of the night and that has really helped. Get those things out really quickly and spread so fast like you were talking about having the logo on everything. It becomes very recognizable.

People know that this is a legitimate source that is asking for help finding this child. They recognize that instead of it being some random photo of a kid that Josh is sharing on his Facebook. So that has really helped with the community too. 

Kara Raftery: I think from a school standpoint, we do anything we can to get our students involved in the social media process. For instance, when we’ve used all five of our calamity days because of the weather in Ohio. But when we knew it was gonna be really cold and we had called off like two days at a time because the temperatures were so cold.

We had students outside and they did cute little videos and that’s what we posted on social. So anything that we can do to get our kids involved that always gets the biggest comments and likes and the biggest reactions out of our community.

I would narrow mine down to four things. People, puppies, pine trees, and primetime news. Anything where people can recognize somebody, or they see a familiar face, or it just makes it personable, right? As a city, it’s hard. You’re usually Not always put in a good light, but people make it more personal and make it more friendly.

Puppies, they’re always a hit. We’re a super dog friendly community and we love anybody with puppies. And we do full dog tags in our city. Pine Trains, we’re a Washington evergreen state. We are at the bottom of the Cascade Mountains, so Leavenworth is naturally one of the most picturesque. places. It’s highly photographed.

It’s gorgeous. If you haven’t visited, I highly recommend. And then primetime news. It is amazing the things that so anything that you would consider like your local news would pick up. We had a story where a rogue, a rogue truck did donuts in our front street pedestrian plaza in our park where it’s known, it’s like a beloved place and it just went totally viral.

It’s picking up on the east coast and but and so that for us was something like hey, the park is closed because someone chose to do donuts. It was just a picture of the muddy street in our downtown. It’s lit all year, all winter long. So that would really resonate with people because it recalled memories of sliding down the hill or bringing their family.

And people were sharing it and we’re like, Oh, we’ll catch this guy. And we did catch this guy. So it was really cool to see that that community band together and the park is repaired, which is wonderful. Yeah, but anything, if you can hit those four topics, I feel like that really resonates with people and we’ll get a much higher engagement.

Sometimes not always positive engagement, but engagement nonetheless. 

Sarah Loyd: Yeah. I feel like that kind of resonates with my experience in a newsroom as well, especially the puppies. People love puppies. 

Jessica Henderson: I feel like in general, the holidays are just, they skyrocket our views because people do, they love the nostalgia, they love the puppies, they love the warmth and the, and if you ever decide you want to start Elf on the Shelf for your community, send me a message that gets our highest traction of the entire year.

Every post probably gets higher than the rest of the year.

Sarah Loyd: That’s amazing. That’s the gift that keeps on giving. 

Jessica Henderson: Yes, it is. Especially when people start asking about it in March.

Sarah Loyd: You’ll have to do a leprechaun on the shelf for March. So moving on how do you guys create high quality visuals or videos when you have limited resources?

Are there any tools that you guys use? I know Jessica, you mentioned Jessica and Erin, you guys mentioned Canva. You can talk a little bit more about Canva or any other tools that you guys use to make your job a little bit easier when you’re actually creating those medias. 

Erin Mudie: I use Canva a lot. Yeah, Canva and Adobe suite for something, but because it is so portable we can do stuff on the fly if we need to, right? I can make a graphic from my phone if I have to like that just real quick. As far as videos we shoot our video with our iPhones. It’s just better. Quality for us, especially for Instagram.

And a lot of people are surprised when we don’t have a, we don’t have that old big over the shoulder camera. I’m like, no way. I just got my iPhone. Like we can just shoot this probably in one take, but yeah that’s how we do it. 

Jessica Henderson: I have this handy dandy Canon. And the great thing is it has an iPhone app so I can take the photos on it and directly send them to my iPhone and either post or edit or Whatever I need to from there.

I don’t use it for video. Because, like you were saying, the iPhone video is fantastic. It generally tends to have better quality in the end than this does by the time I get done piecing things together. But I like that I can zoom in very far away and catch our guys not getting all, when they get in front of the camera, from a distance.

And that really does help because they end up being very candid and I get the photos of them like, being silly with the children and things like that from a distance. And then, yeah, pull it into Photoshop, crop, double check that you don’t have anything weird going on in the background. And blur it out manually if you have to.

That’s a big thing. Just pull it in and double check the backgrounds. And I do, I use Adobe Photoshop for that, InDesign, Illustrator, whatever I need to for whatever product I’m working on. But Canva is super convenient, and it’s quick, and I can set templates for other people around the building to do whatever they might need to do as well.

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. Yeah. Full disclosure. I am also a big Canva fan. This is a Canva presentation as a matter of fact. So yeah, I am a big Canva cheerleader as well. All so let’s talk a little bit about collaboration and delegation. Since you guys are part of a small team or the entire team how do you guys delegate work to other people to share the load?

Do you do any collaborations with other departments or agencies, community partners, maybe parents or volunteers?

Brooke Roshong: I mean, in our district, our teachers are pretty amazing about sending me things with five different buildings. It’s not likely I get into every building every week, although I would love to so a lot of my teachers are great at sending me photos. That’s the convenient thing about iPhones now or even Androids, whatever you have.

Everyone has a camera these days, right? So you can capture anything you need. And then on my end, I did create like a How to kind of guy to take good photos to try and make my job easier on the other side. So I created like a brand style manual with tips on how to take photos with better lighting outside versus inside framing that kind of thing.

And that definitely has helped too, I’m getting better quality photos back. So that’s definitely helpful. And then I do. I’m lucky that I have a senior in high school. She’s interested in it. And so she volunteers with me twice a week. So it’s always nice to have someone who loves to be out and about, knows all the kids and, Hey, can I grab a picture of this and do that? Having that person who’s able to help out a lot is very nice. 

Erin Mudie: I meet with our directors once a quarter to find out what they need from us beyond what we already know in the editorial calendar. So we know that public works week happens every May. But are there needs beyond that?

That public works might have. In the month of May. So getting stuff from them. And other departments it’s easy when you do that. We have that regular meeting established. And then if anything comes up in the meantime, of course, they’re going to let us know, but Social News Desk has allowed us to tap in some team members in public safety and in public works, they have access and they can see like what’s happening.

So they’re, yeah. They can rest assured. Okay, they’re on it. They already have a plan. They can approve content, not approve content chains. We can change stuff at their request. But I do like the idea of telling them how to take better photos. Because, as a matter of fact, I got three public safety photos the other day, and two of them were really blurry.

So I can’t use these. What phones do you guys have over there? Just trying to, that’s a great idea, Brooke. I’m gonna steal that from you.

Jessica Henderson: Yeah the public safety guys, our guys are very interesting. They send me blurry photos all the time, too. And I’m their internal person.

Sarah Loyd: You need to start passing out lens cleaners. I think that’s like the number one offender is people have their dirty camera lenses. 

Jessica Henderson: They also use WhatsApp to communicate a lot. And so they’ll send the photos through WhatsApp and that already degrades them. And going from iPhone to Android and back will also degrade the photos.

And so there’s a lot of teaching them to email photos instead of just texting them. Which I know is that extra step that nobody really wants to do, but it keeps your photos a lot more crisp because they’re not getting lower and lower pixel counts and all of that each time they get sent.

Sarah Loyd: That’s a great point. All right. So how do you guys work with leadership to get approvals for sensitive or high profile posts? If you have an incident that happens, in the public safety realm what are some of the steps that you guys take to get those things approved or do you have an approval process?

Jessica Henderson: I go directly to the sheriff with it. His door is always open. I go directly to him and I say, Hey, this is what’s happening. This is what I want to put out. Are you okay with this? Is there something you want to change to it? Do you want to add a comment to it? And he goes from there of a yes and no let’s change this.

I get it done. And then we pop it out very streamlined, very immediate, because especially when it’s something high profile, it usually is something that’s. That is happening, that needs an immediate response that isn’t like, oh, we can think about this, let’s come back to it.

Erin Mudie: A lot of times I’ll get the message already crafted from the police admin. I will look at it to make sure it means like our style standards are how we format things and it’s free of grammatical errors. And then I’ll post it whenever they’re good with it. But yeah, she’s a really awesome resource for us too, she’s right there next to the chief’s office. So when something’s happening, he’s dictating to her how it needs to be written. She sends it our way and then we let it go.

Kara Raftery: We have developed, we’re in a fire country. So that’s a big issue for us. We’re also in bear country. So we’ve worked together and we’re a small city. So we don’t actually manage wildland fires and we don’t manage wildlife either. So what we’ve done is we’ve worked with a lot of our partners and state agencies county, local agencies, and we’ve created basically templated information that’s already prepped and ready to go with some standard verbiage so that if Wildland Fire hits, we can post something and it’s already been pre approved.

Same if there’s a bear encounter in a public space, we can just get that information up and it’s already been vetted by all the right people. And which makes my job easier, right? Because if something happens and you’re trying to get all the details and Get the right language. It’s really challenging.

So we’ve worked really hard to build a bracket for information for different scenarios to help us be able to push out the information faster. So everyone can stay informed, but we’re getting it out in a timely manner. So that’s been really helpful as a small city who doesn’t actually do a lot of the work, but we do the work ahead of time. So we’re ready to go if and when it occurs.

Sarah Loyd: That’s a great idea. And that actually brings us into our next topic, which is crisis communication and time management. When you are already stretched thin and you are already on a small team, how do you guys handle social media during emergencies or crises?

Jessica Henderson: We loop in our emergency management agency. I will loop in any local agency that can help. There’s absolutely no shame in saying, Hey, I need help. I’m in over my head. I need you to help me get back out of this. And I think that’s the most important thing is just to remember that even if you are your own PIO or whatever for your agency, there’s other agencies around, there’s other agencies within networks throughout the country that can help. And that’s the biggest thing is reach out, ask for help. 

Erin Mudie: I will say the same thing, Jessica The P. I. O. S. Here in the North Texas area are very close, and we help a lot with each other in the sense of information sharing or best practices. But I know I can count on a lot of my peers around me if I need something.

The other thing that I’m exceptionally thankful for is that when we do have an emergency all of the director team, they clear my deck right in the sense of no Hey, comms is busy handling things. So they know that their needs are going to have to go on the back burner and I’ve not always worked in that environment, but when we’ve had an officer involved shooting or something like that, all the other directors are like, okay, my stuff can wait.

Will you handle what you need to do? And then we’ll come back around. So that’s been a big thing for us here. Our leadership team is really tight knit. So they know the balance that we need whenever it hits the fan.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that’s great.

Brooke Roshong: So we tend to have almost like a folder of any scenario you can think of that we’ve collected over, the last I’ve only been here 2 years or so. So everything that I’ve had to put out on social media or press release or anything like that. I have saved.

And then we have a base to work off of and we tend to do that a lot. But I usually just go straight to my superintendent and then our director of operations also has access to all our mass notification system. So we really tag team that kind of thing.

Erin Mudie: We also have a crisis communication plan that dictates how we communicate internally. It tells us, and anybody can pick it up and go, okay, make a social media post check to your scheduled post. All of these things are in that plan. So it’s like a seamless operation, during that time of communication need. 

Kara Raftery: Yeah, and I would suggest if you don’t have a mass communication system set up for your entity.

I highly recommend it. It’s something we’re launching as our small city, and I love it because it can be different languages. We can talk about crisis communications on social media for a whole nother hour, but I think it’s really helpful and also how people get the message is like text, voicemail, email.

And then the other thing we try to use for social media, we try not to have that be the source. We try to that be the direct source of where to get the information during a crisis. And usually that’s in one place. Like I said, we’re a small city, so we have a lot of partners and our emergency management would be the place that we would be able to share their information, but always be directing them to either sign up for alerts via whatever system or to redirect them to where that information is going to be updated versus relying on the algorithm of their social media to get their updates.

Sarah Loyd: Yep. That’s really important to point out, you always want to have kind of a backup to your backup, making sure that you have multiple ways to get in touch with people, especially during a crisis. So moving on, how do you guys avoid burnout while staying consistent and responsive with your social media? Or do you? Do you avoid burnout?

Kara Raftery: I love this question. Yeah, can I go first on this one? I love this one. Yes, you can go first on that. Okay okay, so as a team of one, I think there’s a lot of pressure on ourselves to always be on 24 7. And I think it’s really important for you to set expectations with yourself or your team or your leadership to be like, Hey, we respond to social media inquiries between these times of the day, unless there’s some, exponential reason, right?

And so one of the things I do with my phone is I have an alert of when it goes on, or my Do Not Disturb goes on or off. We also set parameters on our social media that Hey, this is, we don’t monitor this page 24 seven, right? If you want to get ahold of us, if it’s an emergency, you can just call.

I cannot stress enough on, especially in the world of social media and being so instantaneous of being able to unplug as an individual and being able to step away over the weekend, if you have that flexibility, right? But providing resources if they need an immediate response, who to call, but knowing that I don’t think as a social media manager that it’s your responsibility to be there 24 7 for everything, but setting those expectations on your platforms of how and when we get a hold of people.

Or what we do or don’t respond to it’s been really, but the do not disturb on my cell phone has been so amazing because otherwise you’re just going to get pinged all day, all night, all your alerts on all the platforms. So I love that. I love being able to just unplug and step away so you can come back ready for whatever social media has for you the next day.

Erin Mudie: Oh, I agree. Kara, what you said is so important. And what I’ve learned is the majority of people that comment or, whatever on our social media, they are realistic in the fact that Hey, we have office hours, right? Obviously, if it’s an emergency, we’re going to do what we need to do. But I would say the majority does not expect an answer at two o’clock in the morning. Okay, not that I’m not up, but I’m not gonna answer you at two o’clock in the morning, right? So I think also what has really helped our small team is when you’re off, right? So if my teammate is off, she’s off, I can handle it. I can handle everything and I respect her time.

Same thing for me. If I’m out of the office, I’m out of the office, right? And it’s a luxury. And sometimes you got to jump back in, but for the most part, when our, when we are off because we tag team, right? She can do everything I can do. I can do everything that she can do.

So we’re confident in our backups. The other thing too, is I will say, get your time back. And it’s never going to be hour for hour, right? Like you’re never going to always get back. time that you had to work over. But when you can flex your time and your supervisor is okay with that.

Take that time, take the hour, whatever you need to do for yourself. I’m lucky that we have that kind of leadership here. We had a very late meeting on Monday. He said, Hey, get your time back. Try to leave early, tomorrow. Take a whole day off. If you don’t have to work, just take the day off and I’ve not always been willing to do that, but the older I get, honestly, the more I need to do that.

Jessica Henderson: I will say sorry, I actually got an email. I had to respond to speaking of, but I will say I am definitely the epitome of a millennial. And the fact that my phone has been on silent since like 2012. And I’ve pretty much set the expectation that if I am focused on something. I will not be answering your phone call.

I will not be unless there’s an, we’re hosting an event. So they’re asking questions about the event right now. But that’s the thing is I’ve set the expectation of I’m not responding immediately unless it’s an actual emergency. If there is a missing child, I will respond immediately. If it is a question about a t-shirt they want for some event we’re hosting in three months, I’m not getting back to you until tomorrow, possibly.

It is what it is. But the thing that I’ve discovered over time For me personally, avoiding burnout isn’t realistic, it’s more combating it when it happens. So I do a lot of, when you have those moments where you’re up here energy wise, you’re doing great, you’ve got that creativity going through you, knock out every single thing you can for the future right then.

I don’t care if it’s six months from now. Knock it out because then whenever you do get to that point where you are just completely burned out. You cannot focus, you cannot do anything. You’ve built yourself a bubble to be able to just decompress, Do the bare minimum that is necessary to get you through that day because like I said It happens and you just got to be prepared, prepare as much as you can.

Because then, even when you’re burning out, it stays consistent messaging. Nobody notices on the external side and you can buy yourself some grace. So it’s like avoid not so much, but how to fix it. Once you’re there, I got you to prepare for burnout, prepare in there before. And it sucks.

But if you prepare in advance, it’s a lot easier to get yourself through it. And again, with the ask people for help, when you get to that point of hey, I cannot possibly respond to one more troll comment, please can somebody just handle this?

Sarah Loyd: All right. Those are some great tips. Yeah. Working ahead when you have the energy, I think that’s. That’s really helpful. So we’re going to shift gears a little bit and talk about how you guys stay energized and inspired when you’re putting all of your best ideas out there, how do you come up with new ideas?

So where do you guys go for inspiration or best practices for social media?

Jessica Henderson: Conferences.

Sarah Loyd: Conferences? What are your favorite conferences to go to?

Jessica Henderson: GSM con probably, it honestly feels like adult summer camp. It’s great for networking. And three CMA is just fantastic. Those have been the ones that I’ve come back with the most inspiration from, because I think the people that are going to them are also looking to bond and looking to trade the ideas.

And so those really and truly getting out there and talking to those people because you can look at Facebook all day I mean everybody has their different ideas they’ve got on Facebook. I still do it but talking to real humans get outside Talk to the humans you can see what they’re looking for what they’re looking at What’s and they’ll tell you what has worked for them and what has not so that you’re not sitting here making the same mistakes they made And it’s, that’s such a great tool.

Cause then you skip that stumbling block. Also Pinterest is just a great side note. Perfect for inspiration. Just go to Pinterest, start searching keywords and just scroll, just visually, just scroll it. And see, I went to art school. That’s what we do. You scroll through, find inspiration, and go from there.

Brooke Roshong: I don’t know if any other states have something similar, but in Ohio we have it’s called OSPRA. It’s the Ohio School PR Association. We have a conference every April which is pretty awesome. And it’s a smaller conference, but it’s Two days and it’s, I think, I don’t know how many school districts go.

I think last year about 50 school districts went and some are bigger school districts that have, like Columbus they have a team of 20 people, but they have thousands and thousands of kids. But that’s always where I get to connect with people. And then also we do. And we’re on, we’re in Lorain County and we do monthly communications meetings with all of the school districts in Lorain County, we meet once a month and we go over things because a lot of the things we connect, we, oh, you’ve got this email that you had to address and we also got that or, snow days, anything along those lines, we tend to overlap a lot and we share communication that way.

So that’s always super helpful to have a group of people that you can reach out to that are going to be responsive and help you out in any way they can.

Kara Raftery: I also highly recommend following I have a few favorite accounts, like Oregon Metro and Vancouver Wall, I love their social media, I think it’s great, I love what they do, so I’m totally, I’m continuously like, being like, oh that’s awesome, and I’ll screenshot it, or just taking examples or notes for next time but one of the other things for inspiration is honestly, so the PIOs, I love that everyone has like a little core group, and if you don’t have one, I recommend getting one, The P. I. O. is in our area. We meet bi monthly and we’re always talking about, Hey, what are you doing? That’s working. What’s not working? And it’s just so helpful. And it’s just so validating to one. Not like you’re alone or the only one struggling with it. But I always come away with something valuable and insightful, and it just helps me to stay curious and look for opportunities versus Seeing like nothing’s working, but just being like this didn’t work.

What should I try next? So if you don’t have a core group of people that you’re bouncing ideas off of I highly recommend skiing one For whatever format looks good for you But I also recommend being a very cool troll and looking up because there’s so many cool municipal accounts the Park Service obviously is you know, amazing and but highly recommend following other municipalities or school districts or law enforcement agencies and To see what they’re doing and then so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel a little bit.

Jessica Henderson: I will say that the National Park Service Facebook, top notch, and if you don’t follow TSA on like threads and Twitter and all of that, you are missing out. They are hysterical. The two of those, fan girl all day.

Erin Mudie: I also look to the private sector or commercial accounts to see what they’re doing. One of my favorite accounts is Wendy’s, right? Because they are ruthless on their pages. It’s just funny. And obviously we can’t be like that in government, but look at what’s trending as far as major news, like the super bowl. We had some great opportunities for that, like what’s coming up, who’s doing what?

And then I always look at the peers around here that I have that I really admire their stuff. And what did they say? Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. It’s going to be our spin on it, but I’ve got the idea from a peer up here. 

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. Those are some great tips.

Jessica, you were mentioning some of your favorite accounts. One of my favorites to follow is the consumer product safety commission on blue sky. They are unhinged a little bit, but unhinged and informative. So it’s a great mix. 

Jessica Henderson: That’s the thing about the TSA accounts is that they sometimes rival Wendy’s in their sassiness, and they are completely unhinged, but they are fully informative. And it’s the same thing that draws me into the National Park Service accounts. Right now, the latest National Park Service is sharing from Scott’s Bluff National Monument, where they have these ox statues that fell over in the wind, and they’re telling people out in the wind, and it just says, Oxen tip over due to high winds. Lose two days. Oregon Trail. That’s all we’ve got. That’s great. They’re, I told you.

Sarah Loyd: For our 20 somethings on the call, this is Oregon Trail. This is a video game. From the 80s and 90s. If you’re young, look it up. It’s on Wikipedia. All right. 

So how have you guys found any hacks or shortcuts that work particularly well for small teams? Anything that you guys do to make your team seem bigger than it is? Anything to just take things off your plate?

Jessica Henderson: Canva templates. Create your own templates in Canva that you can drop things into when you need to later. And that way if there’s a road closure or something like that, you just knock that, changing that little bit out, maybe add a new photo or a new map to it, whatever, and send it out, and that tends to go pretty well with getting things out quickly.

But also, again with the scheduling ahead, if you know that something’s happening, if it’s something simple or even scheduling behind sometimes, if you have a whole lot of events. You can make it seem like you were in 500 places at one time, just by scheduling all of these things to overlap as far as the algorithm and new schedules go.

I’ve been out of town for two weeks straight and you couldn’t tell from our social media. It looks like there’s three of me operating at one time.

Erin Mudie: Yeah, like keeping that editorial calendar. I like having everything in one place. So on that calendar, I’ve got my calendar tab. I have canned messages for seasonal things like watering or bulk trash reminders. I’ve got cop, I copy and paste it. And then I’m also responsible for the weekly newsletter.

So I keep a list of all the topics that I talk about in each one. So for the next year, what do we talk about in February? Okay. I can look back. So it’s really just building up, it’s your arsenal of resources that really just helps us get stuff out the door.

Kara Raftery: Automation is key, right? Anything you can pre schedule in advance, anything that’s already pre designed, anything you’re not having to spend time and energy starting from scratch is right? Saves you so much time and energy. And anything you can delegate. We actually got to hire a local, two local photographers because I can’t be everywhere at once.

So that way I can disperse for different things and then they just send me the content afterwards. Which has been helpful, but automation programs that streamline effective pre scheduling and build out and just reuse. Yeah, it’s great, but go ahead.

Brooke Roshong: I will also use the note feature in Social News Desk. We did an entire series on our school bus drivers drivers of the Ridge for North Ridgeville. And so I had, I think, 35 to 40 of them. And so trying to space those out appropriately and know which number I was on for which person. And so I went into the monthly view of the calendar and was able to add notes and say, this person this day and then build the graphics as I went so that I didn’t forget someone or skip or out of order, anything like that. So I’ve also found that to be pretty helpful for myself.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that’s great. Just as a placeholder, so when you’re ready to actually create the content you’re ready to go and you don’t have to think about when and, what was the last one? That kind of thing. That’s great.

Yeah. All right. 

Erin Mudie: Chat GPT. Okay. So I use it like if I need a caption, Hey, write me a three sentence caption about whatever. Okay. Approve it. Make sure it’s good to go. But that definitely does help when it’s busy. And we have an unwritten policy against any sort of chat GPT or anything like that.

Jessica Henderson: We don’t. We don’t use it at all. Everything comes from one of us directly. 

Sarah Loyd: Yeah. That’s the debate right now is how much AI can get involved. And I know, some departments have a no AI at all policy. And some are like, no, the more, the better, help us out. So yeah that’s really interesting that you guys are like on, on opposite sides of that.

All right. One more question. Last question. Except we do have some questions in the Q& A, but my last question is if you could give one tip to another small team managing social media, what would it be?

Jessica Henderson: Plan ahead. That’s it. Plan ahead. 

Erin Mudie: Get Social News Desk. I swear it is.

Jessica Henderson: Social news desk lets you plan ahead for three years or something. 

Brooke Roshong: Yeah, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and say, hey, I can’t be at this event. Can you please take a few pictures for me? I’ve really had to do that. We have so many sports and athletic events and oh, this is senior night.

This is white out night. I can’t be. Everywhere. Really relying on my staff is a huge help. 

Sarah Loyd: That’s great. 

Kara Raftery: I would say connect, right? I know that’s a really broad term, but honestly, like attending sessions like this, getting ideas, meeting other people that are doing what you’re doing, connecting, and not only that, but also setting realistic expectations for yourself.

I think we’d all love to be like, Oh yeah, our social media is like off the hook, but. Maybe that’s not realistic, right? I’m not going to be as funny as Park Service or our DOT, but if I can provide consistent, relevant, informative information that is beneficial to our community, our residents, our visitors, that’s a huge win for us and just to be there and just also just feel like we’re connecting with them.

Even though we don’t get to see them all the time. I think that’s huge. And just providing another platform for them to feel engaged or heard or just feel like they are more than just a city government. I think that’s really cool. But yeah, connecting conferences. Tutorials, all the things.

I think that’s really important. But also just knowing that you are one person. And it’s gonna be okay if you don’t get to all the social media posts. Or if you don’t respond to every comment. I only respond to questions. I don’t actually respond to every single comment because it’s not realistic. I’d love to and I love our comments, but I, it’s just, that’s not feasible for a small team.

So just know having realistic goals that you can feel like you’re winning always feels good too. 

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that’s great. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. We do have a few questions. I know we’re coming up on our hour, so we’re going to try to get through some of those. So the first question I have is do you guys feel that scheduling content so far in advance can ever be problematic?

How do you manage things when there’s like an active incident that should take precedence, but you have scheduled content maybe that goes out that doesn’t pertain to the incident. 

Jessica Henderson: That needs to be one of your communications issues for your crisis. Put that on your crisis plan to double check.

I’m not even gonna lie. Make it number one. You don’t, the last thing you want is for there to be like a wildfire and you’re over here talking about swimming pools. And safety on those, check that number one, anytime there’s a crisis, make that part of the plan.

Erin Mudie: I agree. It’s something that I’ve had to learn from. I had an incident and then we had some scheduled content that kind of wasn’t great around that incident. So in my updated plan I went ahead and put that number one, like immediately look at what content is scheduled.

Sarah Loyd: That’s a great point. All right. Next question. Is anyone creating unique content for each platform? We’ve seen different audiences on each platform, so content needs to be customized. However, we struggle with a small team. Do you have any tips?

Kara Raftery: We have to do that. Yeah, it’s awful. I don’t have a fix yet, but we do. But what we try to do is on Facebook, we try to do more graphics or words, but Instagram, we just use photos.

So what I’ll do is I’ll use the same photo for Instagram and then just build on top of that for Facebook and I’ll just resize it to whatever I need to in Canva. So it’s still the same base, but then I’ll just add a little bit more for Facebook. That’s how we do it. But we don’t, we’re not usually using separate. It’s usually the same, just a different version of that same thing tweaked a little.

Erin Mudie: I think it’s important to know the demographic of who’s using what platform. Next door has a very unique demographic. Facebook has a demographic. Same thing with Instagram and X, right? So know who is on it. And that allows us to, like Kara said, we’re using the same message. We’re just tweaking it a little bit to be more appropriate for that platform. 

Sarah Loyd: That makes sense. All right. I see a question that I think is for me. Are you working with Nextdoor to integrate scheduling? So good news, we already have scheduling for Nextdoor inside Social News Desk. So if you are publishing to Nextdoor, you can already do that through SND.

And I know right now it’s available for agency pages, which includes school districts and government and law enforcement agencies. All right. One more question. Where do you source your media from? Do you shoot it yourself or hire out or use stock? 

Jessica Henderson: I shoot it myself or we use Canva graphics if we need to fill something in. But especially if you’re using like a person in a photo, taking it is always going to be better than using stock. Stock photos have a look. And God, if you use AI generated photos, double check that they have the correct number of fingers. But I shoot what I can, I’m going to let you know, Oh, they will let you know immediately and you will end up on some sort of viral page, not in the best way.

Just double check the finger count. But yeah, anytime it’s a photo of a person, we try to use just stuff that we created. If it’s like a generic photo I just need a background image of like blue lights in front of a black background. There’s a stock photo for that. And Canva has thousands of stock photos.

Brooke Roshong: It really depends, too, on what your schedule allows, I am one, a team of one, like most of us. But, being able to go out and shoot something or take pictures at an event gets me away from my desk for 25 minutes to a half hour.

I’m like, I’ll go do that, so it really just depends on the day and what’s on my agenda. But I do try to get out and shoot some of the stuff myself, but it just really depends on what is planned that day.

Kara Raftery: Yeah, we’re really lucky. Our local chamber is super like we collab on a ton of different things.

So they’ll frequently share all of their photos with me or get me to select their media, which is really awesome. And we also created a partnership with a bunch of local photographers, like I said, who are really picturesque. So we’ve even I’ll just reach out to them and say hey, this was an amazing photo you took of the canyon, do you mind if I take it and they’ll be like, oh, yeah, let me get you the high res and they’ll send it to me. And then we just tag them and just give them that photo cred. But that saves me a lot of time of having to go take, especially drone photos. The drone photos are incredible, but we don’t have a drone. So we’re able to rely on their expertise and also give them a little shout out, which is great. But yeah, we do all of the above we try to refrain from AI created images because I don’t feel like that platform’s totally foolproof yet.

But yeah, stock photos. We try to also start from stock photos, but it happens sometimes. So just have to use what you can with the best that you’ve got at your disposal.

Sarah Loyd: All right. Awesome. Thank you ladies so much for your time. I know you guys are super busy, especially as a small team. So I’m so grateful for your time today and thank you to our audience today for your time and attention.

If you would like to learn more about Social News Desk or want to give it a try for yourself, you can head to socialnewsdesk.com/demo or shoot us an email at info@socialnewsdesk.com. All right, we’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you all so much. Y’all have a great rest of your day. Thanks.