Are you looking to add Google Maps on your WordPress site? There are plenty of free Google Maps plugins available for WordPress which makes it difficult to know which is the best. In this article, we will show you the 7 best free Google Maps plugins for WordPress.
Adding Google Map in WordPress
Before we discuss Google Maps plugin, it’s important to emphasize that Google Maps offer an embed code which you can customize and paste in your WordPress posts or pages without using any plugins.
However, you will have to switch to the text editor to add it in posts or pages.
Also, there are not many customization options available for the default embed code. You cannot add custom information to the map.
This is where Google Maps plugin come in handy. Using a plugin will allow you to add locations, markers, directions, routes, etc. Your map will be interactive and more useful to the users.
Having said that, here is our list of the best free Google Maps plugins for WordPress.
MapPress Easy Google Maps is one of the most popular free Google maps plugin. It allows you to easily add a Google map to any WordPress post, page or custom post type by simply typing the address.
You can embed the map automatically before or after a post. You can also use a shortcode to insert the map within the post. See our tutorial on how to add Google Maps in WordPress for more detailed instructions.
Maps Builder comes with a beautiful map customization experience with tons of options. You can easily add locations, choose map size, controls, map types, and even choose a map theme. All of this can be done in a visual customizer.
Adding a map to a post is easy. All you need to do is click a button on the post editor and select your map. Maps builder also allows you to add custom markers, and you can even show nearby places with Google places.
WP Google Maps is another free Google maps plugin. You can easily create maps by entering an address, get directions, set markers, etc.
It comes with a map widget that you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar or any widget ready area. Your users can also switch to street view without leaving your site.
Another great option for highly interactive Google maps is WP Google Map Plugin. It comes with a great set of features allowing you to create beautiful maps with lots of custom information.
You can add colorful markers, information windows, redirect users when they click on map, and easily embed maps with shortcode. You can save multiple locations and then create a map showing these locations with custom markers.
Want to quickly display a map in a sidebar widget? Google Maps Widget allows you to easily add a Google Map in your sidebars or any other widget ready areas. Clicking on a map will open the map in a lightbox popup with a larger view. You can also choose pin colors and even use your own image as a pin.
Want to add a Google map to your site with your own custom placemarks? Basic Google Maps Placemarks allows you to add placemarks with address, assign them categories, add custom marker if you like.
You can create as many placemarks as you need and then display them all together on a map using shortcodes. You can also create categories to create different maps showing different locations and placemarks.
CP Google Maps plugin allows you to easily associate geo location data to a post and display map with your custom images. You can choose a custom marker to be placed on the map for a location. Most of the plugin’s other great features are locked and require the paid version of the plugin.
We hope this article helped you find the best free Google Maps plugin for your WordPress site. You may also want to check out our comparison of 5 best contact form plugins for WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
I just returned from an out-of-country beach trip with girl friends, and while I was away someone shared the video above on my Facebook profile. Interesting timing for Gary Vaynerchuk to share this particular message. Interesting indeed.
I have something I want to share with you on this point - which was a GREAT point, by the way - but first, here's where I was sitting when I watched that video myself...
I actually DO "make money enjoying my life" just the way it was mentioned in the video above. It sounds like a scam, or like something you would read in an Internet Marketing sales letter. I realize that. But I do want you know it IS possible.
I can say that, because... I'm living it.
I was literally sitting in a beachfront apartment (above) enjoying the ocean view when I got the notification about that new video.
I even make money while I'm sleeping, just like the video said.
Sometimes I even make MORE money while I'm on the beach, or asleep, than I do when I'm awake or "at work". Passive income is a GREAT thing!
(You can relax. I don't have anything to sell you, lol...)
This CAN be your reality (too). But as Gary said in that video, it does take real work. Not some sleezy push-button product, or magic solution. Internet Marketing is not like a Vegas slot machine. Internet Marketing means marketing on the internet.
It means providing real solutions to real people, or even selling real products to real people. The internet is simply an amazing tool for running a highly rewarding and successful business... from anywhere.
We can blame scammers, sales letters or big red headlines for the misconceptions about Internet Marketing. But the fact is, they only work because there's a problem with the mass mindset. Because people believe they can buy happiness - or success.
Are people "tricked"... or do they trick themselves?
Any TRUE entrepreneur is well aware of and deeply familiar with personal responsibility, common sense, taking smart risks, and turning even the worst investments into a return.
Those smarmy sales letters and spammers don't target true entrepreneurs. They prey on the type of people that would never survive the business world anyway.
Gary mentioned "practical passive income" - but what does that mean exactly?
It means you're running a real business that serves a real purpose for real people.
As far as the passive income aspect of your business, it will only be a percentage of your business profit. There's another percentage of your revenue that will most certainly be "active income", or a percentage of your time spent maintaining and growing your business... AS you continue enjoying your lifestyle and your success.
THAT is reality.
It's even MY reality.
Gary talked about goals and ambitions too, and how "$60,000/year in passive income online" is "more practical than millions". Saying you want to be a millionaire or "make millions online" is a pie-in-the-sky intangible goal.
It's not even a goal...
It's just a fantasy daydream.
Fact: NOTHING is "100% automated".
Even if it were, it would take quite a bit of energy and effort to set it up... and it would only last a certain amount of time. Usually a short amount of time.
I say this to you from more than 18 years experience working online.
18+ years of running a real - successful - business, and "living the lifestyle"...
I love being able to work (and play) from anywhere in the world!
The evening view from my "Canadian home office" above White Rock Beach this week...
I liked Gary's point about putting in the work to get the outcome, and specifically when he said "use your talents." This is what it's all about. It's not just about money and lifestyle, but about a business that is so rewarding it actually ties into WHO YOU ARE - and your ideal lifestyle. That's the real WIN!
When you love what you do, and your work and your life are so ingrained that you're basically "a walking tax deduction", and you make money just BEING YOU, that... is success. And THAT is when you start reaching your income goals.
Is The “Internet Marketing Lifestyle”… Realistic?
The answer is YES.
It's realistic for me, at least. Like I said in the beginning, I do realize I'm in the minority. I'm out there traveling the world, living my life, enjoying life, and running a rewarding business I love at the same time.
It's not because I'm "lucky" though. It's certainly not because I pushed a magic button. It's not the result of a "promise of internet riches" product I ordered online either.
I worked hard to build both a business and a lifestyle I wanted.
You have to set real goals. You have to take personal responsibility for your actions and decisions, for your business - and the success of your business. You have to make smart choices. You have to be realistic about what you want, and about what you're willing to sacrifice and DO to GET what you want.
YOU, and you alone, have to MAKE it happen.
Some things won't work out. Ditch them, and find things that do. Keep testing, keep working, keep building. Keep doing more of what does work, and less of what doesn't. The only way to "fail at it" is to stop. As long as you're DOING, you're moving toward success - or more success.
The Dream Lifestyle vs The Perfect Life
While I do have that "dream lifestyle" of making money in my sleep, or while I'm having margaritas on the beach, my life is not "perfect". Far from it, actually. In my next post I'll tell you WHY, and share more about... the flip side of it all.
Stay tuned!
Best,
p.s. It's not ALL "play" - even when it seems like it, or looks like it. I love my lifestyle, and I do play a lot, but you've probably heard me use the phrase "always working, always playing". Often, when I'm having the BEST time, I'm also "working" - or tying it into my work, and ultimately profiting from it...
Hanging out with Alice Seba is always a great time! We first met in person 11 years ago in Chicago and most recently got...
Child themes allow you to make changes and customize your WordPress theme without ever editing the main theme. This allows you to continue to get theme updates without losing your changes. Recently one of our readers asked us how would he go about using his child theme on his wife’s website. In this article, we will show you how you can use your child theme on another WordPress site.
Getting Started
Child themes are the safest way to customize and make changes to a WordPress theme. Take a look at our how to create a WordPress child theme article to learn more about child themes.
Child themes are completely portable, and you can use it on as many sites as you like. You can download them and install them on another WordPress site. You can even submit your child theme to the WordPress theme directory for others to use if it meets certain standards.
Last but most importantly, make sure that you have complete WordPress backup of both your sites before performing any actions.
Moving a WordPress Child Theme
First thing you need to do is connect to your website using an FTP client and browse to the /wp-content/themes directory. Next, download both your child theme and parent theme folders to your computer.
The next step is to connect to the WordPress site where you want to install your child theme using the FTP client. Browse to the /wp-content/themes/ directory and then upload both child and parent theme folders you downloaded earlier to the new site.
Now login to the admin area of the site where you want to install the child theme and visit Appearance » Themes. You will be able to see both parent and child themes installed there.
Click on the live preview button under the child theme to make sure everything is working as expected. Once you are satisfied, you can safely activate the child theme on your new WordPress site.
We hope this article helped you learn how to use your child theme on another WordPress site. You may also want to see our hand-picked list of these 43 beautiful free WordPress blog themes.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Too busy to do SEO annotations? Determining what warrants being annotated in the first place, writing everything down, and evaluating your process are a few ways to make the process less overwhelming.
While WordPress powers 23% of all websites on the internet, it’s not the only open source content management system in the market. There are some other really awesome software like Joomla and Drupal. All three of them have a lot in common, but they still have their own pros and cons. In this article, we will compare WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal to find out which is the best.
All three of the web’s most popular CMS have a lot in common in terms of technology, philosophy, and community.
WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are all free and open source software licensed under GPL. See our article on Why is WordPress Free to learn more about free software.
They all support MySQL as their database management system. WordPress exclusively supports only MySQL, while Joomla and Drupal support other database management systems.
All three of them use themes and templates for visual appearance of sites, and plugins, modules, or extensions for extending features.
As open source software, they are all community-driven projects.
While there are a lot of similarities, they are different in many aspects. They have different policies about what to include in the core software, how to handle modules and templates, how to deal with security, etc. These differences make a big impact on users, and how they build their websites.
Having that said let’s take a look at how WordPress, Joomla and Drupal compare to each other.
Ease of Use and Beginner Friendliness
Most people creating their websites are not web developers, designers, or programmers. They are average users who just want to build a website. Ease of use is the most important factor for majority of users.
WordPress
WordPress comes with a famous five minute install. Most WordPress hosting providers also offer one click install of WordPress. This makes it fairly easy for a new user to get started with their website.
The post install user experience of WordPress is way better than Joomla or Drupal. The user sees a simple clean cut user interface with the menus to create posts, pages, or start customizing appearance and themes.
Joomla
Joomla installation may not look as quick as WordPress, but it has very similar steps. Apart from that many shared hosting providers offer one click install packages for Joomla as well.
After the installation, the user lands on a control panel that is not as straight forward as WordPress. There are just too many menus to click on and customize your site. Joomla fans would say thats because Joomla is a lot more powerful than WordPress, but we think it is kind of scary for a beginner.
Drupal
Drupal’s installation is similar to both Joomla and WordPress. Simply download and upload the package and run the installation script.
Drupal also offers distributions. These are pre-packaged Drupal bundles with modules and configurations to create specific kind of websites.
The post installation experience for absolute beginners is a bit complicated. Users will find it difficult to figure out how to change things on their site. Drupal makes it very obvious how to add the content, but changing appearance and adding non-content elements is not very obvious.
Winner: WordPress
Themes and Addons
All three of these popular CMS come with themes and plugins / modules as a way to extend the features and appearance of the software.
WordPress
WordPress allows users to change their site’s appearance using themes. WordPress comes with a few default themes pre-installed. At any time, you can click on the add new button from your Appearance page and install free themes from official WordPress.org theme directory.
Apart from free themes, you will find many more premium WordPress themes developed by third party theme shops like StudioPress, Themify, or ThemeLab. These are paid themes and come with premium support options.
The real power of WordPress lies in plugins. There are more than 38,000 WordPress plugins available for free in official WordPress plugin directory. You can also buy premium plugins which come with paid support provided by plugin developers. Check out our list of 20 must have WordPress plugins for 2015 to see how plugins make WordPress awesome.
Joomla
Just like WordPress, Joomla also comes with templates and extensions. There are great extensions to do just about anything from creating an ecommerce store to managing email.
However, the quantity of these templates and extensions is not as high as WordPress. This could make finding the perfect template and the perfect extensions a bit difficult.
By default Joomla does not have a feature that would allow users to search and install extensions or templates from the administration area. There is an extension that allows you to add install from web feature for extensions. But for templates, users will still have to manually search templates and then install them by adding their URL.
Drupal
Drupal has the same issue with the availability of themes and modules. Users will have to leave their site, search for the module and theme they want to add, then locate the project’s zip file URL. Finally they can enter the URL in the Modules or Themes page to install them.
There are modules to do just about anything and new ones are added regularly. Still, the overall quantity of modules is lacking when compared to WordPress.
Winner: WordPress.
Support Options
Availability of help and support options is very important for beginner users. There will surely be some hurdles when you are trying a new software. That’s ok as long as you can get help.
WordPress
WordPress has a strong community of users. You can find WordPress help on official support forums, docs, handbooks, codex, Slack channels, Stack Exchange, and almost every forum on the internet about web design and development.
Apart from the free support options, there are ways to get paid support for WordPress as well. Online platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and elance where you can hire WordPress professionals from around the world to quickly solve a problem for you at very reasonable price. Due to immense popularity of WordPress, finding WordPress developers is easy and affordable for small businesses and individuals.
Joomla
Joomla, just like WordPress has a large and very helpful community. There is an extensive documentation on the Joomla website which is a valuable resource for beginners. For more interactive support, users can join forums, mailing lists, IRC chatrooms, etc.
Apart from community support, there are third party resources, paid training, and development agencies that can be helpful.
Unlike WordPress, finding affordable expert help is quite difficult for Joomla. Hiring a developer or expert for Joomla development, troubleshooting or assistance can cost way more than WordPress.
Drupal
Drupal has a very proactive community of fans and users. You will find all the community support options for Drupal just like WordPress and Joomla. There is extensive documentation, support forum, mailing lists, user groups, irc chatrooms. All good places to get advice and free help.
Drupal tries to connect users to developers and companies offering professional Drupal services. You may find them in Drupal Marketplace.
Winner: WordPress
Localization & Multi-Lingual Support
A large percentage of websites created each day, are non-English or multilingual sites. It is much more likely that many beginners would probably be looking for a CMS that can handle multiple languages or has support for different locales and languages.
WordPress
WordPress does an excellent job at offering a good platform to build a multilingual site. It does not support multiple languages out of the box, but there are some excellent plugins that allow you to easily create a WordPress multilingual site.
WordPress is available in more than 53 languages. New languages can be installed with just a click from WordPress admin area.
Most popular themes and plugins are also available in multiple languages. Theme and plugin developers are actively seeking help translate their packages into other languages.
All these efforts make WordPress a great platform to build a non-English or multilingual website.
Joomla
Joomla comes with out of the box capability to handle a multilingual website without installing any extension. Simply go to language manager, add a content language and start creating multilingual content on your website.
Translations are also available for admin interface in many languages and can be easily installed from the admin area.
Drupal
Drupal comes with built-in support to handle non-English or multilingual sites. You will need to enable locale and content translation modules. After that you can add site and admin interface languages from Drupal’s configuration section.
Winner: Tie – All three of them support multilingual sites and are available in multiple languages.
Security
Security is a very important factor when choosing a CMS for your website. Almost every website on the internet is vulnerable to security threats.
WordPress
Being the most popular CMS in the world, WordPress based websites are often targeted by hackers. However, WordPress is built on a very secure code, and it responds to security vulnerability very quickly. WordPress also has an auto-update mechanism which allows WordPress websites to automatically update when there is a new security patch.
WordPress sites can be further secured with automated backups, two factor authentication, and other best practices.
There is also a built-in mechanism to show updates for WordPress themes and plugins. This allows themes and plugin developers to rapidly respond to any security vulnerability.
Joomla
Joomla is very similar to WordPress when it comes to security. They actively respond to any security vulnerability and are very quick to patch it up. However, maintaining a website and installing updates is still up to the user.
There are extensions available to backup your Joomla site. You can also strengthen your Joomla site’s security by following the same best practices as WordPress.
Drupal
Drupal takes a very serious approach to security. They publish security vulnerabilities on their own site as they are discovered and patched. There is a perception that Drupal is more secure because you don’t hear about Drupal sites being hacked as often, but that could be cause it’s not as popular Joomla or WordPress.
Winner: Tie – All three follow proper security standards.
Conclusion
Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are all fantastic content management systems. Drupal and Joomla come with many more built-in features than WordPress. However, WordPress beats them with its ease of use, huge global community, plugins and themes. We feel that most non-developer users would find it much easier to build with WordPress than Joomla or Drupal.
Overall Winner: WordPress
We hope this article helped you compare WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal, to find out the best CMS for your site. You may also want to see our guide on how to move your site from Joomla to WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
These thoughts will sometimes race through my head when I’m sitting down to focus on social media time. I’ll fire up Twitter and Facebook and Buffer and want really bad to ensure that I’m covering all my bases and spending time in the best way possible.
And on the good days, I’m right into the groove where I know exactly what to do next and what are the most important tasks that need to get done.
The difference for me is with making a checklist for my social media activities.
I’m happy to share with you all of the tasks I have on my checklist at Buffer and also the ones that social media managers around the web have on their daily, weekly, monthly checklists. And if I’ve left out a favorite to-do item of yours, I’d be so grateful to hear from you in the comments!
I’ve broken it down here into a daily checklist, a weekly checklist, and a monthly checklist as some of the activities vary in their frequency and need. Feel free to adapt any of this to suit your specific needs (here’s a free template that you can copy and edit).
Keep reading for lots more info and explanation on each of the checklist items you see here!
If you can reply to everyone who engages with you on social media, you’re doing better than 75% of brands on social media.
Some reports, like this one from Sprout Social, have found that 5 in 6 messages that need responses are not answered by brands. The inverse, of course, is that only 1 in 6 messages get an answer—that’s just 17%!
So first and foremost—and on those days when there’s just tons going on, perhaps the most important to-do item of the day and the one we’d recommend for sure making time for—reply to everyone. Reply as quickly as you can, given all else you have happening.
Ignoring customers on social media is similar to ignoring the phone ringing when they call your help centers.
Here are some of our best tips for quick and thorough replies:
Set up push notifications on your mobile device
Set up email notifications (with an IFTTT recipe notification if you’d like)
Use a desktop app like Tweetdeck or other
Use software like SparkCentral (for Twitter, where response time is paramount)
Filter customer service to customer service
2. Check your mentions
One layer deeper into replying to everyone (and quite closely related to it) is checking your mentions—any time someone reaches out directly to you on social media.
There are a few quick and easy spots to visit to find these:
As far as the best frequency here, I tend to check my mentions once per day, which I’ve found to be a good flow for my personal brand. The Buffer team, on the other hand, we check our mentions constantly throughout the day on Twitter, using SparkCentral, and in morning and afternoon drivebys of our other social media channels.
3. Monitor social media for keywords and phrases
First off: How do you monitor? There are some neat ways we’ve found to use things like saved Advanced Searches in Twitter, for instance. And we gain a lot of value out of tools like Mention, which feature really robust Google-Alerts-like options for tracking mentions everywhere.
Then as a followup to the how, here’s the what: This great list from Courtney’s post on social media monitoring covers many of the basics of what to monitor on social media.
Brand or company monitoring
Your name or your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer)
Any variations of your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer and bufferapp)
Potential misspellings of your brand’s name (e.g., bffr, bufffer)
Names of the most active/visible members of your company (e.g., Joel Gascoigne, Leo Widrich)
Mentions of specific campaigns you’re running (e.g., #bufferchat, #bufferpodcast)
Your catchphrase, slogan or tagline
Industry or topic monitoring
Key words or phrases that describe your industry or interest (For example, at Buffer I might want to monitor for key phrases like “social media sharing,” “social media posting” and “social media automation” to start out)
Key words or phrases related to or complementary to your industry or interest
Frequently used industry hashtags
I quite like this idea from Sprout Social also, where you use social media monitoring to discover potential new customers for your product.
Monitor for mentions of keywords that indicate that someone is looking for a product similar to yours.
In our case at Buffer, this could be someone who’s searching for “scheduling social media” or “social media management” tools.
4. Schedule your updates for the next day
Schedule your updates ahead of time is perhaps our number one time-saving tip for social media. I’ve personally felt such great freedom and productivity from batching the creation of social media updates into one window of time each day.
Here are some best practices. I’d highly encourage you to test and experiment with what works best for you!
Post 3 or more times per day on Twitter
Post 2x per day on Facebook
Post 1x per day on LinkedIn
Post 1 to 2 times per day on Instagram
Post 5 or more times per day on Pinterest
Post 2 or more times per day on Google+
The timing of publishing these posts is another great one we’ve enjoyed researching. I really enjoy this infographic from SumAll that does a nice job summarizing some of the best practices out there:
5. Check out other social media profiles
We’ve gained so much inspiration from the work of others that it’s become a regularly-scheduled part of the day to head out and see what folks are trying on social media.
This can be as straightforward as visiting a handful of favorite profiles—either some industry titans, some peers in your field, some influencers, or some members of your audience.
On Twitter, this can be done quite quickly with a daily visit to one or more Twitter lists. We’ve come up with lots of ideas on how to create these lists. My personal favorite—and one I try to visit every day—is the list of my Buffer teammates.
On Facebook, you can add other pages to your Insights reports. To do so:
When logged in as the page admin, click Insights from the top of your Facebook page.
Scroll to the bottom of the Insights page, and you’ll see the “Pages to Watch” section.
Click the blue button to Add Pages.
Here’s a sample of what our “Pages to Watch” looks like at Buffer:
6. Curate content to share
Part of a social media sharer’s day is likely to include finding fantastic content to share.
We’ve found this to be an area where we’re okay investing a good chunk of time in order to find truly helpful, high-quality content to pass along to our audience. Many sites excel in personalized recommendations and hand-picked stories, and we’re grateful to include many of these in our daily workflow.
Nuzzel is another one of the “news from your friends” apps, letting you connect your social profiles in order to surface the stories that your circles are sharing. A few neat features of Nuzzel include:
Not only news from friends but also news from friends of friends
A list of replies and tweets referring to the top content shared by friends
A boomerang feature: stories that might have slipped your attention
The site collects the top stories and visuals from some of the best communities on the web and delivers the content in an easy-to-browse layout (or via email, if you’d prefer). You can cycle among a handful of different sites without ever leaving the Panda homepage.
Hacker News
Growth Hackers
Designer News
Sidebar.io
Product Hunt
Lobsters
Dribbble
Behance
Awwwards
Plus here are some more content sources that we’ve found to be great options as well:
This brings up the idea of advocacy: Encouraging your team to share your content and advocate for your brand.
In practice, this can be as simply as adding a daily checklist item of emailing the team with a new blog post of yours or recommending a tweet to RT or favorite. Further, we’ve made it possible to suggest content to your teammates from within Buffer, which make this level of advocacy even smoother.
Here’s more, if you’re at all interested:
https://buffer.wistia.com/medias/o3z7a8nls7
8. Engage with MVPs
Come up with a list of MVP fans or followers, or key people who regularly evangelize your brand. This could be a list of top users, influential people in your industry, folks you’d love to get to know, etc.
Focusing on brand advocates is a popular way to go here, as you can multiply yourself to a degree by encouraging others to share about you. MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has a great way of explaining and showing this process of flipping the funnel upside down:
What this might look like in practice:
Creating a spreadsheet of MVPs with a column for the last time you made contact
Marking MVPs within your social media management tool (we have a VIP tag within SparkCentral)
On most all social networks, you have a chance to reciprocate a follow and to really make someone’s day!
I follow a bit haphazardly on my personal accounts, so I’ve found lots of inspiration from others in the disciplined way they go about adding this task to their daily to-dos. There are a couple different strategies I’ve noticed with this one:
1. Follow everyone!
Return the favor for all those who follow you on social media. This can be quite straightforward on sites like Twitter and Instagram. For other networks, you can add people to circles on Google+, accept all connections to your LinkedIn, and follow a user or an individual board on Pinterest. On Facebook, pages can “like” other pages.
2. Follow those who fit with your focus or niche
Some people and brands choose to follow a bit more strategically by connecting with those who share common interests. With this, you can browse through a new follower’s bio or timeline to see if their social presence meshes with yours and then decided whether or not to return the follow.
Crowdfire (Twitter/Instagram) and ManageFlitter (Twitter) are two really useful tools for finding people to follow back and for removing any followers who are no longer a fit.
10. Connect with a new person
Similar to some of the other daily to-dos here on the checklist, connecting with someone new can fall in quite smoothly with re-following, replying, and engaging.
The idea behind this item is to practice making one-to-one connections with the people in your audience, welcoming new followers with a personal message or reaching out to someone you appreciate or admire.
And there are some fun ways to do this quickly and easily: Say hi, share a GIF, or go the extra mile with some surprise and delight.
Some people enjoy checking stats on the daily, which is great!
We’ve found for us personally at Buffer that stat-checking is something that fits a bit better on a weekly basis—we can focus on creating and engaging every day and then take a step back to analyze once the week is over.
(One way that’s been helpful for me to think about this is by numbering each week. So for instance, we’re in Week 35 right now. The website whatweekisit.com is really helpful for this.)
In terms of what to check when it comes to stats, there are so many, many options.
Measure what’s worked. Note your best-performing posts in a spreadsheet or other file so you can reference later as you hone your content.
What makes for a best-performing post? That can be totally up to you, depending on the stats that matter to you. I’ve found that “best-performing” can often be quite easily seen by checking into the stats in my Buffer dashboard and noting how many clicks and reshares an update got, plus how many people it reached.
2. Engage with influencers
Many of the daily checklist items involve engaging with your audience. This weekly to-do encourages you to reach out to those outside your circle, particularly any influencers in your industry or niche.
Influencers would typically be those with either a large following or a verified status or an important role at a significant company.
In the past, I’ve identified a few people who I was keen to connect with, added them to a Twitter list, then went about the weekly task of checking out their updates and engaging when appropriate. The goal, ultimately, is to build a relationship and connection—and in a lot of cases it works, if given time.
3. Engage with partners
Similar to the above, engaging with partners involves staying in frequent connection with your fellow brands and friends—in our case it might be some sister SaaS tools like Moz, Unbounce, Feedly, or Pocket.
It’s great to foster these good relationships with peers and partners so that you can continue to collaborate and help each other out as you grow.
4. Weekly goals check-in
How are you doing on your goals? (Much more on goal-setting in the Monthly section below.)
Often times, along with checking your stats on a weekly basis, you can quickly peek at how your stats fit with the goals you’ve set for social media. Here’re a couple of ways we do this at Buffer:
1. Per-post basis
I know that we’ve got a certain benchmark in mind for a successful post, so I’m able to quickly see if we’ve reached that goal by peeking at the per-post stats (for instance, one benchmark is 200 clicks per tweet).
2. Longer-term goals
At other times, we’ll set a bigger goal to aim for over time, and we’ll use what’s called a waterfall graph to chart our progress.
All credit to the team at HubSpot for turning us onto this cool idea. If you’re keen to make a waterfall graph for yourself, here are the instructions:
Divide that goal by how many days you have between now and the goal’s end (alternatively, we’ve also done this by weeks)
Fill out the spreadsheet with your goals and data—the built-in formulas to the bulk of the work here—and add your new traffic/numbers each week to see the graph grow!
5. Hold a strategy session
This one fits with our value of making time to reflect. I’ve found that I can quite easily get heads-down into the day-to-day tasks of social media, and it’s always so refreshing to take a step back and see our social media strategy from a higher level.
Some neat exercises here could be reviewing what went into your social media marketing plan in the first place, i.e. your goals and purpose behind social media. Or answering some of these questions:
What do we hope to achieve with social media?
Are we on the right networks to connect with our audience?
How does our voice/tone convey our brand?
In what ways can we be most helpful to those we serve?
At Buffer, we’re getting into the pattern of a weekly visioning sync on some of these higher-level ideas, and it’s felt great to be able to spend focused time making reflection a priority in this way.
6. Attend events – chats, hangouts, etc.
Often times, social media events will occur on a weekly basis—Twitter chats, Google Hangouts, and the like.
Depending on the depth of your commitment and involvement in social media ads, this one could easily be a daily to-do item. If you’re running just a few ads, then weekly could be a good frequency to start with. Check and refresh your ads. Keep the ones that are working. Iterate on the ones that aren’t.
We covered some introductory ground with our social media ads experiments on Facebook, and the comments on the post—like the one below from Lucie—are super helpful in explaining how to know what’s working and what to check on a regular basis.
The Monthly Social Media Checklist
1. Perform a social media audit
With a monthly social media audit, you can look for
Any updates needed to the profile picture, cover photo, description, or bio for your accounts
The frequency with which you’ve been publishing to each place
The growth in followers
Referral traffic from a network back to your site
Average clicks and reach for your updates
We’ve placed all this into a spreadsheet that we use to check in with things on a monthly basis. We’d be happy to share the template with you if that’d be helpful for your workflow!
There’re lots of different ways to go about goal-setting, as highlighted in this neat chat between Tim Ferriss (who enjoys setting goals) and Leo Babauta (who doesn’t).
I find that I fall somewhere a bit in the middle, where I really enjoy having production goals to aim for (publish four blog posts per week, launch a new thing every month) instead of end goals (get to 20,000 followers, have 1 million visits to the blog).
How does goal-setting look for you?
When it comes to social media goals, we wrote in the past about seven goal-setting strategies that could be helpful as you approach this monthly task of finding goals for the future. Here are the seven:
S.M.A.R.T
Locke and Latham’s
OKRs
BSQ
BHAG
Growth Hacker goal-setting
Intriguing metric
3. Come up with new experiments
In the list of goal-setting strategies above, the last one—intriguing metric—is one that we’ve found quite helpful for us here at Buffer as we think about coming up with new experiments for social media.
The process for doing so involves fitting our metrics into one of four buckets (HT to KISSmetrics cofounder Hiten Shah for his advice here!):
High traffic, low conversion
Low traffic, high conversion
High traffic, high conversion
Low traffic, low conversion
The first two buckets are the ones where you find the biggest opportunities for growth and experimentation. Bucket No. 3 isn’t half bad either. Bucket No. 4 is best to be left alone.
4. Plan ahead for the next month or more
This one fits nicely in with the “time to reflect” value and focus of the weekly strategy sessions. In fact, planning ahead on a monthly basis could happen alongside weekly visioning as well.
With planning, you can both brainstorm strategies for the coming months and get granular with setting up an editorial calendar and charting upcoming campaigns.
A few other beautiful and helpful social media checklists
In researching this article, I came across a pair of really great checklists that I thought could be quite useful here as well. The first is from The Whole Brain Group:
The next one comes from AdWeek’s Social Times and is based on a social media checklist that Sprout Social social media manager Darryl Villacorta uses.
Over to you
What tasks are included in your daily workflow?
Weekly?
Monthly?
It’d be wonderful to learn from you and to pick up any tips you might be open to sharing! I’d love to continue the conversation in the comments, and I’ll look forward to hanging out with you there!
