10 Ways Trello Will Make You a Social Media Management Pro

Sharing is caring!

Social media management is challenging and the one key factor to success is organization. It's impossible to juggle all the balls that you need to with social media if you aren't organized. In this article, I'm going to share ten ways that Trello will make you a social media management pro.

I use these Trello tricks to manage my blog and social media platforms. This keeps me on track and sharp. And they can help you get organized too!

If you haven’t used Trello yet, open your account here. You need Trello! It’s like a whiteboard with superpowers. (And it’s free!) This isn't a sponsored post, I just truly love their product and I want you to be more productive too.

If you're brand new to Trello, start with this intro to Trello video.

This is what your Trello Board will look like. This board is in the Trello Gold version so it has a custom background.

There aren't too many parts on your boards: lists and cards. You create lists which are the columns and fill them with the cards that are the individual tasks. You can easily move cards from list to list as the go through the workflow.

1. Build your boards

Some ideas for boards that you could use to help organize your social media management are:

• Brand assets
• Store images you create and the links to the Canva designs
• Blog post flow
• Monthly social media campaigns
• Content curation

Whatever you need to organize, create a board for it and get things moving in the right direction.

2. Create checklists

Checklists make me happy. They help me track progress and also get that awesome sense of accomplishment when I can check something off my list. Creating checklists is a snap with Trello and they are easy to copy to new cards as well.

You can add checklists in the cards from the Add section on the right of the card. When you click on Checklist, you can add a new checklist or use an existing checklist. You can see that once you start setting things up, it gets easier for future boards, lists, and cards.

To copy a checklist it, click “Add Checklist…”

Click the “Copy Items From…” select box, and find the checklist you want to copy.

Enter a title, and click “Save.” Trello will copy your checklist to the new card.

3. Add labels to color-code your work

A label is a way to categorize and sort your cards. There are ten colors to choose from and you can customize the names of the labels for each board. Cards can have multiple labels.

You can also add and remove labels pressing “l” to bring up a pop-over menu of labels. Toggle an individual label by pressing numbers between 1 and 9.

4. Work from anywhere

Trello works like magic on your desktop but is cloud-based so it syncs to other devices automatically.

Add Trello to your smartphone and your tablet for seamless use.

A photo posted by Social Media Author ?? (@pegfitzpatrick) on Sep 21, 2015 at 5:46am PDT

5. Create an editorial calendar

Thinking of your blog as a publication and creating an editorial calendar for your content will help keep you on track with your blogging. Being organized with overall themes, post ideas, and using your analytics to keep your blog readers happy can make your blogging life easier.

Once you have your editorial calendar created, you’ll find that creating more content is easier because you know just what’s coming up next. This takes some of the pressure off of creating blog content and still allows you the freedom to move articles around in the schedule or work ahead in any order that you see fit.

More reading to get serious about your blog and creatively boost your editorial calendar.

Copy this Trello board for your own Editorial Calendar.

6. Convert old spreadsheets into new Trello cards

Let's face it, you can't truly stay organized with Excel spreadsheets but you didn't have any other options. Now you do.

You can can convert  an entire spreadsheet column into Trello cards by copy and pasting the list into a new Trello card. This also works with any line separated list.

7. Curate content

This tip comes from my friend Jeff Sieh of the Social Media Examiner social team. Jeff is the Pinterest and Instagram Manager. Go follow their great profiles!

Their team uses a Trello board to curate content and share their findings on a joint board. Seamless team integration keeps the board up-to-date. They can comment and tag each other on cards. Check due dates and schedule content on social media moving the cards through the lists. So smart!

Simply drag and drop to add content to a Trello board. From the Trello blog, “simply drag a URL over to a Trello board and a card is instantly created with the relevant data including the original link, a description, and even a picture.”

8. Blog tips for Trello

Trello is a gift to bloggers to keep things organized and on track. It provides a solid foundation for working solo or with a team who can edit and add to your Trello.

You can add cards for tasks and add to-do lists in each card, then move it along in your writing process. An example of a blog post work flow:

• Blog idea – add your raw ideas for blog posts.
• Researching – add your links to articles and quotes for experts to include.
• On hold – park your ideas so they don’t get lost.
• Writing
• Editing and graphics
• Ready to publish
• Publish

Once you have the cards set up by task, you can copy them for a new blog post with the steps and checklists.

9. Manage projects like a pro

I like to use a Trello board to keep organized for conference and webinar presentations that I'm working on. Knowing that I have my deadlines, contacts, an outline etc. all in one place helps me save ideas on the go and always be on time with the deadlines. Creating this organized timeline helps keep all the pieces together and manageable.

10. Set and keep your goals

Now that we've gotten this far, you can see that moving through tasks and checking off lists is the perfect way to stay on top of a huge variety of tasks.

Set a personal and work goal board for yourself to track the things that are most important for you to achieve. You can view and copy this board here.

Bonus! Trello shortcuts

There's a host of time-saving shortcuts but I'm going to focus on one: search. Efficient searches save time! Enter search operators.

From Trello, search operators refine your search to help you find specific cards and create highly tailored lists. Trello will suggest operators for you as you type, but here’s a list to keep in mind.

These operators will also work in the “Archive” search bar. See Archiving and deleting cards for more details.

-operator – You can add “-” to any operator to do a negative search, such as -has:members to search for cards without any members assigned.

@name – Returns cards assigned to a member. If you start typing @, Trello will suggest members for you.member: also works. @me will include onl your cards.

label: – Returns labeled cards. Trello will suggest labels for you if you start typing a name.

board:id – Returns cards within a specific board. If you start typing board:, Trello will suggest boards for you. You can search by board name, too, such as “board:trello” to search only cards on boards with trello in the board name.

I hope this article gives you some inspiration to get organize and color code to your hearts content. Being organized will help you become a better social media manager. If you liked this article, please share with your network and pin on Pinterest to help more people find it.

I'd love to hear how you use Trello! Please share in the comments below.

Sharing is caring!