How to keep your images and videos organized when you’re managing a social media account

This guest post from Nate Holmes at Widen has practical tips for keeping your images and videos organized when you are managing a social media program. We love to share advice that helps teams work better together.

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Do you ever find yourself rummaging through folders on your desktop to find the perfect image to share on social media? Or maybe you’ve given up on finding the perfect image and any remotely relevant image will do. Clicking in and out of folders and emailing your co-workers for that one image isn’t the best use of your time. So get ahead of the clutter and save yourself some time but getting your visuals organized.

Here’s how to keep your visuals organized so your posts are on-brand, on-message, and on time.

Put Your Images in a Centralized Place

Centralize Your Images: When you need an image or video for social media where do you go? If you’re listing off a half-dozen places or you don’t know, it’s time to centralize your visuals. It’s the first step in getting organized. You might have multiple sources for images, but they should all end up organized in the same place.

Things to consider:

• Device accessibility — Make sure you can access your visuals from your mobile device for time sensitive posts and from your desktop for scheduling out in advance.
• Team accessibility — If you have multiple people running your social media accounts, they should all have access to the same library of visuals.

Use Descriptive Filenames

Use Descriptive Filenames: When you’re looking for an image, staring at a list of IMG_3091, IMG_3092, IMG_3093, etc. is not helpful. Take advantage of filenames by including descriptive information about the file’s content. A good filename helps distinguish itself from other files. Consider including the event, project, theme, or creator in the filename.

Things to consider:

• A filenaming convention — You can create a filenaming convention to give all your files a standardized format that includes key differentiating information.
• Dates — Present dates consistently. Common date formats are YYYYMMDD or YYMMDD.​

Categorize Your Images and Videos

Categorize Your Images and Videos: Filenames can help you search for a specific file, but categories are especially helpful when you have an idea of what you want but not a specific file in mind. The goal of organizing your files into categories is to make it easy to drill down to what you want in an organic, logical, and easy-to-understand manner.

Things to consider:

• Limit subcategories — Don’t get carried away with creating subcategories. If you go deeper than two levels, you risk files getting buried away in subcategories where you and others can’t find them.
• Point yourself in the right direction — Categories should start with a larger concept to easily point yourself towards the file you’re looking for.

Remove Off-Brand Visuals

Remove off-brand visuals: One of the key benefits of social media is its ability to connect your brand to customers. Any post may be your opportunity to attract a potential customer to your brand. So your visuals better be on-brand.

When organizing your visuals, remove any off-brand visuals, including those that are off-brand due to poor quality. Your visuals should reinforce your brand, not distract from it.

Things to consider:

• What is on-brand — Meet with your brand or marketing manager to determine what makes a visual on-brand. Think about the subjects, color, style, and composition.
• Process for adding visuals — When your team creates or purchases visuals, who determines if they meet brand standards?

Keywords and Descriptions Metadata

Keyword and description metadata:  Metadata is data about data. It’s descriptive information that defines and describes your visual. If you apply this information to your files, you can use it to organize and find files faster. A digital asset management (DAM) system gives you more robust search and filtering capabilities than a basic folder structure.
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Things to consider:

• Keyword terms — While there can be many terms to describe a visual, what are the terms you and others will use to find the file? Will you search for a photograph of a specific product by its product name or SKU?
• Completeness — Are all the relevant characteristics of the visual captured?

Organize Now!

It’s tempting to put off organizing any newly created or purchased images and videos. Don’t wait! There’s never a great time for more mundane tasks like organizing your visuals, but a little time invested now will save you more time later. Like when you need that visual again.

Nate Holmes

Nate Holmes is the content marketing manager at Widen. Nate believes that a good story, some data on your audience, and a desire to help others will lead you to success in marketing. He’d also like to point out he’s modeled for Widen. An image featuring the back of his head had 924 embed views in the last 30 days of this being written.