It takes time to find content, images, links and data for daily social media on a variety of accounts and platforms. Social media as a whole is very labour intensive and time spent online, building a community, building engagement, creating content and uploading information often means that people who are managing social media are at the job 24/7.
If you ever need to find something from a few months ago such as reuse an image or rewrite a blog post based on changes in the industry - all you have to do is access your backups rather than searching for (and possibly not finding) the information you created or used online.
You are creating an easy paper trail.
And while you're at it, back up all your documents, folders, files, photos, passwords, emails, contacts and accounts - so you can keep and have records of all the work you have done over the past year.
1) Purchase an external hard drive - this will expand your computer's storage capacity and back up your data. it's great for making sure you don't lose anything important and is useful as a great storage system in case you buy a new laptop or need to restore your computer.
2) Use https://www.backupify.com to backup Your Personal Online Data. there are a range of options to choose from and provides backups of your personal Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Sites, Google Contacts, Flickr, Picasa and Blogger accounts.
3) Use SocialSafe to archive your Facebook timeline, Facebook Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and Viadeo profiles. Everything is stored locally on the your PC or Mac.
3) An alternative for Twitter - go to http://www.allmytweets.net/ - copy and paste a year's worth of your Twitter Tweets into a Word document for easy access and a later search if necessary. AllMyTweets is also a fantastic resource if you are searching for a specific Tweet on Twitter.
4) For a Facebook Business/Fan Page - you can either use Backupify or SocialSafe or you can simply copy and paste ALL of your Facebook posts into a Word document - to save for a later search or analysis.
It is best to backup all your Facebook links, updates and images to have a record of your work done over the year.
5) I'd also use copying and pasting as an option for all your Blog posts and use an Excel spreadsheet to insert all your links for a later stage - especially if you have a social media team (or person) who should be making use of a weekly/monthly social media editorial/content calendar.
This Excel document or calendar will help you track your social media on all accounts - month by month.
6) Save all your images into a social media folder for 2012 and backup those images into an external drive. If you have purchased images or created your own images; these can always be reused at a later stage.
7) I haven't found any backup options for Pinterest as of yet. Go through your Pinterest boards and copy and paste the data you want to keep into a simple Word document; so you can access content at a later stage - *UPDATE - I have found a few options to backup your Pinterest pins using one of the following tools - http://socialwebnerd.com/blog/20-tools-to-backup-your-social-media-content/
There are two good reasons why you should back up all of your social media content and data for the past year:
1) It is good to have and keep the data for your own records and to assist you if you need to search for anything at a later stage. I'd advise that you look at this data in 3 months time and it will help inspire you to write blog posts about changes in social media, business growth and it will help you keep track of your social media as a whole.
2) This will help with social media training. By having accessible data from the past year; this could help a new employee view all of your content on each account and review your brand image online. By having access to a wide variety of information; your new staff member will be able to see exactly how your brand comes across online and what is expected of him/her.
Keep records of your social media each year and this way you can easily analyse your data and track changes from year to year.
Mine are all in simple Word documents saved in an external hard drive for easy access!
*UPDATE
Here are 20 Tools to help you BackUp all your social media accounts including several options to back up your Pinterest pins and links - http://socialwebnerd.com/blog/20-tools-to-backup-your-social-media-content/
My advice is to backup all your data on a monthly basis; especially if you work in social media or/and digital marketing as this will help you generate reports.
| Image: http://www.handybackup.net |
