How To Collaborate With Remote Social Media Teams

The world of social media & digital marketing has always been centered around a distributed & remote working lifestyle.

But still, a lot of the work used to take place inside the four walls of office space.

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. Now, most of us working in these sectors have had to adapt to a new routine, i.e., Remote Work or Work From Home.

With this change, there comes a host of new challenges.

Apart from missing out on those fun water cooler conversations & office parties, collaboration amongst remote marketing & social media teams has become tricky.

Although we at Statusbrew have a beautiful office & a few teammates that love working from there, we've always had distributed teams working from Japan, North America & parts of Europe.

We've had some great successes & failures while trying to establish processes that can help the team coordinate effectively without losing the context.

Here are a few tips from us on how your social media, marketing or customer success teams, can effectively collaborate in our new shared reality.

These tips would help you increase your social media team's productivity.

Some common challenges that remote social media management teams are likely to face.

What Are The Challenges Of Remote Social Media Management/Marketing?

Social Media Management is no joke.

It involves processes such as

Building strategies
Actively posting content
Engaging with your community
Analyzing results
Competitor tracking

& more on a daily basis.

Getting these tasks done as a remote team requires excellent organization.

Communication

When social media teams are working remotely, it isn't always easy to foster open communication.

You can reach out to your team members in the office and chat about new ideas, projects, or industry news.

This level of communication isn't unfortunately, possible with remote teams. Tools like Zoom, Google Meet & even Slack allow you to brainstorm ideas through your screens, but it's easy to lose context & end up with some discrepancies.

Productivity Loss

At Statusbrew, we've seen a boost in productivity when it comes to remote working, but our team members have also struggled with some distractions when working from their homes.

WFH is a real challenge, and even those who have been doing it for a long time can often end up distracted with home tasks or other things resulting in a loss of productivity & creativity.

This can often lead to a feeling of frustration & demotivation amongst the team members.

Information Overload

When you don't see your team that often, you're always overwhelmed with loads of data & content.

Have you read that blog? Did you check that social media thread? Are you following that podcast?

It becomes hard to filter out what's true and valuable from what's not.

Things can get chaotic if you aren't able to keep your team in the loop on your priorities and the big picture things.

Effectively Collaborate With Remote Social Media Teams

Here are some tips & best practices that'll help you collaborate with remote teams.

Click here to download detailed infographic on Remote Social Media Team Collboration.

Gather Resources

For effective remote working, ensure that your team has easy access to everything they need to do their job properly. Make sure your social media & marketing teams have access to:

Brand assets
Templates
Style guides
Compliance documents
Project Management tools
Communication tools
Social media management platform

For effective access distribution among team members, set up a dedicated knowledge & a resource hub.

Define Roles & Responsibilities

To get the ball rolling, ensure that your team members are aware of their roles & assignments. Here are some pointers:

Decide on your target social networks & ensure each social network has a balanced amount of coverage
Ensure a balanced workload among your team members
Set up approvals & moderation for brand consistency
Team performances are measurable
Someone is responsible for all tasks

You can also go through & create a list of all the essential social media tasks for your business. Some common tasks include:

Content creation & scheduling
Community engagement
Social customer service
Brand analysis

Create Social Media Process & Guidelines

Establishing a social media process master sheet for your team is a must.

Your guide needs to cover all the essential social media activities & how your team should handle different situations.

Your guide will also help you onboard new team members.

Here are some essentials for your guide:

Voice, tone, and language your social media management team will use
Nomenclature & taxanomy
Use of watermarks, borders, signatures, colors, etc
Branded company, product, and service names
Engagement protocol

Plan In Advance

If you don't want all these processes & tasks to overwhelm your team, ensure that you create a content plan.

You won't be able to plan every piece of content you'll be posting in the future, but having an organized content plan will help you stay on track & remain consistent.

It will also help the other departments such as design & SEO to keep up with your campaigns.

Having a managed social media publishing tool will help you easily plan content. If you're using Statusbrew, you can also bulk upload & schedule up to 400 posts with a single click.

Communication Tools

The right communication tools will make collaboration with your remote teams a lot easier. While selecting a communication tool, here are some pre-requisites you can follow:

Your monthly budget for the communication tool
The number of team members that need access
The features you want

Here are some communication tools you can consider:

Slack

Image Source: Slack

Slack is a leading workplace communication tool that has truly revolutionized the way employees communicate with each other.

It comes with features like group video calls, screen sharing, unlimited message history & more.

Pricing: Free Plan, Paid plan starting at $6.57/month.

Statusbrew's Slack Integration changes the way Brands and Agencies can bring in their teams to collaborate in Social Publishing and Brand Monitoring.

When you connect your Statusbrew with one or more Slack channels & workplaces, you receive instant Slack notifications for your publishing and engagement activities.

Workplace by Facebook

Image Source: Facebook Workplace

Facebook Workplace allows you to create a Facebook environment for your organization with groups, chats, and video calls.

Pricing: free plans and plans starting at $4 per person per month.

Remote Social Media Management & Team Collaboration With Statusbrew

Statusbrew has been developed to facilitate teamwork, remote & otherwise. Here is how Statusbrew can simplify your team's workflow & collaboration.

One dashboard To Manage Everything Social

With a cross-platform dashboard for all things social media, you can easily streamline different aspects of social media management such as:

Cross-platform scheduling and publishing
Community engagement
Customer service
Performance analysis
Team collaboration & reporting

Access Levels & Approvals

Whenever we used to hire a new social media content creator or an intern, we used to get nervous when they were starting out & felt like they needed an overlook or someone doublechecking their work.

Remote working presents a challenge in this aspect as you cannot have a senior team member sitting next to them & overlooking all the work.

With Statubsrew's granular access levels & content approvals, you can create smart workflows for your team. You decide who can perform specific actions or access different sections of your dashboard.

Content approval workflows mitigate erroneous posts & facilitate submitting, reviewing, approving, or rejecting outgoing posts.

Unified Inbox

Statusbrew's Engage inbox helps you build more substantial and more meaningful connections with your audience.

You get instant updates of different conversation types from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, YouTube into a single stream.

Moderation & Automation

It has never been more critical to provide consistent, personal, and effective social customer care.

Statubsrew makes social customer care easier by helping you create customized rules that automate dealing with spam, negative comments & other repetitive engagement tasks.

Read how you can apply custom rules to your engagement strategy here.

Reporting

Statusbrew helps you get combined and granular reports for all your social media profiles. From the big picture to a single post, know how your audience receives your brand content.

If you'd like to try out Statusbrew for your business, you can sign up right now & start your free trial.

Try Statusbrew

Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.

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