How To Develop A Social Media Approval Workflow For Your Brand [+Infographic]

9 out of 10 marketers say approval delays are the top reason to miss deadlines.

One of the best ways to build a brand presence online is social media marketing. However, brands need to be extra careful in maintaining their social media presence because once a mistake is made, it remains online forever (even if you delete it, a good portion of the audience might have already seen it by then.)

The most significant weak spot where the gear of a social media team gets stuck is the approval process. Mistakes can happen, but a social media approval workflow goes a long way to ensure that your brand is seen as a professional one on social media.

The primary rule for social media teams to avoid mistakes and maintain brand consistency should be that any and all content that speaks about the brand should be approved, regardless of whether the head of the department has created it.

This guide will give you actionable tips to streamline your social media approval workflow so that your team members can collectively maintain a consistent brand presence on social media.

• Why Your Brand Should Have A Social Media Approval Workflow?
• Steps To Develop An Effective Social Media Approval Workflow
• Build A Powerful And Automated Social Media Approval Workflow With Statusbrew

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Click here to download detailed infographic on tips to develop a social media approval process for your business.

Why Your Brand Should Have A Social Media Approval Workflow?

Reason #1: To avoid mistakes

Your social media profile is like your virtual shop. Making a mistake in your social media content, like a simple typo or grammar error, will look as if you don't care.

Such small mistakes are bound to happen, not purposefully, by new hires and interns who are getting acquainted with your system. Having a social media approval workflow gives your team the time and space to proofread social media copies before publishing them, thus minimizing the chances of committing such mistakes.

Reason #2: To ensure content goes out on time

Posting on social media at a consistent time is vital for your brand’s online presence as when you remain consistent in publishing, the algorithm also favors you. But it's hard to maintain that consistency if your workflow is not streamlined.

There will be delays in creating social media assets, hence in the approval process, because of which the content will not be ready on time to post. This will make your brand look unorganized and unprofessional. When your audience doesn't see a clear pattern of posting on social media, they feel that online marketing is not your brand’s priority.

Having a social media approval workflow will streamline different processes within the social media team, avoiding any delays and miscommunication, thus making each and every social content go out on time.

Reason #3: Increases productivity

Social media approval workflow will help your team members understand what's required of them to gain quick approvals. For example, if the team members know that they have to follow specific guidelines to make the content piece approved, they won't waste time working in a direction that's not required.

Social media approval workflow will streamline the efforts of your marketing team. Having an appropriate social media approval workflow will help the team members to meet the deadlines quickly. This will maximize the result your team can achieve with limited resources in hand.

Reason #4: Helps maintain consistency

Social media marketing develops a personality for your brand that reflects your brand’s mission and values to your audience. It helps you build trust with your audience. An inconsistent look on your brand’s social media page doesn't convey any message to your audience. And this will not contribute to achieving your goal either.

By incorporating the social media approval workflow, your team members will be taking out time to maintain the consistency of your brand on its social page. In addition, this will show your audience that you care for them.

Having a consistent look on your brand’s social media page will deliver your brand’s core message to your audience, thus connecting and building trust with them. Being consistent on your social media page will also help you connect with new audiences, resulting in increased engagement and reach.

Reason #5: To ensure social media compliance

Social media has a different and important set of rules for business purposes. Hence, businesses need to be extra careful not to post any false or misleading information. This especially holds true for regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, healthcare, government, etc.

Having a social media approval workflow allows you to monitor and manage the content pieces prepared by your team members for your brand's social media. It will be ensured during the approval process that these content pieces meet company policies and governance guidelines.

Learn more about Social Media Compliance For Regulated Industries

Reason #6: Ensures security of your brand

Once multiple team members have access to your brand's social media accounts, it becomes impossible to know who exactly used it. Multiple logins using the same passwords bring a concern for data breaches for your company.

The consequences of password sharing at the workplace can be avoided by having a social media approval workflow followed within your team. Instead of giving every team member access to post on your brand's social media account, the upper management should be responsible for performing the social media activities.

Thus, having a social media approval workflow allows you not to compromise with your company's security.

Steps To Develop An Effective Social Media Approval Workflow

Step #1: Develop the purpose of approval workflow

The first step to planning a social media approval workflow is to define its purpose and role within your marketing plan.

Your social media team will have goals discussed and defined for a particular piece of social media content. However, since so many team members will be involved in creating one social media content piece, your goal might lose track mid-way. Therefore, the approver must ensure that the purpose of the social media content piece is followed through the creation stage of content.

Every piece of content that goes out on your social media page should follow the approval process before being published. The approver must ensure that the core purpose of the approval process remains consistent for every piece of social media content created by the team.

According to the type of social media content, some steps of the approval process will be added or removed, but the core purpose of the approval process should remain the same. This can be easily achieved by creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) that can be followed throughout the team to maintain the purpose of the social media approval workflow consistent.

The social media approval workflow differs according to the brand's needs and goals. It will also be different for different types of social media content. Hence, keep your social media approval workflow flexible and easily adaptable for different kinds of situations.

You don't need to stick to one review process forever. For example, if your brand was earlier using a specific social media approval workflow, but you notice that goals are not being achieved. In such situations, it's required to tweak that social media approval workflow to make it possible to achieve team goals.

However, the two things you need to ensure while tweaking your social media approval workflow are

1. Your team members are aware of which social media approval workflow is currently being followed in the team.
2. The core purpose of the social media approval workflow should remain consistent.

Step #2: Delegate roles to everyone within the team

Everyone in your social media team should clearly know who’s responsible for which task. Assign roles and responsibilities to team members based on their knowledge, skills, and availability. This prevents any critical step in the social media content creation process from being missed.

Additionally, your social media team should also have one or more designated heads. A social media marketing team usually includes copywriters, graphic designers, video editors, and social media managers, and each of these roles plays a critical part.

Image Source: Disruptive Advertising

They need to work in collaboration to deliver social media content successfully. Along with knowing their own responsibilities, social media team members should know whom they need to get in touch with for approval and deliveries.

Define how each role will flow into the next and allot deadlines to each role. This ensures that the social media content piece gets sent to the right approver at the right time.

Define a process to collate and send feedback to the team members. It's best to batch feedback to avoid too much back and forth communication.

Protip: Reduce the number of approvers

Don't make a line of approvers, as this would further slow down your team’s progress. Instead, involve only the person who is required in the approval process. In this way, you will also be minimizing unnecessary edits.

However, having just one approver for the entire social media team might halt the workflow when that approver is on leave. Hence, your team needs to have two or more approvers so that teamwork is never stopped, and there's always someone to take up the approver’s role in their absence.

Find the correct balance for the number of approvers such that neither your team has too many approvers nor does the teamwork gets halted in their absence.

Step #3: Prepare brand guidelines

Before your team members even start with the creation process, they need to understand the guidelines to be followed and the expectations. This will give them the correct direction to work in the start itself, thus minimizing the edits.

Brand guidelines are the ones that differentiate your brand from the rest, and hence any and every piece of content that goes out on your brand’s social media page must adhere to those guidelines.

Your brand guidelines will broadly include the following aspects

• Colour pallet
• Typography
• Imagery
• Logo design
• Brand tone and voice
• Policies

Ask your team members to stick with these guidelines while progressing with their work.

Protip: Prepare templates

Keeping templates ready for most common types of social media content saves time and maintains design consistency. In addition, using templates will ensure that your social media content will stay on-brand no matter who is creating it.

At the same time, everyone in your team must be able to find the latest version of these templates. So rather than maintaining a disorganized template library, create a brand asset library that gives all your team members easy and on-demand access to all the brand assets in one place.

Image Source: Uber

Statusbrew’s Asset Manager maintains a pool of your brand’s digital content, making it easily shareable with your team members. You can filter the assets based on tags, quickly choose the stored content and schedule it with a click of a button.

With all the guidelines in place, you might feel as though the formatting of social media platforms is restricting you, but you have creative control over your brand's tone and voice.

Step #4: Set clear expectations for the approver and set timelines

In some teams, approvers are unsure of what's expected out of the social media approval workflow, and such teams have a lot of approvers for a single content piece.

The approvals must be aware of what's expected of them to make the entire social media content creation and publishing process more efficient. Proper communication between the creators and approvers will improve the social media marketing efforts of the team and give better results.

You need to develop an approval outline that lists all the crucial details, such as the allotted time for review of each content piece and how feedback should be provided, and share it with the approver. This makes the approval requests clear and consistent, so the entire team is on the same page to minimize any delay or confusion in the social media approval process.

A single piece of social media content will have several stages of creation. Different team members would be responsible for different stages. To make the entire piece of content ready for approval, divide and set a timeline for each team member involved in the creation process.

When everyone completes their part on time, the content will be prepared on or before its actual timeline. Assign each stage of the content creation a deadline and ensure that each team member is responsible for adhering to their deadlines.

Step #5: Optimize for different social media platforms

If you want your brand to thrive on social media, optimizing isn't a choice; it’s a necessity.

Increasing just the number of views on social media will not help you in achieving your goals. You want your content to be found by the right people that forms a part of your target audience.

Today, it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic. — Adam Audette.

Optimizing improves the visibility of your brand on different social channels. Each social media platform has different requirements when it comes to posting content. Ignoring them will have a negative impact on how your content looks on social media.

Image Source: innocent drinks Twitter

Here are a few best practices for optimizing your social media content

• The heading should fit the designated heading width of the social media platform
• Easy sharing of content should be ensured with social sharing icons
• Images should be of high quality and should appear attractive on the social media channel
• Your social media content should offer value to its users, thus making it shareable
• Use original content to emerge as a thought leader in your niche
• Use appropriate hashtags to increase reach and avoid stuffing your posts with unnecessary hashtags
• As long as possible, use original images and avoid using stock photos
• Use the correct image dimensions when posting images
• Include your brand’s logo in images you post and your company name / URL in the text
• Be relevant and stay on topic

Protips:

1. You can use analytics to determine the kind of content to create that interests your audience.
2. Previewing your post while scheduling in social media management tools will allow you to adjust your content, ensuring that the most critical information is visible to your audience. Statusbrew Compose feature enables you to preview posts, customize posts according to the social media platform, gives hashtags suggestions, and also provides a customizable link previously.

Step #6: Schedule Post

You want to work smarter and not harder. Hence logging into every social media account each day to post is very time-consuming. Social media management tools come in handy for scheduling content at the best possible time. Moreover, it keeps your brand’s social media platforms up-to-date without being a time-consuming process for your team.

Learn more about Social Media Scheduling: How To Do Like A Pro

Scheduling your post once it has been approved will automatically make the content live at its peak hours of engagement. This will save a lot of your team’s time while ensuring that content goes out on social media without any delay.

Built into Statusbrew is a scheduling interface that allows linking multiple social accounts. You can easily choose images and videos from the Asset Manager and upload them with a few clicks. Select an appropriate time for the post to go live, and voila! Your content will be automatically made live on your social account while you are sleeping or traveling!

Step #7: Analyze to improve

Social media approval workflow forms an important element of the content distribution system on social media. It supports all aspects of social media marketing, such as ideation, creation, authorship, and updates. Hence, it's imperative to have a social media approval workflow in place that meets all the requirements for the growth of your brand's presence online.

Periodically, you should be analyzing the flaws and bottlenecks in your social media approval workflow to improve on it. Identify which step in your approval process is inefficient that is delaying the entire process.

Collect team data regularly and evaluate it to know who’s slowing the process and figure out how you can improve. Keep a trial of the social media approval workflow at regular intervals and adjust it as required to achieve your goals. Also, stay updated about your brand’s latest regulations and compliances and adapt your social media approval workflow based on these changes when necessary.

Analyze your brand’s social media analytics to get a deeper comprehension of your team’s social media efforts and user behavior. Statusbrew provides several reports such as Facebook and Instagram paid post performance reports, keyword reports, hashtag, and tag insights to analyze your social media performance. In addition, it also allows you to create Customizable Reports to measure the metrics that matter most to your brand.

Learn more about Top 4 Social Media Marketing Metrics And Their Objectives

Build A Powerful And Automated Social Media Approval Workflow With Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a social media management tool that allows scheduling posts while ensuring that your team has a fully established social media approval workflow. It handles the different stages of content creation, reporting, and approvals.

Statusbrew sets up perfect social media approval workflows for your team to submit and review, using advanced permissions and a flexible approval structure.

It makes your management clutter-free by configuring what each team member can access and use, thus reducing errors. This ensures that no piece of content goes live without being approved.

You can also bundle users from the same teams or provide them with the same access levels together for easy workflows. Onboarding new team members can be achieved in a single click.

It helps you analyze your team's efficiency and individual team member performance by measuring the fulfillment of their goals.

In a nutshell, Statusbrew ensures that the proper approval process is always followed within your team. Do you want to implement such a streamlined social media approval workflow within your team?

Book a free demo or start your free trial today!

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