Have you and your team ever tussled with generating the right kind of content on social media to engage your audience?
Managing social media effectively requires more than just posting sporadic updates and hoping for the best. It requires a structured system outlining the step-by-step process of creating, scheduling, and publishing content, as well as engaging with the audience and measuring performance.
A social media workflow exactly does that. It provides a framework for managing social media activities in a systematic and organized manner, ensuring that no tasks are overlooked or duplicated.
Learn how to create a well-designed social media workflow in this article that eliminates ambiguity and allows for a smoother execution of campaigns.
Table of Contents:
- What Is A Social Media Workflow?
- 3 Processes To Improve With A Social Media Workflow
- 6 Steps To Set Up A Successful Social Media Workflow
- 4 Key Stages Of Social Media Workflow
- Make Your Social Media Workflow Work For You!
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What Is A Social Media Workflow?
Social media workflow includes planning, creating, launching, and analyzing social media campaigns.
The first step of a social media strategy for teams includes a brainstorming session. You come up with campaigns or content ideas for the coming weeks or months. Then, your social media team develops a publishing plan, and your creative team starts work on assets.
Your team writes a copy for each post. Each platform has distinct requirements in terms of character count or image sizes, and your team takes care of the same. After that, your team needs to get final approval. Then they can start rolling out your posts according to the planned schedule.
Finally, you and your team will use analytics to determine what didn't work and what worked for your target audience before repeating the process.
This entire process forms a part of the social media workflow.
3 Processes To Improve With A Social Media Workflow
Some of the major social media marketing processes you can use to assist you in improving your social media workflow include.
Content Creation
A social media workflow helps to ensure a streamlined process for content creation. It defines roles and responsibilities, establishes a content calendar, and ensures a consistent brand voice in every message.
Implementing an approval process is crucial to maintain brand consistency and ensure that every content meets the required standards before publication. It helps:
- Prevent errors
- Ensures compliance with brand guidelines
- Minimizes the risk of publishing inappropriate or inaccurate content
With a social media workflow, you can ensure that your posts are shared at the right time, on the right platforms, and with optimized content. This process not just helps you to save time but also eliminates the need for manual posting and gives you the space to focus on other important tasks.
Community Management
Community management is essential for engaging with your audience, addressing their queries or concerns, and building relationships. A social media workflow helps manage incoming messages, comments, and mentions. It ensures timely responses and efficient resolution of all genuine customer issues, thus improving customer satisfaction.
Performance Tracking & Analysis
To determine the value of your social media marketing efforts, you can use the social media report.
A social media workflow includes processes for tracking and analyzing the performance of your social media efforts. It involves monitoring key metrics, such as engagement, reach, and conversions. By regularly reviewing and analyzing performance, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your social media strategy.
6 Steps To Set Up A Successful Social Media Workflow
Brands today must create massive amounts of content while maintaining an omnichannel presence, which is no easy task. As a result, having an excellent social media process is more of a must than an option.
1. Assign Specific Roles To Teammates
Content creators, graphic designers, and social media campaign managers are all involved in creating a successful social media campaign. A social media workflow helps to specify each of their roles. Social media managers can focus on other work rather than supervising who in the team performs which task and understand their scope of work and deadlines easily.
You will have to collaborate on creating the workflow along with your team. They will all be involved in establishing the workflow, and it won’t feel imposed on them. Creating a briefing document can clarify the roles and responsibilities within the team.
2. Create A Strategy For Social Media Management
As you start creating your social media strategy, consider the following points:
- What are your specific objectives for using social media? Define what you hope to achieve.
- Who is your target audience? Who do you want to connect with and engage with?
- Which platforms do your target audience use, and how do they use them? Understand their preferences and behaviors.
- Take a look at your industry competitors. What kind of content do they produce, and how frequently do they share it?
Determine the amount of content you need to create and the different formats it should take.
Your objectives may vary, from increasing brand awareness to building a community or generating leads. Whatever they may be, it's important to establish them clearly from the start and align your content accordingly.
3. Develop A Content Schedule
Now is the time to transform your social media plan into a content schedule.
Use a content calendar to organize and distribute your content strategically across weeks and months. Schedule your posts based on specific dates, times, and social networks.
A content calendar helps you to keep track of all your posts and ensure they are sent out on time. It also simplifies the management of posts on multiple social media networks.
It's recommended to plan your content at least a month in advance. However, it's important to remain adaptable and open to spontaneous content.
Having a flexible content calendar enables you to seize opportunities and engage with trends or market events at the right moment. This flexibility can greatly enhance your reach and engagement.
Statusbrew's content calendar allows you to plan, create, and schedule your social media posts across different social media networks from a centralized location. It provides a holistic view of your content strategy and allows you to optimize your posting schedule according to your best time to post.
4. Create Content In Bulk
Feeling uninspired from time to time when it comes to writing daily content is completely normal. But, as your deadline draws near and ideas seem scarce, it can become quite a challenge. That's when the idea of batching content can come to your rescue.
Set aside dedicated time in your calendar specifically for content creation. This allows you to focus on producing a larger volume of content in one sitting.
This approach proves particularly valuable on days when your creative flow isn't at its peak. Moreover, grouping posts together helps maintain a consistent brand image and messaging.
Batching content becomes especially crucial when dealing with content that requires extensive preparation, like videos. For instance, shooting multiple videos in one session can save you valuable time on video setup and streamline your production process.
If you are looking to schedule and publish multiple social media posts at once to save you time and effort, Statusbrew offers bulk scheduling of posts for up to 6 months in advance. It lets you plan your content in advance to ensure a consistent social media presence.
5. Streamline The Approval Procedure
According to Workfront, 92% of marketers feel that approval delays are the main culprits behind missed deadlines.
This statistic highlights the impact of having a well-established content approval system in place.
Approval systems ensure that the content you publish is consistent with your brand and free of errors. But, if the approval process becomes cumbersome and inefficient, it can do more harm than good.
To avoid such complications, everyone on your team should understand their responsibilities and respect deadlines. Maintaining open lines of communication with your team will help you stay informed about the progress and approach of the approval process.
Creating a comprehensive approval plan with detailed guidelines helps to streamline the social media publishing process. This approach eliminates the possibility of unnecessary delays and ensures a smoother workflow for everyone involved.
When it comes to implementing an effective approval workflow, Statusbrew offers a customizable solution tailored to your team's specific needs. So you can create a multi-step and multi-user workflow for mitigating errors and ensuring compliance in all your outgoing social posts.
6. Keep An Eye On Your Social Media Performance
Tracking the success of your content is equally important as creating content after it is published. Analyzing the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and measuring the revenue generated will help you understand which efforts bring results.
Document your findings and insights in a report that can be shared and discussed with your team. This collaborative approach ensures that everyone on your team is aligned and informed about the campaign results.
When creating reports, consider your objectives. Create reports that offer actionable insights. Share ideas to address areas that require improvement. Outline and brainstorm strategies for improving the overall campaign performance.
To gain deeper insights into your social media analytics, Statusbrew allows you to track key metrics, measure engagement, and understand your audience's behavior and preferences. You can use this data-driven approach to make informed decisions and refine your social media strategy for even greater results.
4 Key Stages Of Social Media Workflow
1. Brainstorming
Once you have a clear understanding of your team's dynamics, there are several approaches you can take to brainstorming. Exploring different strategies can help unlock creativity and generate fresh ideas.
For example, you can review your best-performing content, explore trending hashtags, or even try other innovative brainstorming techniques with your team.
Identify and settle on a brainstorming technique that works well for your team.
2. Creating The Draft
Now comes the exciting and challenging part of content development: writing your posts. This is where you realize that your brilliant idea from the middle of the night may not be as brilliant as it seemed at first.
There are various approaches you can take, but let's start with a foundation that you can expand on as needed:
- Research: Begin by understanding your target audience and their needs before creating content for them.
- Speak their language: It's essential to identify your target demographic to effectively communicate with them.
- Refine your voice: This is the most challenging aspect. You need to strike a balance between speaking your audience's language and maintaining your unique brand voice.
- Using visuals: A couple of lines of text won't cut through. You should enhance your content with visually appealing graphics and well-edited videos. Don't forget to optimize your images for the platform, considering size and dimensions. Use social media meta tags to ensure your posts always look their best, even when shared by your followers.
- Include a Call-To-Action: Always incorporate a call to action in your posts. Without it, your post may not have the desired impact. Make eye contact with your audience and encourage them to engage with your brand, visit a landing page, or take any other desired action.
Once your content and images are ready, it's time to finalize them, keeping the following in mind:
- Proofread for typos and errors.
- Double-check your facts and evaluate all the sources you have used. There's nothing more embarrassing than spreading false information.
By following these steps, you will be on your way to creating compelling and error-free content that resonates with your audience.
3. Seeking Approval & Feedback
Nowadays, the importance of social media content creation has skyrocketed. It's no longer enough to share anything that catches your attention simply.
What's even more crucial is that social media is a collective experience where providing and receiving feedback is just as important as creating the content itself. Feedback plays an essential role in shaping appropriate content for your audience.
To alleviate the nerves that come with hitting the publish button, it's essential to establish a transparent approval process. Knowing who is responsible for giving the green light provides peace of mind and streamlines the content creation journey.
4. Scheduling During Peak Hours
Now, let's move on to the final and arguably the most time-consuming step: scheduling.
But why is planning so crucial? Here's why:
- Use your calendar effectively: Planning content in advance allows you to fill in the gaps and create a cohesive schedule for all your social media posts.
- Maintain consistency and retain audience: A well-planned content schedule helps you stay consistent with your posting, which in turn fosters loyalty among your audience.
- Construct your brand story: Planning content ahead enables you to carefully structure your brand story, something that becomes challenging when publishing on the go.
- Reduce stress and enhance creativity: By having a schedule in place, you eliminate the need to brainstorm constantly what to post, reducing the strain and freeing up mental energy for more creative tasks.
Make Your Social Media Workflow Work For You!
Creating a social media workflow helps you to maximize the efficiency of your team. But remember that creating a social media workflow is not a one-time task. It requires regular evaluation and adjustment to adapt to changing trends and your business goals. Stay flexible as you fine-tune your workflow to meet the needs of your social media team.
Social media workflow becomes even easy to implement using a tool like Statusbrew. You can plan and schedule your content, collaborate with your team members, implement the approval process, and get insights into your social performance.
Schedule a demo today to see firsthand how Statusbrew can help you create the perfect social media workflow to achieve your business goals.
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