If you think there's no such thing as the ideal social media workflow, think again. The key to mastering your own custom-made social media process is knowing what tools to use and ensuring that you don't miss anything along the way before publishing or posting your content.
Social media marketing has been a powerful means of reaching a broad range of audiences with targeted, unique content. In fact, there are currently more than 100 social media networks for marketers to choose from – and that number is constantly growing.
With the wide variety of options available, separating and prioritizing your social media workflow can be difficult, and then developing a calendar schedule to match. This becomes especially challenging when you consider that there's no such thing as "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to social media marketing.
There will always be various factors involved in what works best for your company's individual needs, especially on social platforms. You must consider your audience, industry niche, and existing resources before creating a solid strategy based on what you want to achieve on each network.
6 Steps to Build an Effective Social Media Workflow
1. Determine your roles and responsibilities
Social media marketing is about connecting with your audience on the most engaging and personal level. It takes more than just posting. It requires an organized workflow that includes content creators, managers/managers-of-talent (i.e., social influencers), graphic designers—and every other person in between.
The best way to assemble this team? Get everyone involved by creating clear roles for each member based on their bandwidths: What responsibilities do they want to take responsibility within? How much time does he have available per week or month before deadlines need attention?
You can't just throw a bunch of people in front of their computer monitor and expect them to work miracles. If you have a team already set up, take some time to sit down with each member and educate them on the specific responsibilities they should be looking over. For example, if Susie will do a bulk of your Twitter updates while Kelly focuses on Facebook posts, then spell things out for them both.
2. Customize your workflow
Many great tools are available that will help keep your social media marketing schedule organized, including HootSuite, Buffer, and SocialPilot. It's important that whatever application(s) you integrate into your workflow process, make sure everyone knows exactly what needs to be done.
Share your schedule with everyone on your marketing team. Set up custom alerts for each of those terms when you need to post daily, weekly, or monthly to a certain service. So they'll automatically pop up in the notifications panel as soon as it's time for a status update. You can find any number of great software on the internet.
3. Follow a schedule and stick to it
A content calendar helps you get the most out of your posts by ensuring they go live on time. It also allows for more efficient distribution across different social media platforms. It indicates what is popular at any given moment to give some inspiration when creating new pieces.
A great way to plan ahead is to use social media management tools. You can input all desired dates to generate a monthly schedule (or weekly if preferred). Be sure to set aside space each day, for example, 30 minutes here or five consecutive hour slots there. So, everything doesn't collide during crunch-time.
It's crucial to set up a content calendar and follow the schedule accordingly in order to save your time. Set up alerts for every term in the schedule to ensure you'll never forget to post anything.
4. Automate wherever possible
Social media automation is key to efficient workflow and is highly recommended for business owners who find it difficult to juggle social media and other tasks. Today, there are tons of social media management software that allow you to edit, remove, and schedule posts anytime you want. Using these tools offers you the chance to save time and focus on what matters more.
That's why, instead of juggling between one social channel to another, it's best to automate your social media workflow. But, make sure you set a schedule and stick to it: use automation tools only if you can't manage your accounts manually. For instance, Hootsuite's scheduled posting feature lets users determine when their message will be posted across multiple channels.
5. Create content in bulk
Having to create bulk content can also save time and energy. This is a time-efficient way to ensure that your social media accounts are always up to date, and you can adjust them as you see fit.
Batching your content creation will help you stay productive and consistent with the branding. In fact, batching becomes especially important for posts that require a lot of attention to detail because it gives them all enough time in one sitting so they don't fall behind or get forgotten about entirely.
6. Track results with analytics
In order to improve the performance of your social media marketing, using KPIs is essential as it helps measure how well or badly your content is performing. In this regard, Google Analytics for websites and Facebook Insights are two great tools that help find out what works and what doesn't in your social media strategy. They monitor visitors' activity from social channels, including clicks, site traffic sources, demographics profile of fans, and page views per visit, among others.
Using social media analytics can improve your workflow and save time because you can access all this information from one source. In order to find out more about your social media activity, you need to know how these tools work and what kind of data they provide so you can improve all your future campaigns.
Conclusion
Working on social media can take a lot of time, especially when you have to maintain the quality of your content. Fortunately, some shortcuts can help optimize your social media workflow so you can utilize your time more efficiently and enjoy working on the social media accounts for your business. This article should help you improve your social media workflow and strategy by implementing all these tips above.
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreoentoro/