Efficient social media marketing workflows are essential to achieving meaningful business results.
A strong social media strategy is an essential tool for any business, brand, or organization in today’s digital world. Successful social media marketing can help you reach potential customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, drive sales, and more.
However, for many brands, achieving social media marketing objectives can seem frustratingly challenging. Posting across multiple accounts can be overwhelming, and constantly having to come up with new ideas for content is time-consuming. Even if you ask an employee to help create posts, you still need to find the time to approve them (often at the last second).
The result? Inconsistent and often poor-quality content that doesn’t align with your brand. Your business is not represented well, and it’s an inefficient and ineffective way to pursue your goals.
Here’s the good news: You may be able to address these issues by instituting some simple workflow processes.
“Processes solve most problems.”
Social Media Marketing Frustrations? Your Problem May Be Workflow
What Are the Benefits of a Defined Social Media Workflow?
A social media workflow is simply a set of steps, tasks, and processes that you establish to help optimize efficiencies and get the most out of your social media content.
A good social media workflow can be a true game-changer. With the right processes in place, you can streamline your efforts, stay organized, plan ahead, avoid errors, track results, improve your content, better allocate resources, benefit from the unique strengths of each platform, save time, focus on growing your audience…the list goes on and on.
Of course, the perfect workflow doesn’t just happen by itself. You must develop and implement the appropriate processes according to your needs.
At Sociality Squared, we have devoted years to honing our workflow processes to create and execute memorable, meaningful content that serves our clients’ business goals.
We use these processes as a starting point with each new client to define and standardize everything from brand voice and visual identity to community management and hashtag strategy. Voice and visual guides, along with creative templates, are important to make sure everyone is on the same page, and expectations are set on how content should look and feel for your brand.
Although we tailor our strategy to the unique needs of each client, we feel our approach represents the best starting point for the development of efficient and effective social media marketing workflows.
Here are some of our secrets to success…
Secret #1: Consistency Is Key
When posting content across multiple communications channels, consistent visuals and voice help members of your audience quickly recognize your brand. It is also a key building block of brand trust.
Visual consistency starts with your logo and brand colors, but it is just as important that your social media feeds have consistent style and design. Does your brand use stock imagery? Product photos? Bright and colorful backgrounds? Moody black and white? Cartoon graphics? Text on top of images? Whatever the visual style of your brand, it’s a good idea to clearly define and templatize your content to ensure your feeds look thoughtful and coherent.
Likewise, your brand’s use of language should reflect a consistent personality and tone across platforms and situations. Is your brand’s voice informal and playful? Technical and serious? Knowledgeable and conversational? What kind of vocabulary does your brand use, and what words does it avoid? And how does your brand voice support your overall marketing strategy?
As mentioned above, the answer to these questions starts with the creation of voice and visual guides. These documents help define your brand’s visual and written identity, making it easy to maintain a consistent look, feel, voice, and tone when creating content.
Secret #2: Templatization = Efficiency
Another secret of the Sociality Squared client playbook: Developing high-level tools that enable us to apply voice and visual guidelines directly to content creation.
For example, one step we often take early in the process is to define content pillars. Basically, this is a set of topics, themes, or “buckets” — types of content that your brand will post, which we identify and flesh out in advance. Perhaps you’d like your brand to post news and updates about your products sometimes and post about the emotional benefits your customers experience when using your products at other times. These are both examples of content pillars; defining and templatizing how you approach posting about these topics makes it much easier to generate content that resonates with your audience.
Speaking of templates, we also frequently recommend templatizing visual content, as well. This goes beyond simply establishing brand colors, fonts, and visual guidelines; creating graphic design templates makes the process of generating content even easier. For added efficiency, you can even pair a specific visual template with a content pillar. Then, all that’s left to do is update imagery and fill in the copy!
To that point, we also often work with clients to create base copy addressing key communication points, as well as messaging libraries, which can be used to collect and organize anything from unused copy ideas to polished brand language.
This saves hours of work and also makes approval a breeze. After all, with a brand’s base copy, messaging library, visual templates, and content pillars pre-approved, creating a content calendar becomes practically “plug and play.”
Secret #3: Plan Your Content Calendar in Advance
This brings us to another critical workflow process: batch-creating content ahead of time.
For many business owners, one of the most frustrating aspects of do-it-yourself social media content creation is constantly reviewing and approving posts the same day. Not only is this a distraction, but it is also a good way to ensure you are never optimizing your content — for example, by posting at peak times.
That’s why one of the best ways to streamline your workflow is to create your content well in advance. We generally create content a month at a time, but you can go further if you desire and if it makes sense for your business.
Our process usually involves a document wherein we map content pillars and templates onto a calendar and then write each corresponding post, organized by date, below.
Ideally, you work a month ahead at a time. Here’s an example timeline. Let’s say it’s December 1, and we need content for January.
Week One: Create your base calendar with dates, content pillars, holidays, and anything else going on (ex. giveaway or product launch).
Week Two: Create your visuals (graphics, photos, GIFs, Reel, etc.) and write corresponding copy.
Week Three: Get necessary approvals/feedback.
Week Four: Edit and finalize the calendar, so it’s in tip-top shape! Once finalized, schedule content to go out at optimized times.
Last-minute posts do happen, and those can be plugged in as they arise. However, by planning and scheduling your calendar in advance, you have a foundation for success with a clear strategy.
Plus, you can spend more time monitoring and managing engagement than creating content each week.
At Sociality Squared, this process is customized for each client, but the general workflow is the same.
Reach Out to Discover More
The workflows outlined here are just one part of the S2 social media toolkit. If you’d like to learn more about how we help brands develop comprehensive social strategies that achieve meaningful results, reach out today.
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