Social media management may sound simple enough, but it’s ultimately a complex undertaking with a lot of moving pieces — particularly when it comes to creating posts.
It can be difficult to constantly come up with new, interesting ideas that will successfully promote your business, build relationships with your audience, and help you connect to new potential customers. And once you have those ideas, you need to determine format, media, platforms, and then actually create it.
Whether you’re a team of one, an in-house marketer, or you work for multiple clients at an agency, a straightforward social media workflow can help you stay organized and better manage social media content on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
In this post, we’ll go over the seven key steps of content management and share daily, weekly, and monthly workflows to help manage social media content efficiently.
What is a social media workflow?
A social media workflow is a series of steps that allows your team to consistently and efficiently schedule error-free social media posts in a timely manner. A workflow defines people’s roles throughout the social media publishing process and implements repeatable steps and deadlines for each editorial period.
Essentially, a social media workflow is how you manage social media content.
If implementing a workflow sounds like what you need to improve your social media publishing process, then let’s take a look at what goes into one.
We like to break this down into stages and people.
How to manage social media content in a workflow
Managing a social media content calendar starts with content generation and continues all the way through publication, moderation, and analysis. Depending on your role, you might be responsible for some or all of these steps. However, since most social media managers see content from development to posting, these seven steps cover the most typical workflow for social media management.
First, let’s look at seven key steps that make up how to manage social media content.
These seven steps cover the major milestones of social media management, but of course every social media marketer’s workflow will look different.
- Ideation: Develop social media campaign strategies and specific content ideas. This is your time to brainstorm freely and document all potential ideas.
- Planning: Choose which ideas to execute and determine content format, platform, and timing. Then align posts with larger campaigns and business objectives.
- Creating: Produce the chosen content, including writing, filming, and editing. Plan for necessary resources and timelines to ensure content is ready on time.
- Approvals: Get approvals from stakeholders or managers to ensure the content aligns with brand voice and quality standards, using repeatable approval workflows for efficient review processes.
- Scheduling: Use social media management tools to schedule content in advance, ensuring posts are auto-published at peak times.
- Moderation: Engage with the audience by monitoring and responding to comments and messages. Meanwhile, keep your eye on the performance of live content to identify trends and successful posts.
- Analysis: Report regularly, tracking key metrics so you can understand what content performs best. In the long-term, perform detailed social media audits periodically to refine strategies and improve results.
If these stages — and the people responsible for them — are not well established, you are likely to see a lot of friction in the process. The key to a successful social media workflow is communicating, and agreeing upon:
- Who is expected to handle each stage
- When the work needs to be completed
This process starts by identifying who needs to be involved.
Enter the people you will be working with…
Who should be involved in a social media workflow?
The roles in your social media workflow are dependent on the type of business you work for, its size, and the scope of scoial media within that company. The important thing is identifying who is responsible for the tasks of each department: names, job titles, deadlines — all of this helps when putting your workflow together.
Here are the functions to consider in your workflow:
- Marketing: Team members responsible for ideation, copywriting, asset gathering and proofing
- Stakeholders: Whoever is responsible for approving the initial concepts, for instance management or clients
- Legal: To ensure there are no liability issues
- Human Resources: To ensure the updates are in line with company policy
- Sales: To check the correctness of any sales messages
- Product: To check the accuracy of product information
- Third-Party (Project Dependent): any clients, agencies or contractors you may be working with
Now let’s look at the standard social media workflow.
The 7-step social media workflow
Your social media workflow should be exactly that: your social media workflow.
It should be unique to the needs of your team, and flexible enough to respond to any changes or challenges you're going to face over the coming months. That said, there is a standard workflow that most social media marketer's will recognize. It can be summed up in seven steps, though you can easily adapt it it to your own team structure and approach to content creation.
.png?width=500&height=750&name=How%20to%20manage%20social%20media%20content%20(1).png)
1. Ideation
The ideation part of the social media process involves coming up with broader social media campaign strategies as well as specific and one-off content ideas.
So where do the ideas come from?
A big part of ideation is strategy; your social media strategy gives you boundaries in which to ideate. In a nutshell, strategies read as “I’m going to do X to accomplish Y as measured by Z.” For example, “I’m going to prioritize Threads to build a tight-knit community as measured by engagement rate,” or, “I’m going to invest in short-form video in order to increase my reach as measured by impressions.”
These give you solid parameters to work within, since you likely already know the format, channel, and/or post type to explore in order to reach those goals.
A local salon, for example, may know they want to create a series of Reels teaching clients how to manage curly hair to increase reach and book appointments. That’s a general strategy idea. They may come up with more specific ideas like the following:
- Showing different techniques for styling curly hair
- Talking about the differences between styling for curly vs. wavy hair
- Showcasing different types of products and explaining how to use them
Of course, sometimes you just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. In the age of recommendation algorithms, random ideas can be a strategy in themselves.
Think of this step as pure brainstorming — there are no bad ideas. Write down any ideas that feel like they have solid potential. You can come up with ideas on your own, or hold a brainstorming session with a team.
Some social media marketers prefer to hold dedicated ideation and planning meetings once a week or once a month, depending on their workflows. Even if this is your preference, make sure to always keep an eye out for new ideas and log particularly good ones when you have them. We like keeping a live note or Google document where we can drop any and all ideas as they pop up, even if we want to review them later.
Need some help kicking off your brainstorm? We add new post ideas every day in the Loomly app, plus we're always sharing idea round-ups on our socials. Or, check out our big list of social media post ideas!
2. Planning
The planning process involves choosing which ideas to execute, what angle to take, and potentially consider how they fit into overall campaigns or business objectives.
A computer repair shop, for example, might look at their idea list and think the concept of “common ways people damage their devices” has potential. This could be turned into any of the following:
- A funny series of TikTok videos showing people accidentally dropping laptops, spilling drinks on keyboards, and power outages short-circuiting devices with a reminder that the repair shop can help.
- A Facebook text post detailing the 5 most common reasons people bring their devices in for repair, and how to protect devices (such as silicone keyboard covers or protective cases with links to products).
- A series of Instagram carousel posts talking about specific causes, at-home fixes, when to bring it to the repair shop, and prevention tips.
Once you have this information, you’ll want to consider how these posts fit into larger campaigns, how many posts you want to create around a single idea, and when you want to post them. The repair shop could theoretically create all of the content above and space the posts out over months; they also may choose to only the first idea because it aligns with their brand best.
This is the perfect time to implement our social media calendar planning method. Once you have your list of ideas, filter them through your value pillars and content pillars in order to mold them to fit your strategy.
- Value pillars represent the value you want to bring to your audience, whether it’s inspiration, education, or something else.
- Content pillars represent the major topic areas you cover in your content.
By filtering your ideas through these pillars, you end up with fully fleshed out content plans that can actually deliver on your social strategy.
At this point, social media marketers may submit their content plans to any overseeing managers or clients for approval. If you’re the only one creating content and making decisions, however, full steam ahead!
3. Creating
Now that you know what content you want to make, it’s time to actually start creating it. That may involve any of the following:
- Writing briefs or instructions and sending it to team members, external marketers, or influencers
- Curating existing images and video clips
- Writing social media post copy
- Creating graphics or taking photos
- Shooting and editing video
- Researching and defining social SEO keywords
It’s important to consider timelines when it comes to post creation. Writing a long-form text post for LinkedIn, for example, can easily be done in twenty minutes or less on the spot. If, however, you want to create a specific TikTok video from an event you’re hosting in-store, you need to have that planned and ready to produce.
Images and videos often take longer to create, and may require certain circumstances to capture. Keep this in mind so that you have enough time to capture the media needed, get any approvals required, and actually edit and create the content itself.
Depending on your business and your social media workflows, you may benefit from the following creation strategies:
- Batching content: Put together a list of content you want to create all at once. It’s smart to batch content that covers the same topic or theme, as you’ll likely realize some overlap between content that saves you from duplicating your efforts. Sticking to the same topic also gives your brain a break because you don’t have to switch between information and ideas.
Source: Loomly's Instagram
- Repurposing content: A single video clip can be used in multiple different individual posts across different platforms. You can think of ways to repurpose anything from an idea to an image to save yourself time later on and to get the most out of a single idea while still creating fresh content for new audiences.
- Blocking off regular creation time: Some marketers and business owners prefer to create all of their posts for a single campaign, week, or month at once time. This can save them time and help them get “in the zone,” and it’s also much more efficient if they’re submitting the content for someone else’s approval.
4. Approvals
This step won’t apply to solo business owners or to marketers who may have hands-off managers, but it’s a crucial step for most in-house and agency social media teams.
This is when you loop in stakeholders, including overseeing managers, clients, or business owners, to review the content. This allows you to get their approval on everything from brand voice to image quality, and allows you to incorporate feedback before content goes live. Sometimes it’s helpful even to just have a second set of eyes on the content, even if it’s from another peer.
The most efficient way to get approvals is to use content calendars with built-in approval processes. Loomly’s approval workflows, for example, allow marketers to create full posts (media and copy included!) in our social media management software. Stakeholders and managers can review full previews of posts, seeing exactly what they’ll look like before they go live and providing feedback or making edits within the content calendar.
Loomly offers three pre-defined workflows – Zero, Lite, and Original. However, if you need to involve multiple stakeholders at different steps or a more tailored approach, you can customize your workflow with assignment triggers and safeguards to ensure posts reach the appropriate stage with the right team member.
Approvals are the most common bottleneck in social media content creation. The best way to keep your workflow moving steadily is to implement a regular and predictable approval process. Pick a check-in point that your stakeholders can pencil into their calendars, so they always leave a few minutes every week to offer feedback.
Make sure you account for the approval process when planning your posting schedule; you don’t want to find yourself submitting content on a Monday that needs to go live Wednesday when it typically takes three or four days for your clients to even review the content.
5. Scheduling
Scheduling content should be relatively easy, especially once you discover your ideal posting schedule. We strongly recommend using a social media scheduling tool (like Loomly) so that you can upload and prep content long before it actually has to go live.
Auto-publishing is the way to go, allowing you to schedule content in advance and ensure that you won’t miss peak posting times, even if your team is out on vacation.
6. Moderation
Community management and post moderation is an important part of any social media marketer’s job. You should watch for public comments and private messages, interacting as much as possible. We can’t stress this enough: Users notice when brands engage with customers, even if it’s not their comments you’re responding to, and this is a critical part of relationship building.
You also want to monitor for successful posts, taking note of what users are responding to (or not) and why. Sometimes it’s easier to spot trends when you’re assessing content while it’s live as opposed to only looking at pure metrics and analytics later on.
Moderation is going to be part of your daily social media management workflows. At the very least, we recommend checking in once or twice per day, but consider monitoring your social media channels and engaging as often as resources allow.
7. Analyzing
Analytics and reporting are crucial to help you understand what’s working and what isn’t. A weekly and monthly check-in to assess key social media metrics such as comments, video views, and reach are essential to helping you track what’s performing best. If needed, you can pivot quickly.
It’s also important to conduct more formal and extensive social media audits at regular intervals. Some businesses may do this monthly, though others will do this quarterly or biannually. These audits dive deep to help you discover which platforms, campaigns, post types, post media, and more are impacting your overall results.
With the right social media scheduling tool, you can also track analytics. Loomly measures post performance in real-time so you can track audience engagement, identify top-performing posts, and track click counts for campaigns. Learn more here.
Daily, weekly, and monthly social media workflows
If you’re still wondering how to structure your workload, we’ve got you covered! Below, we’re going to share some suggestions for daily, weekly, and monthly social media workflows to keep you on track and on time. Keep in mind, though, that every business is unique, so adapt these as you see fit!
Daily social media workflow
- Write down any new content ideas you discover
- Create time-sensitive or urgent content if it arises
- Check messages and comments, responding as often as possible
- Ensure that your social media calendar is in good shape and posts are going live
Weekly social media workflow
- Check the week’s schedule to ensure that all content is scheduled as expected
- Look for any last minute changes to the upcoming week’s schedule, including new priorities from management
- Review the next week’s calendar
- Look for any “next steps” that need to happen, like coordinating with a photographer, making edits on posts, or scheduling a video shoot
- Consider content that may be needed in the following weeks, including copy, graphics, or information from SMEs
- Check in on content approval status if needed
- Casually review of post performance
- Schedule the following week’s content (if you’re operating on a weekly scheduling basis)
Monthly social media workflow
- Audit monthly social media performance for all platforms
- Review your current content strategy against the audit
- Reach out to influencers or potential collaboration partners
- Plan next month’s content strategy
- Consider any significant upcoming events that require special attention, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, which often require advance preparation
- Assess your ad budget, if relevant
Customize these social media workflows
Coming up with great ideas for your social media posts is just one part of the actual content creation process. Having dedicated workflows can help business owners and social media managers alike structure their days, weeks, and months to ensure that the wheels keep turning and nothing comes screeching to a halt.
Customize the workflows above so that they align with your content creation, approval, and publishing processes. Every business is different, so your workflows will be, too.
Improve your social media workflows with an all-in-one content creation, approval, and scheduling tool. Get started with a 15-day free trial.
