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.
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.
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.
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:
This process starts by identifying who needs to be involved.
Enter the people you will be working with…
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:
Now let’s look at the standard 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.
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:
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!
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:
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.
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!
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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