Whether you’re a Virtual Assistant, a marketing consultant or an in-house social media manager, you know how important systems are to your success.
There are so many steps that need to be taken to produce engaging social media content. You need to have a clear strategy in place, a process for brainstorming new content ideas and a step-by-step workflow for bringing each post to life.
As your business or your client base grows, the complexity of managing multiple social media accounts increases. With so many posts, assets and captions flying around, you need to ensure you’re getting content reviewed and approved on time to ensure you stick to a consistent posting schedule.
That’s why you need to implement a content approval workflow that helps your team communicate easily and take posts from idea to execution quickly.
Not sure where to start? Let’s run you through what you need to know about building a content approval workflow and how to power up your team with the right team chat and approval flow tools.
Why is a social media content approval workflow important?
It takes a team to bring the best social media content to life. Whether you’re working internally with your own managers or collaborating with a range of clients, you need to give your teammates a chance to review, suggest changes and approve posts before they go live.
While this might sound straightforward, the best social media content approval workflows actually involve a clear set of steps and guidelines that need to be followed.
Without the right process in place, typos, missing hashtags and pixelated images might slip through the cracks. Plus, without clear deadlines for approval, you may struggle to keep up with your posting schedule, which can impact your brand’s results on social media.
In a nutshell, here are three powerful reasons why you need to prioritize an approval flow:
- Catch mistakes before they happen: a second or even third set of eyes is the best way to spot typos or mistakes in your content before it is published to your feed.
- Give everyone in your team a voice: collaboration is key to success! Approval flows allow your entire team to voice their ideas and suggest improvements to take your social media content from good to great.
- Stick to a consistent posting schedule: with deadlines and approval checkpoints in place, you can ensure you’re posting on a regular basis to social media and keeping your audience engaged and growing.
How to set up a social media approval workflow
No matter what industry or clients you’re working with, all approval flows need to involve the same key steps. With the right processes in place, your team can work more efficiently, produce higher quality content and drive even better results through social media marketing.
Here are the key steps to include in your social media approval processes:
- Assign team roles: make sure to clarify who is creating your content, who edits and maintains quality and who is responsible for approving and publishing content.
- Set timelines and deadlines: think about when you want your posts to go live, and work backwards from there. Plus, make sure to set a regular rhythm and cadence so your team knows exactly what is expected from them at each point in the month.
- Define workflow steps: now, it’s time to figure out what steps you need to take to get your content approved and published. From designing graphics to writing captions and researching hashtags, maek sure you figure out the actions that need to happen, and when.
- Handy notifications and alerts: the best social media workflows use tools that provide notifications and alerts when a post needs to be amended, reviewed or approved. This helps to hold your team accountable and ensure no posts are missed.
New feature: discover Plann’s new team chat and approval flows
Ready to bring your approval workflow to life? Plann has just released two gamechanging new features to make it even easier to work with your clients or internal marketing team.
If you’re tired of managing spreadsheets and sending endless emails back and forth, it’s time to jump on Plann’s new team collab features!
Dedicated team chat for each social media post
Want to make it even easier for your team and clients to offer feedback on posts? Plann now allows you to start a conversation on any post you’ve created within the platform.
Simply create a post in Plann and use the dedicated chat feature to invite your teammates or clients to double-check your creative, ensure your caption is on-brand and even suggest the best call to action.
Approval processes to keep your team informed and accountable
In very exciting news, you can now create and manage your own content approval processes directly within Plann.
No matter your team size or how many clients you’re working with, Plann allows you to assign certain levels of access to different team members, set tasks and start chats to approve and schedule your posts.
Within Plann, you’ll be able to track the status of conversations with handy notifications that show whether a comment is still pending or if the post has been approved.
The best bit? You’ll score real-time sharing and updates across Plann on the web and the Plann mobile app to ensure you can get your social media posts live as soon as possible.
Power up your team with approval flows from Plann
We want to grow with your business, which is why it’s easy to upgrade your Plann account or invite your team to join and collaborate.
Ready to start using Plann’s new team collab features? Find out more or sign up for a paid Plann subscription today.
