One of the biggest social media marketing challenges faced by growing businesses today is producing a large volume of relevant content at a fast pace. Sounds familiar? Read on to learn how to tackle this problem and optimize your content workflow:
Setting up the right social media content workflow has never been more important.
Why?
As your business scales up, you’ll surely face the challenge of expanding your social media presence. To be able to achieve it, you’re going to need more quality content – and you’re going to need it fast.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Alright, but how do I whip out amazing social media posts at lightning speed?”
That’s where a streamlined social media content workflow comes into play. Taking steps to optimize your social media content creation process will enable you to publish a larger volume of relevant posts at a faster pace.
But that’s not the only reason to make your content workflow smoother, as failing to do so comes at a high price. A study by Kapost revealed that inefficient management of content marketing activities costs companies a loss of whopping $958 million each year.
On the other hand, content teams working efficiently produce 2x more content 163% faster with the same volume of resources compared to teams without optimized workflows in place.
Ready to learn how to make your own content workflow more efficient?
Let’s dig right in:
Clearly defined team roles and responsibilities are the absolute foundation of a functioning social media content workflow. That’s because knowing the exact scope and timing of tasks allows people to take ownership of their work and communicate better.
Your social media team members should fulfill three basic roles in regards to content production:
Responsibilities:
Responsibilities:
Responsibilities:
Depending on the size of your team, each person can fulfill one or multiple roles simultaneously. Regardless of the role, though, it’s crucial that all the team members frequently communicate to keep the content flow up and running.
How do you ensure that your team is touching base regularly?
Start with providing your team with the right collaboration tools (we’ll cover these in detail later).
It’s also a good idea to schedule weekly short meetings. To make your meetings as efficient as possible, keep them between 10-15 minutes, clearly formulate the purpose of the meeting, prepare an agenda beforehand, and be constructive.
Analyzing your target audience can make your social media content workflow much more efficient.
That’s because knowing who you’re talking to enables you to build a better content strategy centered around topics and formats interesting to your community. As a result, you can focus on crafting content that works, as opposed to wasting time, money, and resources on posts that just aren’t as effective.
Here’s how you can learn more about your audience:
1. Social media platforms’ native tools. Social media platforms allow you to collect quite a bit of audience data, such as:
*Household and purchase insights are currently available in the US only.
2. Google Analytics. Google Analytics is one of the most important audience data resources. It can provide you with useful granular insights, including demographics, interests and affinities, language, location, behavior, device, and even the type of browser your followers are using.
3. Surveys and polls. Surveys and polls are a great way of learning specific information about your audience that’s unavailable in native analytics. You can run polls natively on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or use tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to go beyond social and survey people via email or web.
After you collect the data, it’s smart to analyze it collectively to understand a detailed picture of your specific audience.
Group your audience according to their shared characteristics such as interests or behaviors. This will allow you to concentrate on creating posts tailored to these groups and minimize resource spending on ineffective messages.
The result?
A more efficient social media content workflow (and a more engaged audience, of course!).
Need help mapping your audience personas? Check out our free persona template!
Knowing how to quickly get post ideas for each of your personas can largely speed up your content workflow.
Yet, brainstorming fresh ideas can be challenging. Just look at the second persona from the image above, Basketball Ben. There’s only so many posts about basketball you can come up with off the top of your head.
And if you’re relying on your own imagination only, you’ll slow down or completely stop your content flow sooner rather than later.
That’s why you need to know where to look for content ideas. We’ve rounded up a little cheat sheet:
Surely what works for the competition doesn’t necessarily have to work for you – after all, your personas might be different. Still, monitoring other brands’ news feeds can give you an idea of content that generally resonates in your industry.
P.S. Yes, that’s another reason to optimize your social media content workflow!
To do that, use a tool like Almighty Press – an app that allows you to quickly search for articles by keywords. You can even narrow down your search and look for interesting blogs on specific websites, like TechCrunch, that you know your audience follows. From there, republishing the content you found on your own page is an easy step.
And the best part? You can now have AI match your audience personas to the prime content they like, speeding up your social media content workflow even more!
At this point, you’ve organized your social media content creation team, analyzed your audience, and rounded up great content ideas.
Now, it’s time to figure out how much content you actually need to produce.
This step is extremely important to optimizing your social media content workflow. That’s because you need to post frequently enough to keep your audiences engaged and reach your targets.
On the other hand, you don’t want to waste resources on creating a vast amount of content only to flood your audience’s news feed and appear spammy.
Want to know if you’re producing too much content or too little? Compare yourself to your top competitors to find out!
So what’s the perfect amount of content to be putting out there?
It depends on the platform.
According to a study by HubSpot, you should be publishing 5 times per week on Facebook and LinkedIn. If you publish more than that, your posts won’t be as effective, meaning you won’t get maximum value from all the effort invested in content creation.
Image source: HubSpot
When it comes to Twitter, HubSpot recommends publishing as often as possible. Since the platform’s feed is still largely chronological, posting fresh content will put you on top of the news feed and help you earn more visibility and interactions.
On Instagram, research suggests the optimal publishing frequency is 1-2 posts a day.
Keep in mind, though, that these numbers are more of a hint rather than rule. You should test different posting frequencies and see what works best for your business.
It’s also really important to publish consistently – more so than scrambling to publish a certain number of posts recommended by research. There’s nothing worse than getting your audience used to seeing your content every day only to disappear from their feeds later – a problem that can be easily solved with an optimized social media content workflow.
TIP: One of the ways to scale up your content production is leveraging influencers. If you’re able to pinpoint experienced influencers who know how to engage their following, you can use their efficiency to spread your message to their audiences.
Your social media content creation process will be much faster if you equip your team with the right tools beforehand.
Here are some apps and websites that can come in handy when creating social media posts:
Once your social media content is ready, it’s time to think of when you should send it out to the world.
A clear content calendar is a crucial element of any working social media content workflow.
Why?
A calendar works like a roadmap showing how to efficiently distribute your resources. Scheduling social media posts allows you to assign tasks accordingly and ensure that your content flow runs perfectly.
A social media content calendar is also a great method for keeping track of your content and making sure all posts go out on time.
How do you set up an effective content calendar?
TIP: Make sure to always publish your content when your audience is active online. This way, you’ll increase your chances of earning interactions and get the most of the efforts invested in social media content creation.
At this point, your content is scheduled or, perhaps, even published – a result of your team working together flawlessly, analyzing your audience, and creating the right posts with the right tools.
For many businesses, that’s where the optimization of social media content workflow ends.
But for smart marketers like you, there’s one more important step to take.
Keeping tabs and reporting on your content performance plays a major role in improving your social media content creation process.
Why?
Monitoring your content enables you to understand what works and what doesn’t. This information is key to identifying any possible inefficiencies or flaws in your strategy and fixing them ASAP.
The question is – how do you properly monitor and report on your content performance?
Use social media analytics. Social media analytics is extremely helpful in regard to measuring the success of your content. Here are some of the metrics you should focus on.
How can it help you improve? Seeing a breakdown of interactions by content type allows you to quickly identify the underperformers and take steps to make them better.
How can it help you improve? A low number of interactions per 1,000 followers might be a signal that your content is resonating with only one of your audience personas – a fact that you can leverage to revamp posts aimed for other audience groups.
How can it help you improve? Looking into your top posts can provide you with a handful of tips on successful content format and topics that you can use to improve your future posts.
How can it help you improve? Knowing which organic posts will perform well can help you cut down on time you’d normally have to spend selecting content to boost. Plus, viewing your posts’ future performance allows you to make better investments and use your social media budget more efficiently.
Use social media listening and sentiment analysis. Another way of measuring the success of your social media campaigns that compliments analytics is using social media listening in conjunction with sentiment analysis. These two tools work great for discovering and measuring the type of responses your content is generating.
Imagine you find out your latest post sparked tons of positive conversations across social media. You can use this information to look into the post, determine what made it successful and replicate the most effective elements in another content piece.
On the other hand, negative comments are hints on content topics and formats you should most likely avoid.
Again, both types of feedback can help steer your content strategy in the right direction, minimize spending on ineffective posts, and ultimately help optimize your social media content workflow.
Once your team collects all the data on content performance, make sure they create a neat report and share it among each other.
This is one of the areas where many managers waste hours putting together reports on their campaign and content performance. This process doesn’t have to be so time-consuming, though. In fact, you can easily aggregate all your data, including third-party data, in one spot to generate an insightful report for your management in one click.
Not sure what to include in your social media report? Here’s a simple 3-step guide on how to properly report on your social media performance.
As an expanding business in the ever-growing social media marketing world, you need to be ready to scale up your content production anytime.
After all, the amount of content that’s sufficient today might fall short tomorrow – which is why it’s so important that you know how to optimize your social media content workflow.
Want to bring your social media content creation process up to speed? See how you can easily create, publish, and monitor all of your social media posts in one place.