How to Plan Your Social Media Marketing: Four Tools for Approvals, Workflow, and Collaboration

When you work as part of a team on managing social media—whether it's a team of 2 or 20—problems and mix-ups are bound to arise. Who decides what gets published? Who has permission to access a particular social account? How do you quickly get approval from busy managers or clients?

This article will discuss planning your social media marketing, including approval workflows and team collaboration.

Why do you need a workflow?

Unless you're completely alone managing your social media—from the creation process to actually publishing your updates and managing comments and messages—you need a tool that allows for multiple team members and lets you set up clear workflows and approval schemes:

• You won't need to share social media passwords with everyone on your team.
• You'll be able to assign specific roles to each team member, manager, or client so that everyone knows what to do.
• You'll plan all social media content in one place, including drafting ideas and collaborating with your team to get suggestions and improve each update.
• You'll submit each update for approval before scheduling/publishing to the right party to avoid any issues that might arise.

What does a social media approval workflow look like?

Though it does depend to some extent what tool you're using for team collaboration, the collaboration and approval workflow follow certain steps every time.

You add team members with their own specific roles that control what they can or can't do on the platform. For example, some can only create content, others can make suggestions and leave comments, while others also have the power to decide what gets published or scheduled. In some cases, you can even control which specific social accounts they have access to and what they can do on them.

You also use a shared space to jot down all your team's ideas, make suggestions for each piece of content to improve it, and come up with additional ideas for content.