8 Ways to Make Social Media Collaboration Work for Your Marketing Team

Your marketing team and social media collaboration is like managing a preschool. While you want to maintain peace, you are constantly being pulled in different directions.

It can quickly turn into a chaos with everyone posting what they like. This can cause inconsistency and confusion among your audience.

Remote work has made this situation more difficult. This is evident in many studies, particularly for communication workers, whose interactions are more static and isolated.

Many employees are frustrated by the difficulty of sharing information.

What do you do then?

Centralizing approval is key to social media collaboration.

Below, we’ll show you how to achieve success in eight steps.

First…

What is Social Media Collaboration?

Social media collaboration simply means working together in social media. The type of social media collaboration that you have will depend on who you are working with.

• External: Here, you work with another brand to share audiences and plan your strategy together in order to attract a wider market. External social media collaboration is a key social media marketing strategy.
• Internal: This refers to collaboration at a company or team level in your social media projects. The subcategory of social media collaboration that includes marketing team interactions can be anything from creating a strategy to curating content.

This guide focuses on the second type, which is collaboration within your marketing team.

Common Social Media Collaboration Mistakes

If you don’t plan or organize social media collaboration properly, it can be troublesome. These are common mistakes that can hinder your efforts and how you can fix them.

Structure is lacking

Problem:Members in your marketing team don’t know what their roles are.

• They may overlap in their messages/posts.
• Everybody assumes that someone else will do a particular task.

Solution:

• Defined roles and tasks
• Smooth hierarchy.
• Streamlined horizontal & vertical communication

Automation is not accepted

Problem: Some marketers are hesitant to use automation as they feel that it removes the human touch.

Solution:

• Automate publishing and scheduling content using automation tools
• Software can be used to manage the activity of your team (e.g. posts, chain feedback).

Even the most experienced marketers have become technologists due to the digital nature of customer engagement. The image above shows that 81% of marketing agencies use marketing automation/journey management software, further cementing its importance. Source

Pile-Up

Problem: Because people in your marketing team aren’t clear on their roles, they often share responsibilities. Your backlog will grow.

Solutions:

• Set a clear schedule and assign roles to everyone.
• Keep an eye on the backlog.
• Find the best solutions and assess issues as they occur.

Misscommunication

Problem: Your marketing team isn’t sharing information well.

Solution:Find out what is causing your miscommunication. This could be due to a lack in expectations, goal setting, or ineffective communication tools.

• Make sure that your team is able to communicate on a particular platform.
• Make sure everyone knows their role.
• Keep in touch with your team to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Source

Tip A simplified approval process for social media is the answer to all of your problems. This means that no one in your team will post randomly without following a clearly defined process.

This approval process will ensure that your marketing team understands their roles and follows a hierarchy before they send out messages.

Thus:

• It is possible to avoid untimely responses and conflicting messages.
• Your prospects are receiving fewer messages from your team.
• Social media communication can be more consistent.
• You’re wasting less time & resources

Let’s now see how these eight tips can help you ensure seamless collaboration on social media.

1. Set goals

You must first set goals. These goals should be:

• To align with your business goals
• Each member of your marketing team should be specific and suitable
• Clear for each member
• Split into clear objectives

Every member of a team must know what is expected. They should also be able to understand the sequence of their tasks.

Here are some guidelines for setting goals for your marketing team.

2. Social Media Guidelines and Processes

Once you have established the general goals, it is time to create specific guidelines and rules for each goal. This means that everyone should know the steps they need to follow in order to accomplish their tasks.

The following is to be clarified:

• Which team will start the project first?
• What’s the expectation of them?
• Deadlines for each person/small team
• Verification and evaluation
• General schedule
• Performance indicators

Let’s take, for example, the goal to create one post on social media. This is what your team must know:

• Who will create the strategy and when?
• Who will take up the creative process and when should they stop?
• Which team should they collaborate with?
• Who will they present the final creation to (e.g. clients, stakeholders, etc.
• How approval is granted and the verification process.
• How will the posting take place
• Who will respond to the post?
• Who will monitor KPIs (e.g. engagement rate, comments and shares, likes)
• How will you monitor the success of this post?
• If the post isn’t performing as expected, who will edit it?

3. Assign Roles

One important observation can be made from the section that follows:

Without clear roles for each member of your team, you can’t create a clear process.

The following people are usually part of a social media marketing team:

• Social media manager, the overseer: The social media manager ensures that everyone works together with their team. They do general research and assign tasks.
• Content Creator is the enforcer.Content creators are given briefs and put their creative cogs to work researching and delivering the content.
• Community Manager is the connector. Communities managers manage relationships with members of the community. They are involved in communication and PR, as well as customer service. They are also your ears, using their excellent interpersonal skills to social listen.
• Analyst: The checker:Analysts monitor the results of your marketing team’s efforts to ensure that they are successful. Analysts can provide you with progress reports that will give you practical insight to help you reorganize a campaign or plan for more success in the future.

4. Make sure everyone is on the same page

Now that you’ve established the core processes and roles of your marketing team, it’s time to let everyone know what they should do.

Here are some ways to ensure everyone is clear about their roles and how they should complete their tasks.

Make a Social Media Style Guide

Your messages should be consistent and coherent. This social media style guide will ensure that your brand has one voice and one personality, as well as one set of values.

Your company will appear unprofessional, chaotic, untrustworthy, and unprofessional.

Source

Create your social media calendar

It is important to have a social media calendar because:

• Everyone is aware of the deadlines for their assignments
• You send clear, consistent messages to your target audience and clients
• You will respond promptly to any feedback or questions
• Social media allows you to target prospects easily and effectively.

30-day social media calendar example. | Source

Establish effective communication

It is important to make sure everyone knows who to talk to and what purpose they are contacting to accomplish their tasks. This will help you save time and money.

Take, for example:

As you can see, every team member knows who to talk with both vertically as well horizontally.

This is why content writers don’t talk directly with analysts or marketing managers, saving both time and resources to ensure everyone does their job promptly.

5. Collaborate with other teams

Once you have established communication between the teams, from style guides to syncing and processes, it is time to establish communication with other groups.

These are the other teams.

If you are a social media expert, your IT department could be one of these teams. IT teams are essential. They can solve glitches, optimize and curate content for different platforms.

The sales team is the next.

Many social media platforms have shopping functions. The world is your oyster, from Shopify to Instagram Shop synchronization and buying directly from your posts.

You want your marketing team to be a part of social media.

• All you need to nail it
• Effectively collaborate with all departments involved, including your sales team.

Your marketing team will need to work with you on this example of shopping features and associated pages.

• IT team
• Customer service department
• Analytics and research
• Even more

You need rules, protocols, people and rules to facilitate all interactions.

6. Multi-level Approval and Feedback

You have now set up your communication, roles, tasks, so people can do their jobs effectively.

What happens when they are done?

They submit their work to be approved, and there is a process for that as well.

These rules are not for the sake of being too pedantic. These rules will streamline your work and improve efficiency. You’ll be faced with incomplete and late feedback.

What happens if your entire team is delayed in their work?

It’s more than a shorter work week and fewer coffee breaks. It doesn’t even matter how much money you lose.

It’s all about missing opportunities.

To avoid this:

• Make sure everyone knows who to ask for approval, and tag the appropriate people.
• Make sure that approval/feedback staff have clear deadlines.
• Automatize notifications before deadlines (e.g., a day before).

Automate the approval and communication process. SocialPilot’s latest feature, which allows you to comment on every social media post that you create and tag specific members of your team, is a great example.

This is how you can get their feedback or ask them for their opinion. It is much simpler than sending e mails, inviting people to open attachments or visiting other websites.

Start your 14-day trial

7. Scheduling/Automation

Automate your scheduling with an automation tool. It can be as simple as an Excel sheet or a software solution like SocialPilot’sscheduling tool that your marketing team can access.

You want your team to be able to do the following:

• An overall view of all the tasks and deadlines for the entire team
• A unique view of each member’s work and deadlines

TipAllow team members to publish their work beforehand, and check a box every time they complete a task. This will allow them to send the task down the funnel and notify the next member of the team who must take it on.

Automatization is also possible

• Recurring tasks (e.g. posts)
• You can create and approve specific social media posts ahead of time (e.g. before holidays or specific moments).

8. Regular internal updates

The goals and objectives of your team will change every week, so you need to keep the latest version.

Also, you need to be updated about the following:

• New rules and guides
• Processes changed
• Tools you’re incorporating into your process
• Roles and deadlines
• All other issues that may arise and impact their work

Software solutions are available that can help you do this:

• Record changes occur as soon as they take effect
• Notifications are automatically sent to the team members concerned
• Modifies automatically the approval process algorithm to ensure that people don’t violate the old rules

In conclusion

We are confident that you will have the right toolkit after reading this guide on social networking collaboration. Our advice will help you and your marketing team work like a dream.

You need to have processes and plans in place for everything.

This is how you can avoid wasting resources and time on unnecessary tasks. Take advantage of the most powerful automation tools available to your team.

SocialPilot offers a variety of solutions, as you can see.

SocialPilot makes it easy to publish on all major social media platforms. Our intuitive calendars will give you a 360-degree view of all aspects of your strategy and execution. Collaboration software improves the efficiency of your team by allowing you to clearly define roles and responsibilities.

SocialPilot’s first article was 8 Ways to Get Social Media Collaboration in Your Marketing Team.