To have a successful and recognizable brand in today’s day and age, you need a strong online presence. Many brands turn to social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook for their digital marketing. But, with so many users on these websites, how can a brand stand out? By ensuring they have a successful social media review process and content plan.
Why Should You Fix Your Social Media Review Process
A brand’s social media review process is a set of steps that any post needs to go through before being posted to social media. This is an important process because it helps ensure that all of the brand’s content is consistent, regardless of which member of the team creates and posts it.
Having a successful social media review process is essential to any company looking to create an online presence. If your brand consistently posts content with mistakes, your followers will notice and it could make your brand seem unreliable. Similarly, if your content creator is creating posts that don’t align with your brand’s image and posting them without review, your brand will have no consistency.
Creating or fixing your social media review process thus is an essential aspect of ensuring brand consistency, catching any mistakes on posts, and overall saving your team time as multiple people can create content by following your review process.
If your company already has a social media process, you may still need to fix it to ensure it is functioning as well as it can by following these steps.
Here’s the Social Media Review Process You Should Follow
The number one thing to keep in mind when creating or fixing your social media review process is to keep it simple. Try using a checklist that your team can easily follow each time they are reviewing your content. If your review process is too convoluted, your team may be less likely to follow it to a tee. Here is the social media review process you should follow:
Brainstorm
It is a good idea to start with a team meeting to brainstorm ideas for potential social media campaigns. As a team, you can brainstorm ideas together, prioritize them and perfect them before they are even created. The focus of brainstorming can be one project, or many, depending on what your upcoming goals are.
Asset Collection
Following the meeting, the content creator should collect all assets necessary for the project. This includes things such as pictures and videos that will be included as it can help create the flow of the written content.
Manage your creative assets by creating a digital asset management (DAM) system so all of your team’s content can be found in one place.
Writing the content
Once all of the assets have been gathered, the content can be written. At this step, it is typically the content creator responsible for creating the perfect copy written content independently.
To ensure your content creator is creating content based on your brand’s standard, specific brand guidelines need to be created. Guidelines will vary based on the brand, but they will help keep each post consistent, regardless of whether the content creator changes from post to post.
Review and feedback
After the content creator has completed the writing, it should be sent off for review and feedback. Your appointed reviewers should check the project for things such as errors, poor flow, or inconsistencies.
Once the content has been thoroughly reviewed, it can be sent to the content manager for approval.
Manager approval
At this step, proofed content should be approved by a content manager to ensure it meets brand guidelines and the goals set out for the project.
If more changes need to be made, the content creator should be informed to make the necessary revisions.
Revisions
If the content does not meet the brand’s guidelines or goals, more changes will need to be made on the project despite the extensive reviewing process.
So, the project should be sent back to the content creator to make these final revisions and get your content ready for posting.
Schedule your posts
Finally, your project is ready to go. As many brands tend to create content ahead of time, you can schedule a date in your team’s calendar for when you want this new post to go up. Assign the role of posting to one person with a caption ready to go if necessary.
Reviewing and Approving Social Media Content: 5 Best Practices
Once you have a social media review process in place, sticking to it and following these five best practices will ensure that all of your content is perfect.
1. Assign clear due dates
As you have an entire team working on one project, ensuring that everyone completes their part on time is vital to keep the project running smoothly. In your project’s brief that we discussed earlier, you can assign each stage of the project a deadline.
This will ensure each member of your team can be responsible for adhering to their deadline.
2. Guide a small team of reviewers
Assigning a small number of people the job of reviewing content is important in ensuring the content is reviewed efficiently. If you have too many people reviewing one project, it will not only take longer than necessary, but feedback will become repetitive and your content may get lost.
Using only the amount of reviewers necessary and guiding them will streamline the process. Guidance for how reviews should be completed must be outlined by the content manager beforehand and will change based on the project.
If you want reviewers to make sure that something specific is included in the content, they need to know that before they start to review. However you want your team to review the project, explaining that beforehand will ensure everyone is on the same page.
3. Keep your goals in mind
As a team, you should have discussed what your goals are for a particular piece of content. Since so many people are involved throughout the process, your goals may get lost along the way.
To prevent this from happening, assign specific team members the task of reviewing content to ensure it matches your brand’s goal. This does not need to be a separate job, it can be assigned to reviewers to double-check as they go along.
4. Customize your review process
Every brand’s review process will differ based on their needs, goals, and team. Similarly, a review process is flexible and can be adapted at any time. So, if your brand was using a specific review process at one time, but you notice some aspects of it are not working, change it.
You don’t need to stick to one strict review process forever. The only thing you need to ensure is that every member of your team is aware of your current review process, whatever it is.
5. Ensure your review process is consistent
As we previously mentioned, your review process is adaptable and can change at any time. Whatever your review process is, using it consistently is important. This means that every project should follow your review process.
You may choose to leave some parts out or include new parts specific to your project, but the core of your review process should be followed every time. This can easily be done by creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) that your team can follow each time to ensure consistency throughout all of your posts.
Conclusion
Creating a streamlined social media process is vital in ensuring your brand’s online image is curated perfectly. Consistency is key in most aspects of life, and creating a solid digital marketing plan is no different.
Having a solid social media process will help your brand grow and develop before your very eyes.
Author bio:
Max Benz is a marketing manager at Filestage and loves optimizing all kinds of marketing processes. On the side, he’s running a German SaaS directory, suitApp.de.
