Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

If you work in a social media team, you probably know how challenging it can be to keep everyone on the same page. From managing schedules to getting things done – everything requires a lot of effort. Things become even more challenging when you are dealing with remote teams with questions like who’s doing what, what’s the plan for the next project popping up.

So, how can teams bring everything under control to work productively?

Well, to help you with this we are going to talk about some simple tips that you can follow for effective collaboration when working as part of a social media team. Further, we will be sharing a list of modern-day tools that can streamline your social media collaboration efforts and help your team become insanely productive.

Let’s begin with the tips first:

  1. Identify your social media superheroes

What’s the one thing that every team has in common? It’s diversity. Every team is made up of individuals, who are different from each other, everyone having a unique quality and expertise of their own.

As a leader, you need to understand this diversity and identify the qualities that make every team member different. You need to then assign them their specific job roles so that they know what they are supposed to do. Here are two common strategies that you can employ:

  • Assign role by network – divide your social media marketing efforts into different channels, and have a specific person-in-charge for each channel. This way, work efforts get divided equally, you can have a direct point of contact to monitor the performance for that channel and there’s no confusion in the execution.
  • Assign role by function – or you can choose another strategy in which the team members are assigned roles based on function. For instance, one person is in charge of content creation, the second one is handling the publishing and distribution, and so on. Based on the team size, flexibility, and skill set of individuals you can pick a strategy.

Whatever strategy you choose, it is imperative that you keep rotating the roles so that everyone gets the exposure and learning. This way everyone gets to learn, and experience a broad range of work related activities and grow exponentially. Besides, it also boosts collaboration efforts in the team since everyone can learn a lot from each other when they are working in rotations.

  1. Focus on your social media strategy and style

Once you have your social media superheroes in place to do their job, the next thing is to define the process that is going to be followed by every individual. It is important to have a process to follow to get the best out of your team’s efforts.

When establishing a process, it is important to be as specific as possible. Otherwise, things can easily slip through the cracks. Here are some simple tips that can help you with establishing processes:

  • Develop a social media strategy

Every business is unique, and your social media should reflect the same. You need to document a strategy and share it with everyone in the team so that they can align with it. Once the strategy is in place, you can move to the next step of establishing your work processes around the same.

  • Create your social media style guide

When you have a social media team, it is important to keep everyone on the same page so that whatever social media efforts go out in front of the audience are unified and in-sync with your brand. This is the reason that you need to create your social media style guide and let everyone in the team know the voice and tone they need to keep when posting on social media channels.

  1. Establish your team processes

The most important step of having seamless collaboration in a social media team is to develop work processes for everyone to follow. Keeping in mind there is so much happening, and you are interacting with real people on social media you need to have a process for your team to follow.

Here are a few steps that you can take to establish social media work processes:

  • Set-up a social media calendar

Plan your social media campaigns, and use a publishing calendar to maintain harmony in your publishing frequency and efforts. Using a publishing calendar, in fact, is the smartest way to keep everyone in your team on the same page, since everyone can see what is being posted online and when.

  • Handling specific scenarios

For instance, handling technical queries on social media. Since your social media team is your first line of communication, they must be able to communicate the basic information. However, based on the specific scenario, they must know where to forward the query and ask that particular team/person to take over.

  1. Keep evolving with time

The most beautiful thing about social media is that it is such a dynamic field. Things can change in the blink of an eye. What worked as a strategy a few days back could become an obsolete trend today.

This is the reason that maintaining flexibility in your social media team collaboration efforts is a must. You and your team need to have constant, meaningful interactions to make sure that you guys can keep your pace up with these constant changes.

Here’s how you can do it:

  • Uninterrupted communication

For a social media team to constantly evolve with changing times, it is important to have well-defined channels of communication where team members can share ideas and updates. This flow of information, keeping everyone in the loop, allows teams to stay on top of the latest trends and bring changes in the work strategies accordingly.

  • Timely meetups for exchange of ideas

Besides regular communication exchange, a social media team must always have regular team meetups, to analyze how things are working, the changes in trends that are creeping up and how you can prepare your social media efforts for the future.

Tools for Effective Social Media Collaboration

Now that we have talked about some simple tips to boost your teamwork, let us shift our focus on tools that can help you in achieving the same. I have divided these tools into four categories, all of which are an integral part of working in a social media team:

Project management and team collaboration

Project management tools play an imperative role in team-building efforts in today’s time. By giving teams a centralized space for all their tasks, workflows, and collaboration endeavors. Here are some of the best project management tools that can within every team requirement –

  1. ProofHub

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

As an all-in-one project management and team collaboration software, ProofHub helps managers stay in ultimate control of their teams, tasks, campaigns, and communications. The easy-to-use interface ensures that social media teams can get easily on-board without any difficulty.

It offers a dedicated space for real-time discussions and an in-built chat app. It also has an online proofing tool for reviewing design files, sharing feedback, and proofing them. You can integrate apps that your team is already using like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Box to bring everything to one place. The simple, no per user pricing makes it an attractive option for constantly growing teams.

  1. Asana

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Asana is another popular project management software loved by social media teams. The drag and drop functionality in the tool makes it easy to use. It simplifies workflow management by giving teams project timelines, so you can track how your campaign is progressing.

Instead of native features, Asana offers a large number of integrations, which makes it a highly flexible tool. Although it offers a free version, the features are fairly limited in that, which is quite understandable. However, the beautiful interface with unicorns flying and monsters peeking around makes it a fun tool for teams.

  1. Trello

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Trello is a visual project management tool that relies on colorful boards for managing tasks and projects, which make it an easy and uncomplicated tool for teams. It is one of the most popular project management tools in the market. You can add tasks to these boards, add tags, assign them to team members, and add custom fields quite easily.

Easy scheduling with its simple drag-drop feature makes it highly intuitive. One of the most exciting things in Trello is its built-in automation tool Butler that lets you automate presets with rule-based triggers. Trello has a free version, but for advanced features, you have to switch to paid plans.

Communication

Communication tools help teams stay connected and maintain a continuous flow of ideas amongst themselves. This is the reason you need to pick only the best ones according to your team’s needs. Here are some of the best options to select from –

  1. Google Hangouts

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Even if you are not a google fan, you cannot ignore the fact that Google Hangouts is the simplest and easiest way to keep your team communication at one place. All you need is a google account to start using this app.

This free app lets you have one-to-one chat, group conversations as well as audio and video calls. It’s easy-to-use, and you can add up to 150 members to a Hangouts chat. Whereas you can have up to 25 members collaborate over a video call using this tool.

  1. Zoom

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Zoom is the most effective way to carry out virtual team meetings. This popular video-conferencing tool has risen in popularity especially since the coronavirus outbreak.

Meetings, webinars, conference rooms, phone systems – Zoom offers everything a social media team needs for effective communication and collaboration.

You can carry out private chat, record your virtual meetings for future use, and share screens.

Although there have been safety and data security concerns raised about the app, you can easily navigate through security settings to prevent all those concerns.

  1. Slack

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

The third name on this list is Slack – a tool that is loved by everyone, from small teams to Fortune 500 companies. It simplifies team communication with features like real-time notifications, discussion threads, and search.

Apart from being just a simple communication tool, Slack also offers advanced task management and team collaboration features. There are plenty of integrations to bring together everything that a social media team needs to work together and stay productive. The company uses freemium pricing, where the basic version is free and advanced versions are charged on a per-user basis.

File storage

Keeping data centralized and accessible to all the team members is important for reducing the confusion and saving a lot of time. This is where using cloud storage apps like the ones mentioned below comes into the picture. Here are some of the most popular file storage apps that you can pick for your social media team –

  1. Google Drive

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

A go-to tool for creative teams, Google Drive is the best way to store your files, share them across the team, and effectively collaborate over your files and documents. It offers flexible pricing based on the storage capacity, so you can pick according to your team’s requirements.

With the option to create folders, share them with others, and quick search, it becomes quite easy to keep everything organized. Teams don’t have to waste time searching for files and documents while working, making them more productive and efficient.

  1. Box

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Box is a free cloud storage app that gives you up to 10 GB of free storage space. Just like Google Drive, it also has flexible pricing plans – but an interesting thing is that it offers unlimited storage in its plan for small and mid-sized companies, which is available at quite an affordable price.

What makes it a popular choice as a cloud storage app is the added work-flow options that it offers. Features like sharing files, assigning tasks to team members, comments, and real-time notifications whenever a change is made in file make it a great option for teams to work together.

  1. Dropbox

Social Media Collaboration: Easy Tips and Tools for Effective Teamwork

Dropbox is one of the oldest cloud sharing apps in the market that is loved by teams of all sizes. It enjoys a large fan following because of its ease of usage. It also offers flexible pricing plans that include a free version with free 2GB data storage, and paid plans that offer unlimited data storage

Dropbox shines through for its simplicity. Advanced data security and file recovery options make it a highly powerful and secure tool for storing your team’s data. So, if you are looking for a reliable and easy-to-use option, Dropbox can be a great choice.

Conclusion

Social media collaboration is not just about sharing ideas, discussing things, and brainstorming together. It is also about evolving together as a team so that your social media efforts are always up to the mark. With the right mix of strategies and tools, you can keep your team inspired to work together, and achieve great results in your social media collaboration endeavors. Try the tips and tools for social media collaboration mentioned in this post, and you are surely going to see a positive change in your team’s performance.

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Author: Nandini Sharma

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