If you and your business are just entering the digital marketing space, you must have learned by now that social media marketing is more than just publishing a couple of random blog entries every week.

Reaching out to your consumers and target market requires a great deal of planning and no less than perfect execution. This is especially important when it comes to building and managing social media properties around your business. Social media is pretty much your frontline engagement with your target market. As a thought exercise: imagine being in your physical store and your sales reps start yelling at your customers browsing through the shop. You’d lose sales pretty quickly, and your shop will probably go out of business in a few months. Social media engagement works the same way, but instead of the 10 or 15 people browsing in your store, an error-filled post could alienate and drive away your entire market-base.

If you’ve ever seen a big company make mistakes on social media (glaring typos, grammatical errors, or simply off-brand content) then you’ve probably already asked yourself, “How did this even get published?” These errors in both grammar and judgment are more than likely to be the result of a poor social media workflow.

Here’s how you can get it started.

Define what your brand is. This is a time-tested method in growing pretty much any business, You probably already have a brand that some segments of your target market are already aware of. Now it’s time to strengthen it with the right social media engagement. A well-planned content publishing calendar is one that is aligned with your brand. For example: if you run a takeaway coffee shop and your brand is all about being at the forefront of artisanal coffee, your social media calendar should reflect that. Publish articles that discuss different brewing methods, the regional taste differences of coffee beans, the most expensive kind of coffee and why it’s so expensive–all that good stuff. A great content calendar should also dictate publishing schedules. Are you putting out content once a week? Twice a week? Daily? It’s a calendar, after all.

Delegate specific tasks to specific people. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things in creating a social media workflow for your business. Most businesses either have too many people working on the same thing, or too few people working on too many things. Delegating tasks to analysts, writers, editors, graphic designers and layout artists should be done under the careful watch of the social media manager (or your marketing head). The delegation will allow you to streamline your social media approval process from start to publish. You can also use work management platforms to easily get an overview of specific projects and will also help you determine which processes are problematic in your social media workflow. Even Google Sheets can be a great tool for collaboration.

Adjust, adjust, adjust. Now you’ve pretty much got everything you need to improve or get started on your social media approval workflow. Here’s a tip: add an analyst for post-publishing work. The right analyst can tell you about user behaviour on your published social media content: how many times has the content been shared or reacted to vis-a-vis other posts you’ve made? Is it reaching new users or just bouncing around on the page’s current following? This will allow you to adjust your content accordingly.

Social media marketing in 2020 is more competitive than ever before. Businesses have taken to the online space in the wake of COVID-19. But with a great content calendar, an efficient social media team, and the openness to adjust based on analytics, your social media workflow is bound to give you an edge over the competition.