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A Complete Guide to Social Media Project Management in 2023

Social media is a challenging task. It requires proper skills and tools in place. Here’s your go-to guide to Social Media Project Management in 2023.

Pratik Shinde

Pratik Shinde

A Complete Guide to Social Media Project Management in 2023
Summary

According to statistics, social media is the place to be. If you're looking for the most popular platforms, YouTube reigns supreme, with 81% of Americans using it, followed by Facebook at 69%. 

The point is that social media is brimming with marketing opportunities. However, even with so much scope, social media strategies often fail when not done correctly, mostly because of poor planning and execution.

It is possible to get lucky once in a while and have a viral post bring you tons of new followers and traffic, but it would not be wise to rely on such unpredictable strategies. So, first, understand how social media works and learn social media management skills to get the most out of your campaigns and drive success. 

Today, I will help you understand all about social media project management and the tools that can help you excel at it. Let’s dive in!

What is social media project management?

The definition of social media project management is far from fixed. Platforms and trends are constantly changing, which means that the responsibilities associated with managing a brand account are constantly changing as well.

However, social media project management can be simply referred to as a continuous process of creating and scheduling content with the goal of growing and nurturing an audience across social media platforms. This includes -

Components of social media project management

1. Campaign planning 

We all have to start somewhere. Often, the best place to start is to identify the campaign's ultimate goal, then work backward from there. If your campaign goal is to increase your follower count or increase brand awareness across social platforms, then set some milestones to measure your progress. You can then plug in steps along the way to create the final plan that your team can execute.

2. Content ideation 

Content is what engages your target audience and encourages them to like, follow, and share your brand with their friends and connections. So, brainstorm ideas as a team, take feedback, use necessary tools, research trending topics, and then move ahead with content creation.

3. Content creation 

Good content doesn’t come out of thin air; instead, it takes a lot of time, careful thought processes, reviews, and revisions for both visual and written content. Usually, this task is handled by professionals such as graphic designers, videographers, video editors, and copywriters. It is also important to see that assets are assigned, developed, and approved on time.

4. Content scheduling 

It is crucial to provide a visual method for scheduling posts across the increasing number of social media networks that today's marketers manage. Social media managers can keep campaigns on track by using an organized social media content calendar along with post-scheduling times and details. It also fosters transparency, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and is aware of what is coming up next.

You can schedule your content in advance with Iconosquare across multiple social media accounts.

5. Approval & feedback 

There is a workflow and a series of approvals for each post to ensure it meets the requirements. By clearly defining workflows, teams can keep track of who is responsible for what tasks and set deadlines for creative asset drafts and approvals. Workflows and task management prevent campaigns from being delayed due to miscommunications or not receiving drafts/feedback on time.

With Iconosquare’s collaboration feature, you can submit your content approval before publishing. 

6. Social listening 

Social listening is another important aspect of social media project management that involves monitoring social media networks for comments on posts, brand mentions, product mentions, questions, and direct messages. All these are opportunities to respond and engage your audience. Social media listening can also be used to conduct competitive analysis.

With Iconosquare’s listening feature, you can spy on your competitors and monitor your brand.

7. Analytics & reporting

Monitoring analytics is a continuous process that allows teams to identify the most effective campaigns and tactics for engaging audiences on social media platforms. After all, you don't want to discover that you're losing followers or that your engagement levels are declining weeks or months after the problem arises. Regular reporting allows you to identify problems quickly so that your social media team can work on solutions.

Benefits of social media project management tools

1. Plan your content ahead

Social media can not always be dependent on impromptu work. It needs proper research, planning, and processes to be in place to make a campaign successful. This is why everything needs to be planned ahead of time. 

All of the planning and establishing content workflows can be done easily using a social media management platform like Iconosquare or any appropriate project management tool of your choice. From content ideation to scheduling and task assigning everything becomes easy with project management tools while ensuring your campaigns are always on point.

2. Improves team collaboration

When tasks are managed using proper social media project management tools and skills, team members are aware of what is next in their pipeline, when they are expected to complete a specific task, what the outcome of their tasks is, and, most importantly, what company goal their tasks contribute to. It is critical to keep the team on the same page and focused on a common goal.

The tool allows you to assign tasks to team members and provides an overview of all campaign details, such as the task owner, due dates, progress status, priority status, and more. Everyone knows who is working on what improves team collaboration.

3. Manage multiple campaigns

Some businesses rely on multiple social profiles and networks for marketing purposes. There are numerous reasons why a company would have multiple social media pages and campaigns running at the same time (different product lines, teams, locations, etc.). Consider how much more difficult it would be to manage them if you had to log in and out of each individual profile and network in order to check all of your messages.

Social media management tools can consolidate messages sent to all of your profiles and networks into a single location, saving you the time and effort required to manage multiple accounts.

4. Track everything from a single dashboard

A Lot of things happen across different social channels for all the campaigns you are running and all the accounts you are managing. The numerous things to look into and juggling between different campaigns can get really stressful often leading to missed mentions, comments, and opportunities to engage the audience.

Social media project management tools allow you to have everything on one dashboard making it easier to track everything from mentions to customer conversations all in one place. 

5. Easy reporting

Social media managers aren't the only ones interested in analytics; stakeholders throughout the organization want to know how social media is performing. It is critical to provide digestible information to the Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Director, or client of your agency.

Social media management tools make it simple to export presentation-ready reports for distribution to those in your organization who require them.

Top social media project management tools

Managing a social media account is a challenging task. You're probably juggling multiple work streams just to keep your social media accounts active, between new posts, audience interactions, and internal company amplification. Luckily, there’s a better way i.e., using social media project management tools. Here are the top 5 social media project management tools that can make a huge difference.

1. Iconosquare

Finding the best social media strategy is a challenging task. It necessitates a significant amount of data. Furthermore, while data contains a wealth of useful insights, it does not provide a clear picture of your brand's performance in a crowded and noisy market. Iconosquare can assist you with this. It's a social media analytics, management, and scheduling platform.

It provides campaign management across multiple accounts, aids in content ideation, creation, content scheduling, and social listening, and includes a team collaboration feature with a strong approval workflow. Iconosquare also provides some of the most detailed analytics in a visually appealing format.

Key Features 

  • Campaign planning: Social media managers can manage multiple social profiles in one place and give access to clients or business partners around the world.
  • Content ideation: Study your market with the section listening and the #s feature.
  • Content creation: Upload images to the content library, to make sure you have your visuals while scheduling posts.
  • Content scheduling: Plan your content ahead of time on IG, FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • Approval & feedback: Improve team collab' with the team approval feature (They can approve or decline posts and even give feedback).
  • Social listening: Track competitors with the IG benchmark and study their strategy.
  • Analytics & reporting: Get insights across IG, FB, Twitter, Linkedin, and TikTok along with automated reporting.

2. SmartTask

It is critical to have a social media workflow on which to rely in order to keep your content strategy organized and effective. This is where SmartTask comes in handy! 

It is a robust project management and collaboration tool that caters to the requirements of teams of all sizes across different industries. When it comes to social media campaign management, SmartTask lets you visualize your campaign goals using kanban boards, set milestones to achieve them, assign roles, responsibilities, and tasks to teams, and share content briefs, feedback, and approvals. 

You also get dashboards, multiple views, and analytics to get in-depth details of all your campaigns running, their progress, performance, and more.

Key Features 

  • Content ideation with boards and views.
  • Content planning & scheduling with milestones and calendars.
  • Assignment of tasks, roles & responsibilities.
  • Real-time collaboration with comments, mentions, feedback, etc.
  • Time tracking and timesheet to keep a track of time spent on tasks.
  • Workload and portfolio views to keep a track of teams’, and projects’ progress.
  • Analytics and reporting features to understand campaign performance.

3. Asana

Asana is a fantastic collaboration tool that supports teams in managing a variety of activities. Kanban boards, lists, calendars, portfolios, workloads, and timelines are just a few of the several project views it offers to let you manage your social media activities in different ways.

With Asana you can create your social calendar and manage your tasks and teams as they work on the content. You also get a social media content calendar template helping you visualize your campaigns in a better way.

Also, Asana provides incredibly simple solutions to automate workflows, repetitive chores, and business processes that include other software programs.

Key Features

  • Mapping content tasks with different views.
  • Social media calendar planning with calendar view.
  • Team collaboration and communication feature.
  • Templates to visualize workflows.
  • Automations and integrations to make tasks easier.

4. Monday.com

Monday.com is a work OS that helps teams manage their tasks and workflows. The tool has an attractive interface and looks as if it has evolved from collaborative spreadsheets. It can be customized as desired.

The tool helps you manage all your social media marketing campaign requests and ideas in one place. You can easily build a social media calendar and then track the campaign tasks related to it with the help of highly-visual dashboards.

You can also import social media analytics data to monitor campaign performance across all your social media networks from the OS itself. This will help you to identify patterns to plan your next campaigns.

Key Features

  • Campaign management from planning to tracking. 
  • Content calendar for planning the content.
  • Centralize campaign tasks through dashboards and board views.
  • Custom automation that triggers specific tasks.
  • Seamless integration with social media platforms.
  • Reporting and analytics to analyze the campaign performance.

5. Trello

Trello is a straightforward and user-friendly project management software. Trello’s drag-and-drop Kanban board is simple to use for everyone on your team. 

You can create a social media marketing board to manage tasks and visualize progress throughout the workflow. The software is easy to use and is ideal for managing simple projects.

Butler, Trello's automation bot, makes it easier than ever to set up rule-based triggers and desired actions. It offers just enough to help you save time and get more done without worrying about admin tasks, such as due-date commands, moving cards from one column to the next, and notifying team members.

Key Features

  • Kanban board and cards to map the social media content.
  • Butler to automate tasks.
  • Templates that make setting workflows easier.
  • Integration and Power Ups for better functionality.
  • User-friendly interface and quick learning.

Wrapping up…

There is definitely a battle when it comes to managing social media. Any social media strategy needs a social media management workflow in place, and it should be your first priority to have one.

Do your best to build your social media strategy around your workflow at all times, keeping in mind to define clear responsibilities, have clear guidelines, and have the right tools. These procedures, along with social media workflow tools, can help you achieve your social media marketing goals.

About
the writer
Pratik Shinde

Pratik Shinde

Contributor @Iconosquare

Pratik Shinde is a Content Marketer and SEO enthusiast. He helps fast-paced B2B SaaS startups acquire customers through organic marketing efforts.

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