Sourcing information and imagery, planning content, and managing the tasks and projects associated with social media content is no easy feat. While some posts are a quick draft and design, others require marketers to source content from different areas of the organization, pull in quotes from members of leadership, write and record scripts, edit video footage, and other steps. For marketers tasked with creating social media content for financial brands, an added layer of compliance approval can make things even more challenging. So, how do you do it? How can your organization streamline content and compliance with better social media task and project management? Maybe even better content marketing workflows in general!? Here are some questions and considerations to think through as you aim to improve efficiency and accountability.
How do you source social media content?
Your content should reflect your values, service, and expertise–including engaging imagery and updates from across different teams and lines of business. Is your lending team holding a seminar for first-time homebuyers? Post about it. Sponsoring the charity golf tournament again this year? Post a photo from the course. Installing a new key member to your leadership team? Highlight her. Planning an annual give-back campaign or food drive? Post, post, and post.
For many community banks, credit unions, and financial brands, the process of sourcing photos and information from these types of social-media-worthy events and moments can be extremely difficult. After all, a member of the marketing team or social media coordinator can’t possibly be everywhere at once. Social Assurance’s Marketing Platform is built for this, offering task and project management tools that make it easy to import key events into your social media planning calendar, then assign tasks for different teammates to ensure they actually take the photos and submit the context and info you need to create social media posts about the events and initiatives happening across teams and branches. Need a specific photo from a specific lender? Assign it to them in a task with a clear deadline and notes about what you need. They simply upload the photo options with a few quick notes, and send it quickly and securely through the Social Assurance platform to the marketing and compliance teams so everything is streamlined. Assign tasks, link them to projects, set deadlines, and keep those involved informed every step of the way. It’s that easy.
How do you ensure follow-through and accountability?
Asking someone to take care of a key step in a process (or several) is one thing, but ensuring follow-through and accountability is another. Some organizations have task and project management tools they utilize to stay organized operationally, but they rarely extend into social media and aren’t built for the granularity of these multi-step projects that can involve copywriting, editing, design, scheduling, approval, compliance checks, and publishing. Those workflows warrant their own accountability and oversight mechanisms.
In streamlining social media content, opt for task and project management tools that integrate into your content and compliance workflows for these channels. Social Assurance is exactly that–a content, compliance, and marketing management tool that connects directly to social media platforms to fully streamline posts and projects of all types and sizes. Best of all, start-to-finish process management means you can assign a task, then follow it all the way through to the final post, so no piece of execution is left undone or overlooked.
How do lenders use social media?
Lenders are an important piece of your financial brand’s sales and marketing puzzle. In fact, social selling can be an incredibly valuable strategy–allowing lenders and sales agents to build rapport, stay relevant among customers who aren’t always ready to act, and build a reputation for their expertise and networks. But, social selling presents unique challenges. Lenders must remain compliant and the way they post needs to help (not hurt) your brand and messaging.
A little bit of oversight goes a long way. Social Assurance’s Sales Agents solution is designed specifically for this use case, allowing financial brands to deploy a social selling strategy and management platform that works seamlessly across multiple teams. Task and project management tools like the ability to assign posts to specific lenders and workflows that can loop in marketing and compliance teams ensure these posts are reviewed and approved. Best of all, these workflows are always documented through audit trails and fully archived.
How do approvals happen?
Approvals can be a key workflow bottleneck for social media posts and projects alike, making them an especially important consideration. If there isn’t a streamlined way to get content in front of a copy editor, a marketing manager, perhaps a branch manager, and definitely a member of the compliance team, what would be a timely post quickly becomes outdated and no longer relevant. What’s more, back and forth messages and screenshot emails can really bog down inboxes.
Streamline social media content and compliance with easy approval checks. Tasks related to a social media post or project can be easily routed to the appropriate user for review and approval in the Social Assurance Marketing Platform. No need for additional emails, screenshots, or other cumbersome communications. It’s all right there, accessible, documented, and done.
Is marketing content being tracked and archived?
Financial brands simply cannot talk about social media content workflows without considering compliance documentation and audit trails. If you’re using common task and project management tools for other business processes, they’re likely not built for the unique compliance checks required of marketing teams in the financial services industry. In fact, social media planning and management tools aren’t either. They typically don’t integrate task management and they definitely don’t integrate task management as well as compliance. Be sure your solution can do all of the above.
Better Social Media Task & Project Management
Better social media task and project management for community banks, credit unions, and financial brands is here. Social Assurance makes it easy to plan, assign, oversee, and manage multiple steps in the creation of a social media post or campaign. With unlimited users, easy-to-track to-do lists, straightforward workflows, and automatic archival, it’s the only solution built for the unique needs of financial brands. Interested in learning more? Use the link below to get in touch.
