Democratizing Social Media Marketing

Overview

Xenia Muntean is the CEO and co-founder of Planable, a social media tool that acts as a one-stop-shop for the entire creation process, from writing content to scheduling and distributing across a multitude of channels. Planable is used by large, multi-national companies like McDonald's, Motorola, and Volkswagen.

Her Mission: To optimize workflow and ensure the streamlined collaboration of multiple teams in the publishing of content across social platforms.

Not A One Woman Show

At larger firms, that are producing and distributing 10+ pieces per week, content is no longer fully reliant on one or a small team of creatives. Social as a whole has grown within the marketing mix, both in headcount and budget, as the platforms have extended to reach billions of potential customers. For Xenia, this expanded value required coordination which, at the time, was extremely lacking using the available tools, namely good old fashioned spreadsheets; teams were wasting time and trying to track down which modifications were approved/rejected in cells. This is the mess that Planable aims to solve.

What You See Is What You Get

One of the biggest obstacles, in addition to the nightmare approval process, was the inability to display content in the suitable formatting for the various channels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others all have proprietary formats, from word count to image dimensions. Teams spent countless hours tempting to tailor posts and running around trying to fix cropping or image warping errors. From the start, Planable set out to create a cloud-based platform that allows the teams to 'see what they get' during the creation process. It provides the means to host, manage, plan, and discuss the content all in one place, streamlining the process and freeing managers from tracking down rogue emails or Slack messages with edits.

The Order of Operations

When wishing to overhaul a company's workflow, management should begin with a small internal audit, to find the bottlenecks and pain-points. This will help determine whether the workflow slows in the approval, feedback, or planning stage. Every team is different and expanding communication, with the team members and clients, helps arrange the company-specific methodology. Just because a certain process has been in place for many years, doesn't mean it is the most efficient or effective as Social has changed so dramatically in such a short amount of time. It is paramount that both the workflow retains clarity both in who is performing which stage and the overall messaging or aim of the piece. Is it clear? Is it simple? If the answer to either of these questions is 'no', it may be time to overhaul the workflow process.

In Summary

Social has expanded and grown in importance within the marketing mix. However, Xenia has worked to create a platform that bolsters clarity and collaboration, while adjusting to the remote-reliant world in which we now. This was only a high-level overview of our conversation. Be sure to listen to the full episode.

See you next week!

Extra Reading on the Social Media Approval Process