Bo Pokštefl
|Best practices , Collaboration

5 Easy Ways to Improve Collaboration with Your Team and Clients

Oct 04, 2016 min read

Content

Working in a team, and especially with clients, can sometimes get difficult. Since you’ve opened this article, you probably know a thing or two about that 😉 If you are a marketing agency, a freelancer or you simply manage social media channels with someone, listen up!

So what if I told you there are a few ways to make collaboration better and more effective? And it’s easier than you think! Let’s get it crackin’ 😉

Do you still use spreadsheets for social media content planning and trade them back and forth between all the people in your team and with your client?

Then you know the pain of having to do your work twice. That’s only because you worked on an older version since you didn’t check your email for a newer one or your colleague didn’t share it with you on time…

The trick is to keep all your content plans in one place, enable all team members to contribute while making updates in real time, and store images, ideas and post inspirations accessible for all team members.

Everything should happen in one place. No more frantic search for that one file among tens of others, no more lost visuals, copy texts or entire content plans, no need to exchange files between all those people anymore.

A little secret here: there’s a solution to that 😉 More about that, later on in this blog.

When working on social media content in a team, it’s essential that every team member can easily see the communication about the posts that are assigned to them – what has been done and what the next steps are.

It is impractical to have all this information scattered in mailboxes or messaging apps of different team members where others can’t see it.

Not only does it consume time; it may also prevent other team members from progressing with their work and meeting the deadline.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to lead both internal and client communication in one place, next to the posts to which they relate?

Team members will keep track of all comments and won’t need to look anywhere else, yet clients should not see any of this. They will only see their own communication with you.

Yes, there are collaboration and communication tools like Slack may provide an easy and quick way to chat. However, it may be a pain in the neck to look for specific content-related messages, and it’s even worse when you can’t find a message because it’s been deleted automatically after some time.

And email may still be useful but not for sharing resources for a content plan – just try looking for the image your designer sent you 2 weeks ago and match it to the right post. Not easy, right?

Spreadsheets are great for numbers, not content plans. Visualizing your content plan with a calendar and post previews will give you a much better overview of the post schedule than a dull Excel table and will help everyone be more effective.

Furthermore, changes should be uploaded in real time so that everyone always has the latest version of all content.

Making it easier and faster for the team to contribute resources to specific posts is another way of facilitating collaboration. And another aspect of a seamless workflow is streamlined internal approval process that eliminates the need to exchange emails or messages when you approve a post or send it for rework.

Spreadsheets are great for numbers, not content plans

Sounds like a lot of work to set it up? Just read on, it won’t be – I promise 😉

It’s important to have a comprehensive overview of all the planned posts, their status, and tags.

Especially tags will give you a precise idea about your content balance (e.g. 80% of your posts are hard sell? This helps you see it and change it for the better.).

Everyone in the team should be able to see everything and add resources to posts, such as images, videos, 360 photos, GIFs, and more. In addition, leaving notes and comments next to the posts is very effective when creating high-quality content. Then just send it for internal approval.

You probably know how frustrating and disorganized it can be when clients start editing your copy or changing the schedule of posts. Because if they have the chance to edit these things, they almost always will.

The best solution is to let clients give you a creative input and guidelines (brief), then review the content and approve it or give you relevant feedback and send it for rework.

This will later lead to high quality, engaging social media content.

When reviewing content, clients should be able to see a live preview of each post, both a desktop and a mobile version. Let them also add comments, images and videos – they shouldn’t have to send these via email but upload them directly to one shared platform.

To make this streamlined approval process concise and clear, be sure to keep track of feedback comments.

How many versions of a single post does your team create before it is ready to be exported? Sometimes one, sometimes five.

And I’m sure you know how it can happen that one of the first versions complements the later ones, and THE post is born.

But it may be hard to remember what those earlier copies were, for instance.

It’s a process, we understand.

And that’s why it really is important to keep history of all post versions in the shared platform. Together with comments and notes in a chronological order, this makes it a lot easier to work on posts.

Kontentino helps you tackle these challenges effectively and make your collaboration within the team and with clients seamless – as easy as ever.

Kontentino, withn its intuitive features, will provide you the 5 easy ways to make your collaboration better.

PS: These best practices have really helped us and many of our clients. And how about you?

Do YOU have any tips on how to improve collaboration? Share them with us in the comments below! 😉