When you manage multiple social accounts, efficient processes are key to success. Learn how to overcome the most common social media workflow challenges.
Remember when all you needed to do to drive engagement was post a cute photo with a clever caption? Today’s social media managers could start a support group to mourn the days when social media strategy was simple. But they wouldn’t have the time between juggling accounts, chasing trends, and appeasing algorithms.
If you’re managing social for an agency or multi-location brand, you know the struggle all too well. You spend your peaceful mornings chasing down post approvals. Your afternoons vanish into platform-hopping. And just when you think you have a handle on things, a client tags you in an urgent comment expecting your response yesterday.
Without a streamlined workflow, social media management can be all-consuming. But with the right tools and processes, you can have a well-oiled, content-creation machine. No matter how many accounts you manage, each can have its own content strategy, approval chain, and engagement requirements.
Sound too good to be true? Let’s review seven of the biggest workflow challenges that trip up social media teams and how to overcome them.
1. Avoiding bottlenecks
Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you: You’ve got brilliant ideas ready to go, but somehow they keep getting stuck in limbo. Bottlenecks make your blood boil and can derail entire campaigns, leaving you scrambling to fill content gaps at the last minute.
Imbalanced teams and unclear ownership are common culprits. When you have 10 social media managers sending briefs to one overwhelmed graphic designer, you’ve created a natural chokepoint. Likewise, when briefs lack clear direction on goals, audience, and messaging, creators waste time guessing or producing content that misses the mark.
Combatting bottlenecks starts with better content planning. Consider templating more of your content or diversifying post types to reduce design dependencies. Standardize your briefs with mandatory checklists covering all essential elements—target audience, messaging points, campaign goals, and required assets—before work begins.
Manual solutions only go so far. You can set firm deadlines, assign task owners, and implement project management tools. But if you lack the specialized features your social teams need, the results will fall flat.
Dedicated social media management tools make life easier. For example, platforms like Sked Social give social media teams visual content calendars, customizable approval workflows, and asset libraries to help them coordinate their social media efforts more efficiently.
Added challenge: Getting approvals
Even the smoothest content creation process can crash and burn in approval purgatory. We’ve all been there—clients forget they need to approve posts, stakeholders request endless revisions, or approval emails blend into crowded inboxes. Before you know it, your well-timed campaign is running days behind schedule.
The key to breaking this cycle is designing an approval process with efficiency built in. Send content for review well in advance of publishing dates, establish clear SLAs for turnaround times, and consider a ‘two revisions max’ policy to prevent endless feedback loops.
Content approval processes can sometimes be challenging, but the right tools can help simplify them. Some tools offer features like approval workflows where stakeholders get review links directly by email. This allows for quick feedback without requiring additional logins.
A centralized system for comments can also help keep all feedback organized in one location rather than scattered across different communication channels. Content moves smoothly from creation to publication, everyone has visibility, and you can finally catch your breath from chasing approvals.
2. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule
Consistency can be a struggle for busy teams. Whether you’re managing multiple client accounts or coordinating across brand locations, maintaining a steady posting rhythm on your content calendar can feel as impossible as keeping your sourdough starter alive. Inconsistency creates gaps in your feed and works against the algorithm.
Static content calendars in spreadsheets might seem like an easy fix. But they become outdated fast, requiring manual updates and offering zero automation. The moment a post gets delayed or needs revisions, your entire calendar needs manual adjustments.
Planning tools help you bypass this train wreck completely. Sked Social’s visual planning calendar gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your content across platforms and accounts, making it easy to spot and fill gaps.
Some tools also include batch scheduling, which allows you to prepare a week or month of content in one session rather than scrambling every day to post. Automatic publishing sends out your posts at optimal times, so your social presence stays consistent, even when your team focuses on other priorities.
3. Collaborating with other team members
Social media is a group effort between designers, copywriters, strategists, and clients. But this multiplayer approach often creates workflow headaches. Scattered feedback across emails, texts, Slack DMs, and in-person conversations leads to misaligned content, duplicate efforts, and frustrating delays.
While communication tools like Slack centralize conversations, they still separate discussions from the content you’re creating. Team members toggle between platforms, searching for specific feedback about that particular post from a week ago.
Collaboration features tie all the threads together, keeping communication where it belongs—attached to the content. Team members can comment on posts, tag colleagues for input, and track revision history, all within the same platform where you create and schedule posts.
With permission-based access controls, custom user roles, and transparent workflows, social media collaboration can go from a free-for-all to a buttoned-up process where everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it.
4. Keeping up with social media platform algorithms
Just when you think you’ve cracked the code, the algorithms change again. Social platforms leave marketers in a constant game of digital musical chairs. Last month’s clutch strategy can suddenly flop, which leaves teams struggling to maintain visibility and engagement rates.
Then there are resources to consider. If you’ve built a team heavy on graphic design talent and the algorithm starts favoring video content, you’re stuck. Or maybe you’ve spent weeks creating template libraries for carousel posts, but the algorithm has other plans, prioritizing Reels or Stories.
The best defense is staying informed. Subscribe to industry publications like Social Media Today and Social Media Examiner. Follow social media channels for platform announcements so you never miss an update, and implement A/B testing to see what sticks. Most importantly, keep an eye on your analytics so you know when performance shifts.
Some platforms track this all for you. By monitoring engagement metrics across content types, you can spot emerging algorithm preferences before they become common knowledge. When certain formats outperform others, you’ll know when to pivot and redirect resources to beat the algorithm at its own game.
Added challenge: Staying on trend
Beyond algorithm changes, there’s the pressure to tap into cultural moments and trending topics before they fade. Being late to a trend is almost as damaging as missing it completely. But monitoring every platform for emerging content formats and conversations is a full-time job.
Not every trend will resonate with your target audience—and knowing the difference is critical. Social listening features help you cut through the noise by analyzing audience sentiment and engagement patterns within your community. Instead of chasing every trending hashtag, you can see what conversations followers are actually participating in.
Craving more hard data? Many platforms offer custom reports with data-driven insights to help you adapt your social media marketing strategy.
Sked ranks your best and worst-performing posts and uses AI analysis to highlight which content types are gaining traction. You’ll quickly see if static posts are losing steam or if video content is surging, so you can change up your approach before engagement takes a nosedive.
5. Responding to comments and DMs
The work doesn’t stop when you hit publish. Managing responses across accounts means logging into each platform separately, navigating different interfaces, and creating on-brand replies for every comment and message. For teams managing multiple brands or locations, this approach turns community management into the job nobody wants.
Manual workarounds like batching responses into dedicated time blocks or focusing only on high-profile comments can help, but they’re band-aids on a deeper workflow issue. Your team will still have to bounce between platforms, missing valuable customer interactions while knee-deep in older posts.
Having a unified inbox is a lifesaver. All comments, direct messages, and messages from connected platforms appear on one dashboard. It typically captures old and new interactions on posts, so nothing slips through the cracks. Plus, you can tag team members within message threads, so you’re not Slacking about how to respond to a comment.
Some platforms offer customizable filters for prioritizing urgent messages and built-in team collaboration tools. This turns multi-platform engagement chaos into streamlined workflows that won’t leave customers hanging.
Added challenge: Keeping up with tags
How do you respond when your brand gets tagged? These mentions are valuable opportunities for connection and user-generated content, but they’re easy to miss when scattered across platforms. Without a system, these potential brand assets disappear into the social media abyss.
A centralized monitoring system can help you track mentions of your brand across platforms, including comments and messages. Some tools offer different features that automatically collect posts where your brand is tagged, linking the original captions and creator information.
When you find content worth resharing, these platforms may provide streamlined ways to contact creators and influencers for permission. After you get approval, you can save preapproved content in a digital library for future use, creating a more organized approach to content creation. That means you can finally clear all those screenshots off your desktop and trade them in for a clear workflow.
Added challenge: Averting crises
Try as you might, you can’t prevent every PR disaster—an unintentionally insensitive post, a misconstrued message, or a customer complaint that takes on a life of its own. In these moments, speed and coordination are everything. But traditional workflows often fall short when you need a quick, thoughtful response.
A comprehensive monitoring system gives teams the visibility they need to spot emerging issues before they blow up. Rather than discovering problems hours later during routine platform checks, notification features can alert you to unusual engagement spikes or negative sentiment patterns.
Collaboration tools are the true heroes of social media crises. Within Sked, you can tag team members into sensitive conversations and loop in leadership, PR specialists, or subject matter experts as needed. All discussions happen within the platform, which creates a decision trail for crafting appropriate responses. You can make sure every reaction shows your brand’s best side.
6. Reporting on performance
Drowning in metrics across platforms with little time to extract meaningful insights? For agencies juggling client accounts, this is a common struggle made worse by different client goals and strategies. Setting clear KPIs and using third-party analytics tools can help, but they take effort to compile, analyze, and present in a stakeholder-friendly format.
Analytics tools eliminate the time drain by automatically importing key metrics from all connected platforms into one interface. Solutions like Sked offer automated analysis that provides instant performance summaries, highlighting social media trends that can take hours to uncover. Report generation features can help you create shareable summaries without needing separate design software.
Want to see how your competitors are doing? Competitive analysis allows you to monitor how your performance compares to others in your industry. Track rival performance alongside your own and give stakeholders the tea they crave.
7. Overcoming content fatigue and creative burnout
Every social media manager hits a creative wall. Content fatigue is real, and until you’re staring at a blank content calendar or posting the same type of content, it doesn’t always sink in.
Breaking through creative blocks takes both strategic approaches and tech assistance. Repurposing social media content can extend the life of your best ideas while reducing creation demands. Look beyond your industry to adjacent markets for fresh concepts that still align with your brand voice.
With AI tools, you have another creative lifeline when inspiration runs dry. From generating caption variations and hashtag recommendations to suggesting engaging content ideas based on your top-performing social media posts, it’s like having a virtual creative assistant for overcoming creator’s block. No tool can replace human creativity, but it can give you the brainstorming spark you need to fill your team’s creative tank.
Social media management software: The key to efficient workflows
Manual workarounds seem cost-effective, but they create unsustainable processes that collapse under real-world demands. Spreadsheets become outdated, platform-hopping is exhausting, and makeshift solutions drive everyone nuts.
Purpose-built social media management tools transform chaos into strategy by:
- Reclaiming your team’s time
- Creating cross-platform consistency
- Making collaboration friction-free
- Empowering data-driven decisions
Platforms like Sked solve workflow problems by creating better workflows. When technology tackles complex operations, the real-life humans on your team can be more creative and strategic.
Streamline your social media workflow with Sked Social
Managing multiple social accounts shouldn’t fray your nerves. Sked Social supports your team at every stage, turning fragmented processes into workflows that make sense. Our comprehensive approach eliminates workflow bottlenecks, from content creation and scheduling to engagement and reporting and every step in between. You maintain control without doing the heavy lifting—and you get all the credit.
Ready to reclaim your time, reduce stress, and deliver better results? Start your free trial today and find out how efficient social media management can be with Sked!
