How do others use Workfront to manage their Social media team projects/tasks?

[David-M-Allen]

Hi everyone, because engaging with social media can be so quick turn, we are having challenges using Workfront to capture an accurate representation of the work involved in the day today. How are you using Workfront to track your social media efforts?

[JillAc]

Our social media manager refuses to use Workfront because she uses Sprout and adding to Workfront is duplicate work. She also doesn’t use WF for approvals, which means her work is outside of everything else we do (can you see how annoyed this makes me!). I have convinced her to add one line item for each topic she’s posting about into a project that I can add to our marketing calendar so we can see how it flows with the rest of our marketing. However the marketing team is continually annoyed how they have no insight into what is being posted until after the fact. It’s an ongoing struggle.

[David-M-Allen]

Yes, we have a similar issue with our marketing team not knowing what is happening on social until after it happened. To solve this we set up a monthly "bucket" jobs for social, where they have weekly stand ups to discuss the topics that will be engaged. However there are still gaps quite often, when topics need to shift during the week and someone forgets to update the job.

[JillAc]

That the topics shift is the reason they don't like to enter it into Workfront, too much manual labor to keep up with both Workfront and the other tools they use to manage the posts. I think the real answer to this is integrations with social media project planning tools (ie Sprout, which I don't even know if it's any good, the reporting is lame, no personalization)

[David-M-Allen]

I will have to look into integrations - we use Hootsuite.

[TCarey]

I'm curious how others handle it as well.

We have 4 business units + corporate and 1 social media manager. The process has always been a struggle. Our current system for owned social was put in place by an interim manager who was not comfortable with WF -- our product marketing folks are responsible for writing the copy, requesting an image via WF which I assign to a designer, and then they put their request for our social manager to post into a google doc for her to post. Our social media manager also submits social design reqs for social as needed.

I plan to revisit the process to see if we can remove the need for the google sheet.

[David-M-Allen]

The reduction in the process seems to be key. But also getting people to change is another challenge I have here.

[cag1223]

We have a social media project with its own intake queue for the day to day. If there is paid social or a specific topics that aligns with a campaign, we include social as a channel with its own project that rolls up to the program (campaign).

[David-M-Allen]

We use a queue here as well for planned campaign related social. However it would be a struggle for us to use it for the day to day social because it would add more process and I am looking more into reducing process around social if possible.

[ChrisMc4]

Saw your post and while we (at Edward Jones) are too new WF to give any advice, I can say as an Alumni ('92) and parent of HS senior admitted to Purdue... You guys are killing it on Social!

I have always followed Purdue Sports on Social and now with my daughter in the college admission process you have kept us up to date ALL THINGS PURDUE! #OnlyPurdue #BoilerUp😊

[David-M-Allen]

I too am a '92 graduate! Small world. I just never left #BoilerUp

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi David,

I invite you to consider our Editorial Calendar solution (which includes a couple of 5 minute videos), and if you think it might be a good fit for Purdue, then email doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug

[DSim1]

We are struggling with this also. Workfront really needs to up their game on some easy to modify templated social media management solutions. Many on comms/social teams are not technical and balk at the struggle of WF complexity (it's real!). Also, WF doesn't natively integrate its calendar with Microsoft Teams/Outlook which also makes things frustrating. 

For those with big teams making granular forms and thousands of technical pathways, it may be great, but WF falls flat when it comes to integrations and cross-functional business technology plugins/partnerships - without significant technical back-end help from people outside of the business unit team.