How does your team manage social media drafts in Confluence?

Question

Hi, I'm interested in hearing how marketing or communications teams use Confluence for preparing/organizing social media drafts.

My marketing team currently uses a page to collaboratively prepare drafts and get comments/coordinate dates/images/etc, but we also have social media drafts on the pages of events. This is not great because it means our drafts are not all in one place, but if we did that to be able to create the content in the context of the event details. We might ask non-marketing team members to contribute a photo or some text, and they are used to consulting the event page, not necessarily the social media draft page.

I've been thinking about using excerpts (or multi-excerpts), but I'm not convinced that would necessarily be better than our current system. If I were to excerpt the social media post draft from an event page on the global social media page, and when I am consulting the drafts to copy them into our social media scheduler I realize I need to change the text, I have to go to the page with the excerpt to make modifications.

And lastly, how do you organize your drafts with a page? We started out planning posts based on campaigns, but if there are several campaigns going at once, it can be hard to see the chronology of posts. Maybe someone has used Team Calendars for this?

Thanks for your comments!

Julie d_Antin _Elements__bsgnak · Answer

Thanks @Teodora V _Warsaw Dynamics_  for your detailed reply about your team!

I'm understanding that you keep your work in different spaces, and link to what is related for a particular campaign/event/release.

We have a similar split up of spaces, with one focused on content management, another or website/Marketplace content, and a third on events and other marketing actions.

If tried to replicate your organization, I think the closest would be keeping all the social media drafts in one place, and excerpting them to other pages that they concern.

The archive tip is good too, since old content/data doesn't need to be at your fingertips every day.

Teodora V _Warsaw Dynamics_ · Answer

Hi @Julie d_Antin _Elements_

This is an excellent question for me because our marketing team is actively using Confluence and we've been through any kinds of confusions. Like how to organize our space correctly and don't get lost in a mess.

Last year I made a considerable Confluence reorganization, and from this experience, I can give a few bits of advice:

* Have different spaces for different activities: Blog, Event, Social, Campaign, Product documentation.
* Keep topics separate. It doesn't matter if they are part of a joint campaign. Use a Parent page ("My Great Event #1") with an overview of your initiative and link all the content there. Most of the time, you need to coordinate with different people, and if you are giving all the same link, they will eventually create a nightmare of highlights and comments.
* Archive! The first thing that I've done with our marketing spaces. So far is separated by years and months, this is how we keep our 2019 initiatives clear from content which we don't need at this time.

For example: If we are running a campaign with Newsletter, Blog post, Social shout-out, and Product documentation updates the flow will be:

* Blog post as a Parent
* Social shout-outs are inline content of the blog post page or its Child page.
* Newsletter content is linked to the blog post page
* Product documentation updates are also linked to the blog post page

All pages are in different spaces but they have a few common things: titles and links to each other (like "My Great Event #1, 2019 - Blog post", "My Great Event #1, 2019 - Campaign content", "My Great Event #1, 2019 - Product updates".

If you need your product development team to review the new product content, you give them the link to Product updates, and they are having fun without harming the other content :)

Sounds a bit messy, but it works for our team :)  I'm adding few screenshots from my spaces: