Using Confluence to Manage your Monthly Social Media Schedule - Crazy Creative or an Epic Disaster?

[#1]

A few months ago, my team decided to invest more time and effort into making Old Street’s socials a better place. As much as we already had a massive reach on LinkedIn, our company social profiles were a bit… vague.

Committing to the purpose, we gained a part-time team member to help us with integrations across networks, pro tips, and general advice.

After the initial load of discussions, we were ready to start being furiously creative. Five minutes later, we hit a few walls on our way to greatness.

Our team comprises a content creator, social media master, an event manager, a graphic designer, and a grumpy lead. And everyone was supposed to be aligned and contribute to a single source of social-media-planning-and-scheduling truth. But where?

What tools we discussed, and why we dismissed them

1. Jira Work Management: fantastic view, but way too complex

2. Trello: perfect for the use case, but extend our efforts to one more tool (we were already using Jira and Confluence)

3. Slack: this was dead before even fully discussed

Why we defaulted to Confluence (again)

Ugh, mostly because I love it. It’s a bit selfish, but it’s no secret we spend most of our productive time in Confluence, and going outside of it feels uncomfortable.

How we structured our Social Media workflow and activity tracking in Confluence

I needed 3 or 4 iterations and multiple feedback sessions before achieving the desired outcome.

Heavily relying on Confluence’s built-in functionalities, I’ve picked a particular set of macros to help me construct our little playground.

• Structure 1: The Schedule

With Social Media having high time sensitivity, we needed a way to show how and when posts would happen.

And yes, that’s the poor man’s team calendars, so don’t judge me!

• Structure 2: The Details

Each day of the calendar is assigned a spot on the page where we can write, design and prepare our social posts.

• Structure 3: The Connections
  
  

I want to think we are just efficient and not lazy, but people would probably argue with me. I spent some time figuring out how to create and link anchors to have one-click access to each part of the page.

As my info tutorial shows, each date is a link to its corresponding page spot. Due to popular demand, I added a back-to-top button linked to the calendar view so that people won’t get tired of scrolling

• Once a Template, Always a Template
  
  

Since this page has loads of tables and fields, I saved it as a Confluence Template assigned to our marketing space. Well, people still need to make their link setups, but having tedious work occasionally is good for your brain.

How is this actually working?

Well, so far, so good, even if I think it’s just … crazy.

As our content beast, Mr. Christopher Berry said, "The anchors are only partly useful - you can click on them and jump to what's ready. But most of the time when I'm on that page, I want to jump to a day so I can write/edit a post. Which means going into edit mode, and as soon as you're in edit mode, the anchors don't work!"

Which is a fair observation if you are on that side of the fence.

I would love to hear your thoughts and weird Confluence use cases. And if your company has the perfect social media collaboration tool (and it works!), please, reach out to me

[Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy]

This is so so so cool @Teodora V _Fun Inc_ !!! And, as someone who has also created some monster pages, anchor links working within edit mode is at the top of my Confluence wish list. 

At the risk of making your page longer...anywhere you're monitoring or reporting on results? 

[Andy Gladstone]

As usual, amazing writing @Teodora V _Fun Inc_. Did you schedule this post on the calendar? 

I wouldn't know (OK, I prefer NOT to know) whether our company has a killer social media collaboration tool. However, I have too many weird Confluence use cases to share! But in the end, it always gets the job done for me and my teams.

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

@Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy, we monitor our starts in 3rd party tools and analytics, but as you said it, I feel like we can copy some stats in a table and turn it into a Confluence report, which sounds beautiful!

@Andy Gladstone, even better, I used my personal Confluence instance to write and schedule it. That's what I love about Confluence; you can get the job done while using a big part of your imagination (which is something I highly appreciate). I rather make my brain circle across various problems and their solutions than installing just-another-3rd-party-app that promises to resolve all of my worries. 

[JannAce]

Hi! I've had some experience with Confluence too, and it's a versatile tool for collaboration. Integrating your social media workflow within Confluence makes sense, especially if your team is already comfortable with it. However, I also suggest you check out LinkedIn. Exploring LinkedIn groups focused on marketing or social media could lead to worthwhile discussions and insights. Also, you can buy cheap linkedin followers there. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

[Ceara Crawford]

Love this! Does it exist as a template somewhere we can actually use? Would love to have access :D 

[Birgen Jansseune]

@Teodora V _Fun Inc_ Can we get this template somewhere? Would be very helpful. 

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Hi @Birgen Jansseune @Ceara Crawford 

Since one of my absolute favorite apps, External Share for Confluence, is now free up to 10 users, I am able to share link to my template page:

https://confluence.external-share.com/content/239556c4-3653-4989-9b1b-e75746760691

You can use it to copy the structure and modify by your preference.

The downside is that you need to basically create the month out of a table (so minor editions every month) but it worths the one-hour effort. You can easily select all and copy onto a new Confluence page :)