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?
Jira Work Management: fantastic view, but way too complex
Trello: perfect for the use case, but extend our efforts to one more tool (we were already using Jira and Confluence)
Slack: this was dead before even fully discussed
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.
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
Teodora V _Fun Inc_
Putting Pieces Together @ Fun Inc
Fun Inc
Sofia, Bulgaria
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