Social Media Workflow

Planning begins by pulling historical posting data from Hootsuite and Publer across every connected channel, exporting post frequency and engagement rate by post type over the trailing 90 days to establish a baseline before building the new calendar.

Feed this exported data into Metricool, using its timing analysis feature to generate specific posting cadence and time-slot recommendations per channel based on actual audience activity rather than generic best-practice windows. These recommendations should directly inform how many posts per week each channel receives.

Structure the timing recommendations into a draft weekly skeleton using PostPlanify, organizing available slots by channel and week before any content themes are assigned. A draft skeleton entry might follow this structure:

{
  'week': 1,
  'channel': 'example_channel',
  'slots': ['Monday 9am', 'Thursday 1pm']
}

Once slots are confirmed, use Canva to sketch the visual direction for the week — selecting or adjusting brand templates ahead of full production — so the content generation stage starts from an agreed visual style rather than making design decisions from scratch per post. The output of this stage is a finalized calendar skeleton with slot, channel, and rough visual direction assigned to every planned post.

Content generation converts the Stage 1 calendar skeleton into finished captions and visual assets. Start with Writesonic, feeding it each slot's assigned theme from the calendar to generate an initial caption draft, then use ChatGPT to refine tone and length so every caption feels consistent across the week regardless of which slot it was originally drafted for.

For visual assets, use Simplified to batch-produce graphics across multiple post types in a single session, pulling from the brand template direction agreed upon in Stage 1's planning sketch. Producing assets in a single batch session rather than one at a time is what keeps visual consistency high across a full week's output.

Once captions and visuals are both finished, pair each asset with its corresponding caption and upload the combined post into PostEverywhere, tagging it with its assigned channel and time slot from the original calendar skeleton.

Review the full staged batch in PostEverywhere against the Stage 1 calendar before moving to publishing, confirming every planned slot has a completed asset-and-caption pair and flagging any gap where a slot was assigned a theme but never received finished content.

Publishing distributes the staged batch from Stage 2 across every channel at its assigned time. For channels natively connected to Hootsuite, apply the exact publish times from the original calendar directly within its scheduling interface, confirming each post's slot matches the plan before finalizing.

For channels better suited to a rolling content queue, configure Buffer as the scheduling tool for those specific channels, allowing content to post on a steady cadence without requiring a manually assigned time per post.

Cross-check the full week's assigned slots one more time in PostPlanify against what has actually been scheduled in Hootsuite and Buffer, catching any post that was staged but never confirmed for publish. Use PostEverywhere for any batch spanning multiple platforms simultaneously, configuring bulk scheduling so the entire staged week can be queued in one pass.

For any remaining connected channels not covered by Hootsuite, Buffer, or PostEverywhere's primary integrations, use Publer to fill the gap, ensuring every staged post from Stage 2 has a confirmed publish destination and time before the week begins.

Advocacy and influencers begins by reviewing engagement data directly in Hootsuite to identify posts significantly outperforming the account's typical engagement rate, using this as the qualifying criteria for advocacy extension rather than resharing content based on assumption.

Use Sprout Social to monitor and identify influencer or advocate interactions tied to those top-performing posts, flagging any partner or employee account whose engagement or resharing behavior suggests they would be a strong candidate for a more formal advocacy ask.

Once a top-performing post and relevant advocate are identified, use PostPlanify to schedule advocacy-focused follow-up content — such as a resharing prompt or a coordinated post timed alongside the advocate's own channel — ensuring the advocacy push happens close enough to the original post's momentum to feel connected rather than delayed.

Log every advocacy action and influencer relationship in Notion, recording which original post triggered the advocacy effort, which advocate or influencer was involved, and the outcome. This log becomes the team's reference point for identifying which advocates consistently drive strong results across multiple campaigns.

Analytics and growth begins by pulling consolidated post-publish performance data from Sprout Social and Hootsuite, exporting engagement metrics by channel and content theme over the reporting period to compare against the original Stage 1 plan.

Cross-reference this internal performance data against Metricool's competitor benchmarking for the same period, distinguishing genuine underperformance from a broader industry-wide engagement shift affecting every account in the niche simultaneously.

Confirm final publish and engagement totals for any channels managed through Publer, ensuring the consolidated performance view accounts for every channel rather than only the ones natively tracked in Sprout Social and Hootsuite.

Use these combined findings to identify specific growth actions for the next planning cycle — which content themes to scale up in volume, which posting cadence to adjust, and which underperforming formats to retire — feeding these conclusions directly back into Stage 1's next round of calendar planning rather than treating each reporting cycle as a standalone exercise.

Collaboration closes the loop by giving the full team a shared operational view spanning every prior stage. Maintain the master calendar in Hootsuite and the cross-platform staging queue in PostEverywhere, ensuring both reflect the current status of every post from initial planning through to publish, rather than requiring separate tracking documents outside the core tools.

Use PostPlanify to support internal handoffs between planning and execution roles, confirming that whoever built the original weekly skeleton in Stage 1 and whoever executed the publishing in Stage 3 are working from the same up-to-date slot data rather than a stale export.

Confirm cross-tool status through Publer for any channels it manages, checking that its scheduling and engagement data matches what the rest of the team sees in Hootsuite and PostEverywhere.

Log every post's final status, publish date, and links to its Stage 4 advocacy activity and Stage 5 performance data in Notion, creating a single traceable record per post. Configure a Notion view filtered by "This Week" so the whole team can see current status without needing access to every individual scheduling tool separately.