3 ways to speed up social media workflows with DAM

For social media marketers, speed is essential to success. Social media constantly keeps us on our toes, challenging us to be timely, relevant and pithy – all at breakneck speed. We also somehow find a way to keep up with trends, memes and the latest algorithm updates.

To create and share the best content, it’s key to have quick access to the assets you need. Here are four tips to power up your social media workflows.

1. Stay flexible with a cloud-based content library

Social media emergencies can strike at any time, even when your team is OOO. Having a cloud-based digital asset library means that your social media team can access the content they need from anywhere.

When such an emergency struck at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), here’s how they dealt with it:

“On Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I was sitting in my beach chair when I found out that Valerie Harper Rhoda had passed away. She had visited OMRF in 1998,” says Jenny Lee, creative director at OMRF.

“From my beach chair, I was able to locate her photo and the press release from her visit in our Canto archive. I sent it off to my writing partner, who then wrote up a tribute. We got it posted within an hour of getting the news – on a Saturday with nobody in the office. That’s why cloud-based is so great for us.”

2. Empower your social media team to self-serve

Your social media team should be able to pull the image or video they need and share it within a matter of minutes. Cut out the time-consuming steps of submitting image requests or digging through unorganized archives to help your team boost those impressions!

To make it easy on your team, have a one-stop shop for social media content. We’ve seen customers save hours a day by consolidating their content library in Canto, which has an intuitive folder structure and search and filter functions that make it easy for team members to find exactly the visual they need.

3. Avoid content purgatory by tracking digital rights

The last thing a social media marketer wants to discover after finally finding the perfect piece of content to share is that they don’t have the digital rights to use it!

If your organization doesn’t track digital rights, it can be tedious or even impossible to find out if your team has permission to use certain photos or graphics. We’ve worked with organizations that have thousands of photos they can’t use because of this issue. If we had to think of ways to torture marketers, this would be high up on that list.

We love the clever way that Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) manages their photo permissions. The communications team has thousands of photos of the tenants they help, including families and children, which require photo release forms to use.

“One of the things we really needed was a way to connect photo release forms with the photos themselves,” says Susanna Linse, SHA’s communications manager. “With Canto we are able to relate files and easily access the associated documents through the asset’s information page.”