Key takeaways
- The six stages: plan, draft, approve, schedule, publish, review.
- Approval is the stage most teams skip informally, which is also where mistakes get caught.
- Bulk scheduling collapses the draft-and-schedule stages for a month of content at once.
- A review stage closes the loop — feeding performance data back into the next planning cycle.
1. Plan
Decide what to post and when, ideally as a content calendar rather than one post at a time, so gaps and clustering are visible before anything is drafted.
2. Draft
Write and design each post. up to 2,500 posts per upload on Agency, and up to 25,000 on Enterprise of bulk import turns a batch of planned content into scheduled drafts in one pass instead of composing each post individually.
3. Approve
Route drafts through sign-off before they’re scheduled live. This is the stage most teams skip informally — and where a caption error or wrong-account mistake gets caught before it goes public.
4. Schedule
Set the publish time per account, ideally with automatic pacing so many posts going out at once don’t look like spam to a platform.
5. Publish
The post goes live. This is the stage most tools focus on, but it’s the last of six, not the whole workflow.
6. Review
Check performance and feed it back into the next planning cycle. Without this stage, planning repeats the same choices regardless of what actually worked.
FAQ
- What are the stages of a social media workflow?
- Plan, draft, approve, schedule, publish, and review — in that order, repeating each cycle.
- Which stage do teams skip most often?
- Approval, especially informally — which is also the stage most likely to catch a mistake before it goes public.
- How does bulk import fit into this workflow?
- It collapses the draft-and-schedule stages for a batch of planned content at once, rather than composing and scheduling each post individually.