A social media workflow for agencies, from brief to report

Agencies rarely fail at making content. They fail at the handoffs between making it and publishing it. This is the shape of a workflow that survives a busy month, written in terms of what each person actually does.

Start at the Campaign, not at the post

A post is too small to plan around. A Campaign holds the brief, the goals, the budget, the date range, the assigned team and every Deliverable, and it moves through four phases: Setup, Planning, Production and Launch.

The creation wizard walks eight steps, from Campaign info and channel selection through brief and goals, assets, budget, Deliverables, calendar placement and team assignment. Do the brief properly here. Every later step reads it, and so does every Agent you assign.

Break the Deliverable into Content Slots

A Deliverable is one finished item the Campaign owes, such as a launch post. It breaks into typed Content Slots: a caption, an image, a video, a thumbnail, hashtags, a first comment, alt text, ad copy, and more besides.

Each slot is assigned to a Writer, Designer or Reviewer, and moves through its own states: Empty, In Progress, Submitted, In Review, then Approved or Rejected. The Assembly Board composes the slots into platform previews, so you see the finished piece rather than a list of parts.

This is the step that removes the status meeting. A manager reads slot states. A contributor opens a dashboard showing only the slots assigned to them.

Compose once, adapt per platform

The composer targets several platforms from one draft, with per-platform overrides for the copy that has to differ. Write the LinkedIn version and the X version of the same post without creating two posts to keep in sync.

Media attaches by drag-and-drop or by picking from the Brand's library. Saved hashtag sets and content templates keep the house format. Platform-specific previews show the post as it will appear. Version history with rollback covers the edit somebody regrets.

An assistant panel sits beside the editor to generate copy and variations, suggest improvements on the current draft, handle keyword research, and check the draft for duplication before it ships. Actions on a draft are explicit: Save Draft, Schedule, Publish Now, Submit for Review, or Submit to Slot.

Put the review on a clock

An Approval Workflow is an ordered chain of review stages, each with a required role and a deadline in hours. Set one per Brand, or set a Workspace-wide default. Auto-approve rules cover roles that do not need to sit in the chain. Anything past its deadline escalates automatically.

The queue supports bulk approve and reject, and comments carry mentions, change requests and the full approval history. Posts, Campaign Content Slots and media assets all flow through it. Read the detail on the campaigns and approvals page.

Schedule from one calendar

The calendar has five views: Month, Week, Day, List and a Swimlane view with one lane per Campaign. Drag a post to reschedule it. Month drops keep the original time of day, week drops snap to the hour, and dropping into the past is blocked.

Bulk operations cover publishing, rescheduling, duplicating, deleting and status changes, with undo on reschedules and deletes. Filter by platform, status or Campaign. Conflict detection warns when two posts land too close together on the same account. Campaign date ranges show as bars across the calendar, so the plan and the schedule are the same picture.

Publish, then watch the queue

Twelve networks publish today: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit and WhatsApp Business. Each integration handles that platform's real requirements, such as Instagram carousels and first comments, LinkedIn's two-phase image upload, and TikTok video processing.

The publishing queue shows everything scheduled and in flight with its status, failures and retry state. Failed publishes retry with increasing delays, up to three attempts. An expired platform token is refreshed and the publish retried. Recurring patterns generate repeating posts on a schedule you define.

Give someone the queue as a standing job. It is short work, and it catches the failure before the client does.

Report against more than one source

Numbers are where agency trust is won or lost. Collabre compares what a connected analytics source reports, Google Analytics 4 or PostHog, against the delivery records Collabre itself wrote. When the two disagree beyond a threshold you set, it raises a warning or a critical alert, and you choose which source you treat as truth.

Attribution runs five models: last click, first click, linear, time decay and position-based. Anomaly detection flags unusual movements with a severity score and a suggested action. Reports are scheduled, exported to CSV and PDF, and agencies can publish them under their own branding.

The workflow in one line

Brief into a Campaign, Campaign into Deliverables, Deliverables into Content Slots, slots through a timed Approval Workflow, approved work onto the calendar, calendar into the queue, and the queue into a report you can defend. Hand that line to the next person you hire.