Producing high-quality content is never a one-person job.

It takes different minds across various teams coming together to share content ideas and collaborate over content creation, review, and distribution.

Even if your content team has one person running the show, they’ll need a defined process to coordinate with people from other teams, document their processes, and create a library-like home for all the content they’re churning out.

All this points to one thing: the need for content collaboration or the process of handling everything involved in content production and distribution in one place.

But how exactly do you coordinate all your content activities in one place? This piece explains how. We’ll walk you through exactly what content collaboration is, why your team needs it, and the tools that can help facilitate it.

What is content collaboration?

Content collaboration is the process of organising, creating, managing, and sharing content within a system that keeps the entire workflow streamlined and accessible.

Depending on your content operation, collaboration over the different stages of content production can look anything from chaos to a well-organised, efficient process that supports quality content production and distribution.

But, why bother with ensuring your content collaboration process is a slick one? Let’s answer this next.

Why content collaboration is important for content teams?

A defined space to communicate and coordinate content activities helps teams create a well-oiled content engine that produces quality content at scale. Here’s how:

Improved content quality

Good content is never created in silos. Instead, it requires teamwork to think up content topics, create product-led content, polish pieces, and so on.

For example, content ideation and creation need input from customer-facing and product teams. Content teams also need to communicate among themselves on writing, editing, and publishing.

Having a single collaboration software for working together on all these activities supports optimal communication and, with it, better quality content production.

Better content accessibility

With all your content (from the style guide to the published drafts) in one place, content comes more accessible to one and all.

Typically, without a collaboration system/place to coordinate, you and your team will find yourselves snacking through various folders and email threads to pull out the needed content.

For example, writers will need to hunt down pieces they’ve to link in their drafts internally. Customer-facing teams will also slow down as they spend time finding content to reference for answering queries.

This slows down things even more when you’ve to ask another teammate for a post and wait for their response.

Enhanced remote team collaboration

For remote teams, in particular, online collaboration is essential for creating content in real-time in a well-defined workflow.

For instance, writers, content managers, and editors can work on a draft in one place – minimizing the need for endless back and forth. 

Faster content production

And, finally, with better content accessibility and collaboration in a centralised platform, content teams can be more productive.

To add, by laying all the steps in a workflow, teams can work with deadlines. This makes production predictable and increases production volume to meet the ever-increasing demand for more content.

💡 See also: eBook:Techniques for collaboratively prioritising content

Content collaboration tools

Now, to reap all these benefits of content collaboration, your team needs to leverage tools that promote communication and streamline workflow.

Essentially, these tools provide the necessary infrastructure to facilitate efficient content operation.

Here are some content collaboration tools worth adding to your content toolkit. (Notice we left out GatherContent — we’ll be highlighting it next.) 

1. Slack

Slack is an instant messaging tool offering multiple integrations and the option to share files. It’s a helpful tool for document sharing, communicating over processes like brainstorming ideas, exchanging notes, and discussing strategy.  

2. Zoom

This is a video communication platform that helps you connect with teammates over audio and video calls. For instance, editors and writers on the team can use it to exchange complicated feedback synchronously.

3. Google Drive

An alternative to the Microsoft OneDrive, the Google Drive umbrella packs in tools like Google Docs and Google Sheets for creating shareable documents that you can work on with your team in real-time.

Using the privacy setting functionality, you can also change documents’ accessibility to make them public to particular team members, giving them the option to edit, view, or comment. Plus, you can use Google Drive for document management by organising files into folders. 

4. Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage service that offers secure file hosting and sharing. All you’ve to do is to upload files and save them in folders. File sync is another option that the SaaS company offers so you can sync content across devices. 

You can also share files and folders, including sensitive data with relevant folks using shareable links or by adding them to a file using their email address. To add, the folder permissions option gives you a choice between providing people viewing or editing permission.

5. Trello

Lastly, Trello is a Kanban-style project management software for organising and communicating over content with your team.

You can use it as a central repository for ready content and tracking content in various production stages (writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing, for example).

How GatherContent facilitates content collaboration 

In contrast with the tools shared above, GatherContent offers a collaboration platform for all the moving pieces involved in content production. From co-working in a single document to getting a visual overview of your production and content schedule, GatherContent makes content collaboration effortless.

Briefly, here’s what GatherContent offers: ‍

• An easily accessible content repository for all your content documents, including style guides, published posts, and briefing templates. This way, everyone can quickly get their hands on the files they need.  ‍
• Streamlined collaboration through each content stage – from leaving feedback in comments in a draft to publishing it without redoing the formatting.‍
• A visual overview of a project’s status. At one glance, you can tell what’s in progress, what’s under review, and so on.
  

Let’s elaborate.

Document your processes

With GatherContent, you can create a library of templates for all the processes involved in your content workflow, such as templates for email content, blog content, and social media captioning, to name a few.

As an example, let’s take briefs for blog content. Using a template in GatherContent, you can break down a lengthy brief document into sections with embedded in-line guidelines for each section.

This makes it easy for all collaborators to understand what’s needed from them, helping speed up production.

Not to mention, all the centralised documentation improves production consistency. Ultimately, by making content governance a breeze for you, GatherContent helps significantly improve your content quality.

Collaborate on content, planning, creation, and review

Using GatherContent, you can easily assign, review, and publish various content projects – all in one place.

With your briefs ready in the platform, simply assign them to writers – complete with due dates to stick with your schedule.

Writers can then work on drafts within the templated documents, leaving them for review when ready by tagging the manager/editor. Feedback happens in one place too as editors leave inline comments – speeding up content reviews.

As for publishing? GatherContent takes care of that as well. All you have to do is integrate it with your Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. This will let you import the final documents (posts, pages, media, and more) into your CMS without losing formatting.

Not only does all of this reduce work on your plate, but it also helps you publish faster and scale production without compromising on quality. 

Streamline your workflow

By collaborating over content using GatherContent, you can easily track your workflow by seeing all active projects in your dashboard. More importantly, you can get their progress status by looking at the colored circle beside each project. 

To top that, the Calendar view offers a birds-eye view of the production schedule so you can tell what’s in your content pipeline at a given time. 

This way, you don’t have to chase people for project updates.

Convinced you need a platform for streamlined ops, faster production, and better content quality? Improve your team’s content collaboration with a free trial of GatherContent.

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