Build an efficient and automated content workflow to better communicate with your editors.

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to build an efficient and automated content workflow that you can use with your video editors to scale your personal brand or content agency. I'll show you the best tool for working with your editors, why it's not quite enough, and how you can make it better by setting expectations with your team, how to take all of that finalized content and efficiently publish it to social media, and three important concepts that you need to automate the entire process. I'm gonna start this in a tool called Frame.io. It's a video collaboration tool that you can use to work with your video editors. You can upload videos, you can play videos in the system, you can give your editors visual feedback directly on the videos just by writing on them, and of course, you can also type out comments as well, and they can come into the system and see all of that feedback, and it will even integrate into their software so they can see it while they edit. But one of the things this tool does not do is really set clear expectations in terms of what content should be created for any given project. So I'm jumping into a system that I built in Airtable called the Content Engine, and it allows me to build a very efficient content process where I can store all of my content and build out custom workflows. I'm gonna talk a bit about the video podcast workflow. So here I'm able to define projects and the different types of assets that accompany each project. So for a video podcast, you're obviously gonna have the video that goes to YouTube, but you're also gonna have audio that goes to the podcasting platforms, and you may have a certain number of vertical videos that you'd always like to repurpose from the video. So I'm gonna go over to the planning portion of the system and create a new project. I'll schedule the next interview with Gary V. We'll move this to record, and in the background, some automations are being run as we speak. So if we jump back over to Frame and we refresh the page, we're gonna see that a new project is already being created in Frame.io to store all of these new assets. It's also going to start to create all of the placeholders that we need in order to complete the project. So instead of just having no structure, no folder, and no idea what specific assets are created for every single project, we're gonna create that folder and then also create the placeholders as you see they're being created now. We've got a place for the podcast, we've got a place for all of the vertical videos, and then we also have images that we can use for thumbnails on these vertical videos as well. And so when our editor comes into the project, they're gonna know specifically what they need to create for each given project. And then they can go ahead and start to drop in these different assets, the YouTube video and the YouTube thumbnail, and then you can simply drop the YouTube video on top of the placeholder, same with the thumbnail, and then we're able to use the built-in stacking feature that comes with Frame and integrate that with our system in Airtable. So if we come over to our inbox, which shows all of the content that's coming into the system that hasn't yet been given a publish date, we see that these rows for the given pieces of content that we need are already here, and it's also starting to sync up that content within the system. So we can see a thumbnail for the YouTube video, and then we can actually see the thumbnail in the system, and then we can drop in the podcast, stack that on top of the placeholder that was there before, and then we can drop in vertical videos to stack on top of the vertical video placeholders. We'll need one more, and then we'll simply drop these on top of the vertical video placeholders. And now if we come back to Airtable, we're gonna see all of these rows automatically update as well. And then, of course, we would also be able to get back to Frame.io from Airtable by simply clicking one of these buttons. This takes us right to the video. We could leave additional feedback. We could put the status back to in progress. That would send a notification to the editor. If we enable the status from this view as well, we would be able to see that the status was automatically moved back to in progress. The video editor could upload the new version and could simply stack that on top of the previous. And then in a couple seconds, the system will sync back with Airtable again. Here you can see that update coming through. And it's also cool because if you check out Frame.io system, we can actually compare the different versions. They're obviously the same in this particular situation because I uploaded the same video, but you could watch them side by side and watch the differences that your editor made. And then from here, you can easily schedule out your content. I'm gonna go ahead and schedule this for the 14th. It's gonna fall out of this view because this view is just showing us new content that has not been scheduled. If I jump down to the media section here, we're gonna see that video that I just scheduled for the 14th. The status is in needs review, so whoever's checking the videos could click frame. They could make further edits or just move it to approved. And in just a moment, the status will move to approved. And the row will actually fall out of this status because it's only showing you content that has not been approved yet. But if I were to move it back to in progress, we'd see it come right back, just like that. I'll go ahead and just approve it. And then there are further automations that we can use to do autoposting. It can trigger this zap here. It will automatically use Metricool to post that content directly to social media. And so by using these workflows that we can define in this system and having it create these placeholders in Frame.io, it sets very clear expectations on what your editor is supposed to create. It allows you to sync that status back to the main system that keeps track of all of the content, the brand, the project name, the workflow, the media type, the publish date, the status, the media editor, and then ultimately lets you publish that down to social media. Now, jumping over to Zapier for a second, one of the main things that makes the placeholders possible, I'm using this zap here called create asset in frame. And the zap is actually quite simple. It just asks for a folder, a name of that placeholder. And then we go ahead and we send it that placeholder image and it simply creates the asset for us in frame. And so you can replicate this process for whatever system you're using. And then the way we sync videos to the other system when we use the stacking function in Frame.io, quickly jumping back over to Zapier is this zap trigger here, asset versioned. And that's what Frame.io calls this process when you stack another video on top of another, it creates this version stack. And when you create that version stack, it's going to trigger this zap here. And then you can trigger all of the additional automations that you need in order to sync with whatever process you're using. In this case, I'm using Airtable and my content engine database. And then finally, the way I manage the sync process and the status, again, back in Zapier is this other trigger here called update asset label. They happen to call this a label. And so when you change this status here to whatever that might be, needs in progress, this zap here is what will be triggered.