Working as part of a team can get a bit chaotic and the bigger the team, the more difficult it is to make sure everyone is on the same page. There’s keeping track of tasks, making sure content is being delivered on time, knowing who is managing your social media at any time and so much more, which makes it almost impossible to keep on top of everything without a few tools to help. In this blog post, I’m going to share the 10 best collaboration tools for teams.

What types of tools do you need?

• Something to help you keep track of all your tasks
• A tool to aid your team in managing your social media accounts
• A platform for managing your content
• Communication tools for connecting your entire team
• Collaboration tools

Here are some of the best tools available to help your teams’ work go as smoothly as possible:

Task managers

One of the first tools you’ll need when you work with a team is a task manager to help you track all of your existing tasks, as well as assign tasks and keep track of their progress.

1.     dapulse

dapulse is a task manager for teams that aims to help you manage all of your tasks from one single dashboard.

Use it to:

• Add and assign tasks
• Check the status of all your different tasks and projects
• Leave notes and mention other team members to make sure they’re alerted
• Evaluate and comment on your team’s work
• See exactly who is busy and who isn’t

2.     asana

asana is another very popular option when it comes to task managers; use it to:

• Create tasks and assign them to team members
• Organise tasks, customise them and prioritise them
• Customise the updates you get in your asana inbox, so you’re always in the know
• Check progress for any project at a glance
• Collaborate and communicate with other members of your team

3.     Trello

Trello is a personal favourite of mine – you might know it too if you’ve read enough of my blog – because it has such an easy-to-use interface and so many different ways that you can use it:

• Create boards for all your projects
• Add individual tasks for each board
• Organise and customize your boards and to-do lists
• Assign tasks to team members
• Upload documents directly
• Create a board to manage your content marketing

4.     Flow

Flow is a project management and task tracking tool designed specifically for teams. Among some of its best features:

• Manage projects from start to finish
• Visualize your tasks, projects and to-do’s in a calendar
• Check reports to track the exact progress of your projects
• Integrate with other tools, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, for easy collaboration

Social media management for teams

The busier your social media, the more people you need to help manage it. With these tools, you can make it easier for your team to manage all your different social accounts, but also easier for you to make sure things get done:

5.     Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management tool – one I’ve talked about a few times in the past as well, as it’s a favourite of mine – but here, I want to focus on its features for teams:

• Flexible and real-time collaboration
• See who is reviewing/creating content
• Assign content to team members
• Create automations to quickly assign matching mentions/updates to team members
• Assign roles for your team
• Use the editorial calendar to plan, manage and approve social updates
• See exactly what each teammate has done
• Check analytics to see response rates and times for different members of your team

6.     ContentCal

ContentCal is a social media marketing tool built for teams (business teams, marketing teams, and agencies alike). It’s all about facilitating the planning and management phases, especially when you work as part of a larger team:

• Assign specific roles to each team member so that everyone knows what they have to do (and not be allowed to do some tasks, like scheduling or publishing a post)
• Create a workflow so that every time you need to come up with a new campaign, the proposed updates go through all the right parties before they are officially approved
• Collaborate on update ideas using the Pinboard where your team can share their ideas, leave comments, and generally collaborate to turn any ideas into great updates
• Plan and organize your social media calendar with tags and colours and drag and drop ideas from your Pinboard directly in the calendar to be scheduled

Plus, you can also collaborate on managing your social media as a team (responding to comments and messages) and you have access to detailed analytics to help you improve your strategy.

Communication tools

Another issue with teams is that they often need to be in constant conversation; whether it be by video, message or phone, one of the following tools can help you find a better, more efficient way of communicating with your team:

7.     Slack

Slack aims to help you lead a less stressful life by “simplifying communication”; what this means is that with Slack you can form a better system for communicating with your team, and keeping all the conversations together, for easy access.

Your conversations and decisions are saved in the shared space so that you can search through them to find answers to your questions.

Another plus of using Slack is that it integrates with other productivity software (such as MailChimp, SalesForce and Skype).

8.     Skype for Business

Skype has introduced Skype for Business a few years ago, in an effort to provide businesses with a better tool for holding online meetings.

Skype for Business also integrates with Office products, so you can even start conversations on your Word app. With the more expensive plan, you get file storage and sharing as well.

Otherwise, use it to hold audio and video conferences (in HD) with up to 250 people, message your team, share your screen, schedule meetings in Outlook and more.

Marketing tools for teams

Planning, strategizing and managing marketing campaigns can be a pain – but, with the right tool, you can cut down on the planning and reporting and instead focus on your tasks and projects:

9.     CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a marketing calendar that aims to help you organise all of your marketing efforts into one place.

Use their drag and drop calendar to create workflows for each of your projects and then manage them: assign tasks, collaborate with other teammates, add notes and comments and keep track of all your work deadlines.

A huge plus of using CoSchedule is that you can also schedule your social media updates through your calendar and even your content.

Additionally, you’ll have access to performance analytics, so you can examine your teams’ performance and efficiency.

10.  Wrike for Marketing

Wrike has quite a few different solutions for teams of all sorts (creatives, project management teams, and so on), including for marketing teams.

You can use it to create your project workflows, set tasks for others in your team (and send notifications for when they need to start a task), share documents, communicate with your team, approve content and basically, anything you need to make sure you’re on top of everything.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for ways to improve your team’s efficiency and productivity, look no further; a good tool can make a huge difference to your whole team and make everyone’s lives so much easier. Use tools to manage all of your projects, create detailed workflows, assign tasks and keep track of all your teammates and more; the more you can centralise your communications and work, the easier it will be for everyone involved to manage their workload.

What tools are you using for easy collaboration? Leave your comments below and please share if you found the post useful 🙂