If you've used Trello, it's that, except the cards are your actual posts. Each column is a stage, ideas on the left, published on the right, and you drag a card as the work moves along. You can also give a column a rule so it fills itself: set one to Review and every post waiting on a sign-off is already sitting in it, without anyone dragging anything.
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A kanban board goes stale the second someone forgets to drag a card. So give the column a rule instead. Answer one question, how cards get here, and pick the status that fills it. From then on a post lands in that column the moment it reaches that stage and leaves the moment it doesn't.
You can match on where the post is in the workflow, from Idea through Draft, Review, Scheduled, and Published, or on where it is in review, sitting with your team or sitting with the client. Those review states feed the same pipeline that approval software for social media teams runs on, so the board and the sign-off never drift apart. That's the whole rule builder. One dropdown and one button.
Board settings shows every column and tells you plainly which is which: Manual means you move the cards, Smart means it fills itself, and each one says what it holds. Keep Backlog and your working columns manual for the work you shepherd by hand, and let Review, Scheduled, and Published look after themselves.
Twelve columns in total with six on the board at once, dragged into the order you want, hidden when you don't need them. Backlog is the one you can't delete, because it's where a card goes when it has nowhere else to be. Convert a column and you get told what that will do before it happens.
Not every job is a post. There is the shot to film, the caption to tweak, the client to chase. The task board keeps that work next to the content, in its own columns from backlog to done, with each task able to point at the post it belongs to. The work around a launch stops scattering across three other apps.
A minute on how work moves across the board, what sits on a card, and how a column can fill itself.
Priority, due date, who owns it, labels, and a link to the post it belongs to, all along the top. Underneath, a description with room for the actual brief, a checklist you tick off as you go, and attachments for the reference shots. Comments and a full activity history sit on their own tabs, so the argument about the caption lives on the task instead of in someone's DMs.
The columns and the cards are shaped around a post, not a generic ticket, so the board stays honest about where the work really is, whether you move the cards or the rules do.
The Board is the workflow view. The same posts read differently on the other surfaces, and moving a post on one moves it everywhere.
For the planning before the board fills with drafts: free, open to everyone, no account needed.
A kanban view of social media posts grouped by production stage. The Board is Maeve's version. Five lanes from Idea to Published, and the cards are the actual drafts. Same posts as the calendar, just shaped by stage instead of date.
Trello and Notion can run a kanban, but the card is a card. It doesn't know what your post is, when it goes live, or whether the publish step succeeded. The Board's card is the post itself, so the lane it sits in is the state the post is in.
The Calendar is date-first. The Board is stage-first. They read the same posts. Use the one that fits the question.
The Workbench is for planning before there's a draft. Tables, research notes, series builders. The Board is for the drafts themselves, once they exist.
A column that fills itself. Instead of dragging cards in, you give the column a rule, and any card matching that rule appears there on its own and leaves when it stops matching. A column set to Review holds every post in review, without anybody moving anything.
Open the column and answer one question: how cards get here. Either you move them by hand, or they move automatically on their workflow status (Idea, Draft, Review, Scheduled, Published), or on their review status (internal review or client review). Pick the status that fills the column and you're done. There's no rule builder to learn.
No, and that's the point. A smart column is read-only, so a card can't be forced into a state it isn't in. The rule is the only way in or out. Manual columns are the opposite: you drag whatever you want into them and the card's workflow stage doesn't change.
Dragging a card between manual columns changes how the board is grouped, nothing else. The post's workflow stage stays where it was. A post only becomes scheduled or published when you actually schedule or publish it, so the board can't push a post live by accident.
Yes, and most people do. Keep Backlog and a couple of working columns manual for the stuff you shepherd by hand, then let Review, Scheduled, and Published fill themselves. Convert a column from one to the other whenever you like; Maeve warns you first, because turning a manual column smart makes it read-only and sends any card that doesn't match the rule back to Backlog.
Backlog, In Progress, Review, Scheduled, and Published. Rename them, recolor them, reorder them, convert them to smart columns, hide the ones you don't use, or add your own. Backlog is the one you can't delete: it's the fallback every homeless card lands in.
Twelve in total, with six on the board at once. The rest sit in a hidden list you can pull back in whenever you need them. Two columns can't share the same automation rule, since the card would have nowhere to be.
Your choice, in board settings. One card per post keeps a cross-platform post as a single card. One card per channel splits it, so the same post shows up once for Instagram and once for LinkedIn, which is what you want when the channels are on different schedules.
Not every job is a post. A task is the shoot to book, the caption to rewrite, the client to chase. It carries a priority, a due date, an assignee, labels, a checklist, attachments, comments, and an activity history, and it can link to the post it belongs to. Tasks live on their own tab beside the content board.
Both. A solo creator runs it as a personal queue. A team adds assignees, the Pending and Changes pills carry the approval state, and the assigned-to-me filter lets each person clear their own work without filtering by hand.
Four filter dimensions, stacked: platform, assignee (you, anyone, or unassigned), label, and archive visibility. Filtering by workflow status, pillar, or format isn't shipped yet. The workaround is a workflow-match custom column for the status you care about.
Not on the Board. Failed publishing is a separate surface so the workflow view doesn't get cluttered with platform errors. Failed Post Recovery is where you see the platform message, reconnect an account, and retry.
The Board scrolls horizontally on phones and tablets. Cards drag on touch with the same guardrails as desktop. It's not read-only on mobile.
Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google Business Profile. Cards on the Board show channel avatars for whichever networks the post will publish to.
