Do you find yourself dreading your next social media post?
Or maybe you’ve got plenty of ideas but can’t work out how to organise them?
It’s a problem many of my clients face.
Well, I’ve got some good news to share. When you get strategic about your content creation, you’ll not only produce better quality content, you’ll save yourself heaps of time in the long run.
Follow my three-step guide to speed up content creation.
Step 1: Plan
Once a month, block out time in your diary to plan your content for the weeks ahead.
This process should include looking back at what’s worked well in the past. Is there something your audience loved that you can do more of?
Next, plot out a number of themes and decide upon the content that sits within each.
For example:
- Sales posts – what are you promoting this month?
- Expert posts – what can you create to share your expertise and show people that you know your stuff?
- Pain to gain posts – what can you post to show your audience that you understand their problems and have a solution?
- Personality posts – share behind-the-scenes shots to build know, like and trust.
#Bonus tip: Come up with three ideas for each section and you’ve got enough posts for a month. Use a spreadsheet, Trello board or Post-it notes to organise your ideas.
Step two: Repurpose
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you post. In fact, if you’re smart, you can make one piece of content work multiple ways.
Let’s say you do a Facebook Live.
Use the free Otter app to transcribe your Live and turn it into a blog for your website. You can then link to that blog from your socials.
Pick out a number of tips from the Live and turn them into individual posts.
You can also take quotes from the Live and create quote images in Canva or Wordswag.
Posts that worked well in the past can also be refreshed and reposted.
Honestly, people’s feeds move so fast these days, they aren’t going to remember the wording of a post they read three months ago.
#Bonus tip: Creating templates in Canva that you can reuse over and over again will save you a huge amount of time and give your content a consistent brand feel.
Step three: Automate
Once you’ve decided what to post you can use a content scheduler to speed up the publishing process.
There are lots of great free options available and they’re usually easy to use.
I use Later for Instagram and Publer for just about everything else! I love Publer because it supports so many platforms (including LinkedIn company pages and profiles, and Facebook Groups) and has some great features, such as being able to schedule the first comment.
Different schedulers cater for different platforms too. Later and Planoly are great for Instagram for example, and Tailwind is perfect for Pinterest.
Facebook also has its own inbuilt scheduler – Facebook Business Suite – which can be used to publish posts and Stories to Facebook and Instagram.
#Bonus tip: Great as schedulers are, they’re not an excuse to load up your content and forget about it!
While they save time on a day-to-day basis you should check in with your accounts and engage on a daily basis. Without consistent engagement, your posts will flop.
Need help with content creation, planning or scheduling? I offer a range of services including Training & Workshops, Audits & Set Up, and Monthly Social Media Management.