How to Make Content Creation Natural
Get your social media doing what it should with less work
It can start out fun, but it doesn’t take long for your social media to become a job in itself. And you already have a job - running your business. Successful social media accounts take time, but they can take less time if you have a good execution strategy. Research and planning can result in epic content that takes your business to the next level, rather than just taking an hour of your day as you wonder what to post.
So where do you start? Here are some of the things you can implement to help make the job easier.
Set up your content foundations.
Dedicate time to determining your brand voice and content pillars or buckets (i.e. the topics you’ll speak about). For most brands, three to five pillars are enough. These will what content you’ll post and how you’ll talk about it. Looking for some content pillar ideas? Here are some ideas:
Product / Service
Features and Benefits
Highlights
Demonstration
Educational
Tips and tricks
How to
Tutorials
Bust a myth
Simplify and idea
Checklist
Guide
User-Generated Content
Client before and afters
Testimonials
Influencer content
Customer photos
BTS / Connection / Story
Say what’s not being said, share your opinion/idea
A day in the life
A look into your office/workplace
Share a win/struggle
Share a fact about yourself/you team
Quotes, Funny GIFS, memes that your audience will enjoy
Promotional
Tell people about your product/service and ask for the sale
Upcoming sales and promotions
Encourage newsletter sign-ups
Showcase products with a strong CTA
Plan and bulk create
Determine how often you’ll be posting and then batch-create your content for the week/fortnight/month ahead. This includes booking in any photoshoots, taking your own photos, shooting video,s and creating graphics. Doing it all at once is more efficient because you stay in the mindset and can think about the relationships between the posts. Use your content pillars to determine what you’re going to be posting and, once you know your topics, you’ll be able to create the visuals you need to accompany the words.
Choose a scheduling system and use it
We use Planoly, simply because it’s so easy to use. The free version allows you to schedule all of your static content (images) to auto-post however you won’t be able to upload carousels, videos or stories - we’ve upgraded to the paid version as it’s where we also manage all of our clients content and we’re able to schedule carousels, video and stories, however they still will not auto-post, this requires the manual click of a button thanks to the Facebook/Instagram API.
The benefits of a scheduling app:
You can plan out your feed and clearly see what’s coming up
Scheduling content to go out at your ideal time - it will either fire or ping you to post depending on the format - meaning you don’t have to keep track of time.
The ability to post from your desktop means it’s much quicker. Typing out a caption on a keyboard is much more efficient than on taping it on your phone.
It allows you to save all of your hashtag sets for easy access. Huge timesaver.
Believe us when we say, the hardest part is getting started. Once you have your foundations you’ll build momentum, know what you’re doing and creating content will become second nature.
Don’t forget to include an epic hashtag and engagement strategy to support your content. Not sure where to start? Book yourself a free 20 minute call with Sammi - we can help you bring together a strategy that you can execute yourself or we can take care of the whole lot for you.