Do you find yourself dreading your next social media post?
It’s a problem many people face.
But when you get strategic about your content creation, you’ll not only produce better quality content, you’ll save yourself time in the long run.
Follow this three-step guide to speed up content creation.
Step One: 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, consider your content categories and decide what to include for 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?
- Problem-solving 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.
- Timely posts – what’s coming up in the diary this month? Any events you need to mention or key dates to celebrate?
Bonus tip: Come up with three ideas for each section and you’ve got enough posts for a month.
Step Two: Repurpose
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you post. If you’re smart, you can make one piece of content work in 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.
Posts that worked well in the past can also be refreshed and reposted.
People’s feeds move so fast these days, they aren’t going to remember the wording of a post they read six 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. Sign up here.
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 options available and they’re usually easy to use.
I use Agorapulse to schedule my client posts. I can group profiles into separate calendars so that clients can access just their scheduled posts, I can work with other team members, and I can schedule posts for client approval – great if there’s anything I would like the client to confirm is correct.
Different schedulers cater for different platforms too. Later and Planoly are great for Instagram for example.
Facebook also has its own inbuilt scheduler, Facebook Creator Studio, 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 schedulers help you get organised and save you time on a day-to-day basis, you should still check in with your accounts and engage on a daily basis. Without consistent engagement, your posts will flop.
