Let’s start off by discussing multi-tasking, and why it might not be as helpful as we first thought it was. Multi-tasking often makes you feel as though you're being productive due to the amount of work you're spreading yourself across on any given day, but in reality, multi-tasking is actually less productive than taking things one at a time. It's estimated that only 2% of the population is genuinely proficient in multi-tasking.
So when the majority of us (98% to be exact) aren’t proficient multitaskers, what are we meant to do? Scheduled posting. Social media content creation can take up a huge chunk of your time, especially if you’re creating the content to then manually post it to your social accounts.
We’ve prepared a process for you below to save time by creating your content in advance.
Planning Process
Each month, set aside a day where you map out the entire social calendar for the following month. Outlining the topics you want to cover gives you the chance to see your strategy from further away, allowing for a clearer understanding of what you’re doing. Plan out your following month, and give yourself a few hours to write up your roadmap.
Content Plan Checklist:
- Number of Posts - Note down how often you want to be posting content each week. It’s important to remember that quality will always trump quantity. Create a schedule and stick to it, being consistent over a long period will garner results and allow you to sustain it.
- Goals - Write up the specific goals you want to hit for that month and how can your content help you hit those goals.
- Important Dates - Do you have any important dates upcoming? Possibly a new service or a new product, maybe even an event that you’re hosting. Get those immovable dates into your content calendar first and fill in the gaps around them.
- Social Media ‘Holidays’ - If there are any relevant social media holidays coming up which your business identifies with and you’d like to celebrate them, put those into your plan so you can create some content for those too. Hubspot have a great list of social media holidays which you can access here.
Having a content roadmap that focuses on these 4 pillars will make life easier for you moving forward and staying consistent with your posting.
Types of Content You Should Create:
Knowing what content to post is arguably the biggest hurdle when it comes to running a successful social media account. You need to remember to post a variety of content, you want to educate, entertain and sell.
An advantage of planning your content for the following month in advance is that you can plan the types of content much easier. This way you don’t need to scramble to get a post up that might potentially have a detrimental effect on your social accounts. You can be strategic and intentional with some pre-planning.
If you decide that you want to share four posts per week you’ll need to balance the content that you post, you can share two educational posts, one sales post and one entertaining post each week. The more you plan the easier it is for you to smash out new content and schedule it for the upcoming month.
It’s important to remember that your planned content doesn’t need to be complex. Anything can count as content as long it is of value to your key audience. Share knowledge, share behind the scenes, share your team, share testimonials and share answers to FAQs. Your audience follows you because they want access to your insights.
Batch Working:
Batch working is a streamlined, topic-specific workflow. When you’re batch working, you’re essentially dividing your work into different hours and days of the week where you’ll only focus on one thing at a time during that specific time. You can apply this model to so many aspects of your life, not just during work.
First Step (Plan your upcoming month’s content) - The first step in batch working is planning and creating your social media content for the upcoming month.
If you’ve got your content and roadmap already sorted then you should be following these steps to streamline your workflow.
Second Step (Create all your visual content) - Having your content roadmap ready to go allows your to pivot towards your visual content for the month. Write up a checklist for what you’ll need to create this content, this includes everything from stock images to custom graphics.
With your list in hand, it’s time to create! If you’re wanting to create custom branded graphics you can use a free tool like Canva. If you wanted some proper custom designs you could even purchase a library of templates that you can customize to suit your brand. Your branding will stay consistent and saves you time opposed to creating new designs from scratch every week.
Third Step (Write all of your captions) - Captions aren’t a time consuming part of content creation. If you batch work your captions you can create a formula for your captions that make it easy for you to write up new ones. Good captions include these:
- Hook - An attention grabbing first sentence, aim to inspire your audience to continue reading the rest of your post.
- Value - Deliver. If you promise something in your hook then make sure you deliver on it, share content here that educates, entertains and sells.
- Call to Action (CTA) - Tell your audience what they need to do for you (eg. like, comment and share.) Make sure your call to action is a simple and fun one so that your audience will actually follow through on what you’re asking.
Fourth Step (Schedule posts) - Now that you have all of your content ready to go, you can begin scheduling them into your social calendar. Making use of a social media scheduler like Pur will save you time and stress giving you a platform to schedule and post to all of your social accounts from the one spot. (insert picture)
Sit Back and Relax
You no longer need to be stressing about what to post. Getting yourself into the habit of planning and scheduling your content in advance will improve your workflow. You’ll start to see reward for effort by having a consistent posting schedule while saving yourself time and effort, it’s a no-brainer at the end of the day.
Freeing up the time you spend on content creation allows you to put it towards other aspects of your business that might be more time consuming. Think about how many hours you could save per month just with a little planning and scheduling in advance. Use this whenever you’re low on motivation to stick with your scheduling process.
