Creating social media content can be very time-consuming. You have to think carefully and decide what you need to post, create a suitable graphic for the post, come up with a creative caption, choose classy hashtags, upload the content, and then engage with your audience by responding to their comments. Additionally, you have to do it over and over again.
The challenges of creating social media content can be daunting but showing up on your social media platforms regularly has significant economic rewards for your business. You can do the following by posting valuable information on your social media accounts consistently:
- Expand your target market.
- Boost your brand’s recognition
- Develop your industry’s authority.
- Boost participation and engagement from your followers.
Suppose you aim to achieve all the benefits that come with creating social media content. In that case, you need to come up with a long-term strategy that will help you save time when planning and coming up with social media content. The secret to making this a possibility is planning ahead and creating material in batches, commonly referred to as batch working content creation.
The procedure that has been outlined below can be repeated monthly to save time planning and developing social media content.
Content Planning Process
The mechanism by which your firm selects which content projects to undertake and when to undertake them is known as content planning. In terms of creating social media content, you can set aside some time every month to plan the content you will share on your social media platforms for the whole month. You may take a high-level view of your content and be more strategic with your content plan by establishing the content topics you want to cover for the month. Each month, set aside one to two hours to plan out your material for the month. This planning will help provide you with a map of how your content will be.
In your content plan, make sure that the following items are addressed.
1. The overall number of posts.
How often do you usually post per week (or wish to post)? Keep in mind that quantity is not as important as quality and constancy. Maintain a plan and consistency that you can stick to. Remember that creating social media content with a plan in mind is a time-saver for you.
2. Your business’s goals.
What are your month’s general business goals, and how can your content assist you in achieving those goals? Goals are crucial since they will provide you with guidelines on the type of content you need to create. In creating social media content do not forget to incorporate your company’s goal and mission vision.
3. Important dates to remember.
Do you have a new product you are offering or a service coming out within the month, or a special event coming up? Filling in the supporting content about those first before plugging them into your content strategy will ensure that you don’t miss out on sharing essential details about your business.
4. Social media holidays you aim to celebrate.
Are there any relevant social media holidays you’d like to commemorate on your social media accounts? You may find a nice collection of these types of holidays online, or you can look up ones that are special to your sector.
In the long run, the aim is to have content that resonates with your audience, matches up to your goals, and attracts more followers to your business. Thanks to a well-defined content roadmap, you can safely go into the month knowing what content has to be developed each week. A content plan can assist you in overcoming the problems you experience with content marketing daily, such as:
a) Ensuring that you are creating original and relevant social media content: Planning ahead allows you to collect more ideas from a more significant number of people.
b) Considering the available resources: with improved workflows and processes, you and your team can be more successful and productive and consequently get a good return on investment in your business.
c) Optimizing engagement for each piece of content you create: With a content strategy in place, you’ll be able to give each piece of content the attention it requires to maintain high levels of engagement.
d) Keeping a schedule: Using a content calendar, you can avoid the usual problems that content teams have when staying on track with timelines, tasks, and projects.
The adage “If you don’t plan, you plan to fail” has been bandied about for years. It’s usually credited to Benjamin Franklin, as with most quotes, even though he probably never uttered it. Regardless of its provenance, this remark endures and is repeated ad nauseam for a straightforward reason: it is entirely accurate. You need to plan your content if your content is to help you grow your business on social media.
Types of Social Media Contents You Should Create
One of the most challenging aspects of creating social media content is deciding what to share. It is critical to publish a range of types of content while developing content for social media. Sharing one type of content may not get you the engagement you need for your business. Your material should either educate, entertain, or sell what you offer. All in all, it should add value to your followers.
Below are different types of social media content you can use.
1. Written Social Media Content
Written content can be in the form of posts, blogs, articles, or guides. They demonstrate your company’s skill and understanding, which can help you significantly in gaining credibility and improving your reputation. However, there is a lot of written content out there, so competition is fierce—and coming up with new topic ideas takes a lot of imagination. Generating content ideas takes quite some time, especially when you’re expressing complicated concepts.
Looking into trending searches in your industry can assist you to come up with high-quality content. This can provide insight into the types of queries people are looking for answers to, which can then help you come up with topics to write about.
2. Images
Good images boost engagement and attract more customers to like your brand. Customers are less likely to swipe past your post and miss the message if you use them. Written content like blogs and essays is far more difficult to consume and engage with than visual social media content, but incorporating an image into a blog article can boost engagement and drive traffic to your website. Production of images has become easier since phone cameras can produce amazing pictures, and there are many online applications that make it simple to edit, filter, and enhance them.
3. Videos
It’s convenient and simple to record your videos, and they’re way more entertaining than photos. Video tours, how-to tutorials, demos, and product updates are all examples of amazing video content you can use that may boost your website traffic and increase revenue. Making simple videos is inexpensive, but expenses will increase if you desire a video with more outstanding standards.
4. Infographics
Infographics are a visual representation of data. They accompany data and other textual concepts and are therefore very effective at communicating complex ideas. The creation of infographics usually necessitates the use of both copy and graphics, which may demand the collaboration of several people. They also require the use of imagination and thorough study.
Use the different tools provided by each of your social media platforms to combine these diverse content kinds to help your business stand out, save time, and improve your consumer experience. Don’t be scared of trying new things and being inventive with your concepts. Over time, you’ll discover the types of material your target audience responds to most. You can only know what works best if you give it a shot!
Streamline Social Media Creation with Batch Working
Batch working is one of many tactics you can apply in content planning. To know how you can use it to streamline your content creation, you first need to understand it.
What is Batch Working?
Batch working is a time management strategy that improves your productivity and avoids distractions by focusing on one activity or task. Batching work helps you focus, be more creative, and be more productive while reducing stress, exhaustion, and distractions.
You can use batch working in numerous aspects of your life and career, but we’ll concentrate on using it for content creation. The theory is that focusing on one job at a time will allow you to enter a flow state, which will enable your productivity and creativity to soar. As a result, you can produce higher-quality content in a much less timeframe.
How to streamline creating social media content with batch working?
Below are steps to follow to help you streamline content creation with batch working
1. Plan creating social media content one month ahead
The first step in planning and preparing social media content is planning out your content for the month. Once you’ve completed your monthly content plan, you can follow the procedures outlined below to streamline the content creation portion of the puzzle.
2. Create all the visual content you will need weekly
Using your content roadmap, identify and determine the visuals you’ll need to generate for the week. Make a list of every image you’ll need, including stock photographs, videos, custom graphics, and cover shots.
Once your compiled list is complete, you are ready to be creative. You may use a tool like Canva to create custom-branded graphics. Create (or buy) a template library that you can quickly customize each week with new material. Instead of beginning from scratch each week, the template will keep your branding consistent and save you time.
3. Note down all captions when creating social media content
It doesn’t have to take a while to generate your captions. Generally, you can quickly produce captions that will convert your audience by batching captions and following a caption formula. Typically, a decent caption should:
- Grab your audience’s interest immediately with a catchy hook. Just consider your caption’s first 14 words as the email subject line. The hook must persuade your audience to click “read more.”
- Be valuable in that it shares content that entertains, educates, or sells, as promised in the hook.
- Tell your audience and followers how you want them to participate in a call to action. You can ask them to share, tag, like, sign up, comment, buy, click, etc. Keep your calls to action straightforward to prompt your audience to respond and follow through.
- Schedule your posts
Now that you have your photos and captions, it is time to plan all your articles according to the content calendar. You can use tools such as Buffer’s Publishing tool to set your posting schedule. With the buffer publishing tool, your post will be automatically posted at the scheduled time. Alternatively, you will receive a push notification at the scheduled time to post it yourself, depending on the type of post.
Your efforts in content planning will pay off once you get into the habit of planning and scheduling material ahead of time. You will not only gain from your content strategy, but you will also save time and minimize stress when it comes to social media content. Using a content batching routine allows you to create high-quality content and schedule it according to your social media plan.
Conclusion
Social media content planned earlier might better assist in achieving the entire business goals. If you want to promote your products or services, an event your business is hosting, or a company milestone, planning earlier allows you to create strategic content that happens to support those goals.
Ultimately, by devoting less time and effort to generating your content, you will dedicate more time to other brand aspects. You can use that extra time to build stronger relationships and better connections with your social media community. You can focus on engaging your audience by using Socialays which as a tool ensures that it tracks all responses and comments made on your post so that you can respond to them accordingly. Additionally, other business areas such as admin tasks, sales, team building, and networking can also benefit from the extra time.
For businesses, social media is a tremendously beneficial tool. You can use social media strategically and wisely if you plan ahead of time.
