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. 

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.

2) 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 or Instagram Live.

1. Use the free Otter.ai app to transcribe your Live and turn it into a blog for your website. You can then link to that blog from your socials.

2. Share as an Article on LinkedIn

3. Pick out a number of tips from the Live and turn them into individual posts - titles like 3 or 5 things to XXX make it clear what the takeaways are.

4. You can also take quotes from the Live and create quote images in Canva or your favourite graphic design tool

5. Review your insights, 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 heap of time (and overwhelm), but also really hammers home your brand identity. I use the same fonts and colours throughout my social posts and presentations.

3) 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 a combination: Facebook Creator Studio (it’s free, perfect if you are just using Facebook & Instagram); my go for Client scheduling is Agorapulse as it has fantastic reporting and I can also post directly to Google My Business as well.

Different schedulers cater for different platforms too. Later and Planoly are great for Instagram for example, and Tailwind is perfect for Pinterest.

There is also a primarily app based tool for Facebook and Instagram - 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.

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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 channel audit; hashtag strategy; social media strategy; content planning and creation and Google My Business set up.

Click on the button below to book a free 20min discovery call with me to see where I could help.