Time.
It’s probably the biggest factor when you’re a business owner (or social media manager, or mom… the list goes on), especially when you’re a small business owner who is wearing many hats. I totally get it, I create content and manage social media for 9 businesses right now, so my time is precious!
So when you need to work on your online marketing, social media posts, and creating content, you want to spend your time in a smart way, use the best, time-saving tools, and use the most time-effective strategies to maximize your time.
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In this post, I share with you my step-by-step content creation blueprint to get the most content created and repurposed, in the least amount of time (and actually create cool, interesting content too!)
Step 1: Start with the basics
In order to fully maximize your time and effort, you want to understand a few basic things:
- what is your goal with your online marketing efforts? Is your focus to get more people to your events? Do you need to fill jobs? If you don’t know your goal, you’re going to create useless content that is going to waste your time, and your audiences’ time (note- this doesn’t mean to only fill your feed with sales messages!)
- what type of content does your audience enjoy most (you can check out your analytics for this data)?
- what type of content do you enjoy making most? (if you HATE writing blog posts and they take you forever, AND your audience doesn’t enjoy reading, this is a time-waster. Spend time making content you actually like making (or hire someone to create it for you).
- when is your audience online? Again, you can check your analytics for this. Scheduling your posts at the ideal time of day to reach the most people is a great strategy, plus, scheduling your posts saves you time.
Now that you know your goal, your ideal content type, and when to post, you should have streamlined your content creation process already, and it will help you stay laser-focused on your content you will be creating.
Step 2: Plan
I know, this isn’t the fun part, but this is one key area to save you a huge amount of time.
Planning is more than just planning out your yearly content calendar (though that is part of it).
- Keep an ongoing list of content ideas so that on your less creative days, you already have your topics ready.
- Plan the day you are going to create content and batch your content. Whether you’re creating images, shooting and editing videos, batch your content to save time.
- Decide on the days you are scheduling your posts, whether it’s once a week/month or every few months.
Having a clear plan that incorporates your overall goals of your social media platforms will save you so much time and helps you stay on task.
Step 3: Create your pillar and mini content
In Step 1, you got clear with what type of content you would be creating.
Let’s say for example, that you love creating images (specifically images with quotes on them), and your audience loves them too. It makes sense with your brand, and they’re simple and quick to create. This would be your pillar content that you create.
Starting with one graphic, you get your main design, and then create platform-specific sizes and images for each other platform you are posting to. For example:
- Create a Facebook image to share and write your text that is suitable for your audience for Facebook
- Create an Instagram-specific image (less words, more focus on the image) to share on Instagram with a suitable description and hashtags
- Use the image on Instagram Stories, while adding a location tag and adding a GIF sticker to add some interest
- Repurpose the image, and add audio to the image to share an additional time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Remember that you can share content more than once, and I will cover that more in Step 4.
For more on how to create these different types on content, I absolutely love how Gary Vee gives a rundown on his content creation strategy.
Step 4: Use smart social media tools
Social media can be overwhelming and the number of graphic creation tools, social media scheduling tools and other software can be confusing.
Use smart social media tools that ideally save you time, and can do more than one thing. One example of this is using Promo Republic to get social media post ideas, design your graphics, and schedule, all in one tool!
(FYI, I am an affiliate for Promo republic which means I get a small commission when you use my code to purchase the tool 😊 )
Using Promo Republic, you can:
- get thousands of ideas for social media posts
- use their holiday calendar to get ideas for fun special events to use in your social media, like National Wine Day, or National Stop Bullying Day
- design all your social media graphics within the site
- connect your social media profiles and schedule right in the site!
Check out Promo Republic here!
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Step 5: Be ok with what you create
One thing with sharing content on social media is that you really can’t focus on being perfect (even if it’s tempting).
If I only shared perfectly polished videos, I would never share anything.
My videos aren’t perfect.
My blogs aren’t perfect.
But they help people. When I get a comment on YouTube saying the video helped them, it’s such a great feeling. If I waited foe the video to be perfect (which would be never), I wouldn’t have been able to help that person.
Focus on creating helpful, informative, entertaining, or interesting content that your audience likes, and be ok with your content just be ok.
Step 6: Repurpose, reuse, recycle
One thing with social media is that it moves fast, so much content is shared daily, and there is no doubt that not all of your followers will see every post. Which means it is more than ok to re-share existing content.
If you spend an hour to write a blog post (likely longer), time to create the featured image, time for SEO, time to schedule it, etc. make sure you reuse it!
When I write a blog post, I add it to my Hiplay account which is connected to my Buffer account (ie. both smart tools like mentioned in Step 4!) which continues to reshape my blog posts over and over again. I make sure to only add evergreen content (content that is relevant for a long time) so that when someone clicks on the blog post 2 months after I write it, it still makes sense and is useful for them.
Another way to repurpose old content is to reshare using a new featured image, by turning your blogs into videos, podcasts, using snippets of your blog as tip graphics, and more. There are so many ways to reuse your existing content, and create multiple social media posts from one idea.
Do you have a social media content system? Share your steps with me and let me know if I missed something!
