The demand for content is ever growing and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. But don’t let the thought of creating content for your business give you overwhelm, start managing the demand for content creation so you can get your life back!
In my experience there are 4 fundamentals when it comes to mastering the demand for content creation:
Plan Ahead
The key to managing your content is in the planning. You need to be able to take a step back and look at the bigger picture in order to establish what your messages are and what types of content you should be creating.
Use your event calendar and other marketing materials/communications as a base when creating content and ask yourself the following questions as a starting point:
- What social platforms are my target market on, and what forms of content work best on those platforms?
- What are our overarching marketing objectives here?
- What internal resources do we have available to create content?
- What budget do I have to bring in external resources such as bloggers or videographers?
- Do we have any events or milestones coming up?
- What are our key messages?
At the end of the day, the planning of content comes easily when you know your platform, your audience, and your content.
Be Consistent
You need to be consistent with your content, so don’t over commit to too many posts in one day. Your audience wants to know that they can rely on you and your content. Whether you commit to blogging once a week or once a month doesn’t matter – ensure it’s relevant and always comes out at the same time every time.
The same process applies for all of your other posts, commit to a number of posts per day on a platform and stick to it. Start small and work your way up. Begin with one platform and get that right before jumping across multiple platforms and wondering why none of them are working.
Using a scheduling tool (see below) will assist you greatly in this area; as will having someone hold you accountable for your content delivery.
Repurpose Content
Social content isn’t a one size fits all, so you’ll need to get creative with using your content across different platforms in different ways.
A while ago I blogged about having the ability to turn 1x 2-minute video into 14 pieces of usable social content: 1x video 1x transcribed written article, 2x facebook posts, and 8x tweets.
In fact, even if you’re not creating video content (and you should be) blog articles are a great source of social content in so many ways:
- Pull out a couple of short, snappy and on point sentences to make tweets.
- rework a couple of sentences or a paragraph from your blog and add a picture for Facebook or Instagram,[Text Wrapping Break and
- Turn the above sentences / key points into quotation graphics for Facebook or Instagram using a program such as Canva
It really is that simple – you just need to think outside the box a little.
Schedule
Using tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite enable you to schedule your content on social platforms and are a huge time saver!
As a user of Buffer I love the fact that I can:
- See when the key times to post are
- Get advice on how many times a day to post on which platform
- Get in-depth analytics of my content
- Re-Buffer old, relevant posts
- Add content on my mobile – the app is super simple, and
- Get my team to contribute to the content (bye bye spreadsheets!)
But don’t let these scheduling tools fool you, there still needs to be elements of your content that are ‘live’ and you do need to be active on your chosen social platforms daily. Communities don’t grow themselves, they need to be nurtured. Take time to review other content. To like, comment and share other content. And above all, respond to comments that are left on your content.
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Rebecca Saunders
Rebecca is one of Australia’s leading video strategists, Founder & CEO of the Deli Agency, The Vlog School and Pyrmont Studio, and is the creator of ‘ENGAGED: The Video Roadmap’. She’s leading the industry in making high-quality video both accessible and affordable and has created content for the likes of Microsoft, LinkedIn, Hitachi and ASUS. Rebecca also works closely with Thought Leaders + Industry Experts to give them the courage and confidence they need to make an impact through video.