When it comes to your social media marketing and planning, many people find this area of their business to be the most challenging. Taking time to create content, schedule and engage with your audience may seem like the most daunting task of all, especially if you’re not outsourcing this type of work.
Working with clients, like you in mind, we’ve found a few helpful ways to make your planning a bit easier and take a little stress of you.
Content Creation As Your Starting Point
When we work with clients, we like to get an idea of the type of content they’d like to post, content they need to post, but more importantly, the content that their audience needs. One helpful way to begin creating content is organizing the content by themes.
In the digital space, it’s important to begin to establish yourself as an authority within the industry you’re serving. Let’s say, you’re a photographer. Here’s content ideas you' could start with:
a) Behind-The-Scenes look into the photography industry. You could show your clients what' your process is like to edit photos, assist in styling for a shoot, etc.
b) ”On-Set”, this is great to showcase what it’s like to work with you. A glimpse into the shooting experience.
c) Photography Tips: As you establish yourself as a thought leader, providing good/sound advice and tips to your audience is great for content. Whether it’s a tip a day, tip a week, or monthly, providing people with advice will always be a great resource for creating valuable content.
d) Motivation/Inspiration/Transparency: Everyone likes to be inspired and motivated, so when you’re looking to create content, put yourself in the shoes of your audience. As a novice photographer, I could be discouraged about many things and unsure of where to go or what to do. That’s where your content comes into play. You, as an established thought leader can offer the best inspiration on how to stay motivated while starting out.
Draft social media posts for a daily, weekly, monthly basis
Ideally, you’ll be posting more than one time a month, so find a rhythm that works best for you and something you can actually manage. Unsure when to post?
We recommend posting to Facebook anywhere between 12-4 PM.
We recommend posting to Instagram anywhere between 11AM -1PM, and in the evenings (5PM)
We recommend posting to Twitter anywhere between 10AM - 3PM, and in the evenings (5-8PM)
Automate, Automate, Automate
Yes, it’s 2019 - and you need to automate your posts as best you can. There’s a time to live-tweet and engage authentically and right from your fingers, but most of your content can be scheduled so that you no longer have to manually tweet/post and share every . single . time . Truthfully, unless you’re tweeting or posting for an event, joining in a lively conversation, manually updating your social media channels is time that could be spent on something else.
There are PLENTY of schedule software tools out there, and the most common are Hootsuite, Later (for Instagram), Buffer, Sprout Social, to start. Take 1-2 hours out of your day, preferably on the weekend, and schedule all your draft content so that during the work week, you have the peace of mind knowing that content is being pushed - reaching your audience - and doing the work for you.
