Social media can be a challenge for many small business owners and small nonprofits. After all, most people didn’t start a business or go into nonprofit work to do the marketing side of things — they want to spend their time working with clients and delivering services. But sometimes writing your own marketing content is a necessity for small businesses and nonprofits.
If you’re looking for ways to streamline social media content, batching is a good option because it saves time and helps channel your creative energy. It’s also one of the best ways to stay consistent with your social media presence. However, it’s important to do it in a way that your content doesn’t get stale. These tips can help you streamline your social media content process while also keeping your content fresh.
Start with an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar helps ensure you’re not starting from a completely blank page each time you sit down to create content. An editorial calendar can include key themes or topics by month or important dates you want to remember for social media.
Sit down and brainstorm what topics make sense for your organization to talk about overall, and then sort them into months of the year. If you don’t have specific seasonal reasons to talk about certain topics, you can still assign themes to specific months to keep yourself on track. Even having that basic framework of ideas in place six months at a time can help ensure consistency in your social media content and give you somewhere to start when you sit down to write.
Know your ideal mix of content
Keep your content balanced by including different types of social media content each month. That includes promotional posts about your business, posts designed to help educate your customer about a topic related to your business, and sometimes entertaining content if it fits your brand. Some of your content may even be online articles from other sources that relate to the work you do.
Within the number of social media posts you need each month, think about how many will highlight a specific service you offer, how many will be useful information for your customers, how many might spotlight volunteers or clients, and how many might be purely for entertainment value.
Keep in mind that within your own promotional content, you may have different categories. For example, we have subcategories of social media, blogging, strategy, and email marketing within our promotional posts.
There are no hard and fast rules here, so try some different options for content and see what gets engagement from your audience.
Prewrite and preschedule content
Consistency is one of the biggest hurdles for small organizations on social media, and prescheduled content means greater consistency. If writing a full month of content at a time seems daunting, start with writing and scheduling one week at a time. Once you’re in the rhythm of doing it once a week, try for two weeks at a time. Then, expand to one month if you can.
When you’re batching content, write similar posts at the same time. For example, write the number of posts you need that promote your services. Then move on to finding articles you want to share and write something to go with each article.
You can — and should — still add those in-the-moment posts to show the personal side of your business, but having an editorial calendar, an ideal mix of content, and some prescheduled content can help ensure consistency and boost engagement over time.
If you need help developing an editorial calendar and ideal content mix, get in touch with our team to chat about our social media strategy services. Or, if you’re ready for someone to take social media completely off your plate, we can do that too.