How You Can Accelerate Content Production For Your Social Media Pages
With so many companies and marketers competing for a slice of the public’s ever more divided attention, competition on across social media platforms is tough, often brutal. This is especially true when you’re the new guy, trying to establish your presence and carve out a niche for yourself in the space.
But while the task may seem daunting, with a combination of working hard and working smart, you’ll soon be well on your way to making a name for yourself or your organization across the social channels of your choice. So without further ado, here are our top tips to help you build a great body of content for your social media pages quickly and efficiently.
Getting organized
The first step is actually very simple but since so many people miss this step, it’s worth including. When you’re trying to build up your social media presence it’s important to first determine your desired outcomes and then develop a clear plan to achieve those goals. The first step is to develop a content calendar to help you easily plan what you should be doing and when you should do it. However with social media, it is important to be dynamic so if an important event occurs in an industry you cover or are involved in then, by all means, divert from the calendar to address it. The purpose of the calendar is to guide you when you need it. It’s not supposed to rigidly keep you on track when you have your sights on a good opportunity.
The next step is to create content in batches, this helps keep you focused on a particular topic and give you room to explore the topic in detail. This approach is best employed for content that won’t be affected by current and on-going developments in your field. A retrospective on an industry and some notable events in its past is a great example of this kind of content which you can produce at your leisure as the facts are highly unlikely to change.
Finally, it’s important to schedule your posts, this is done primarily for two reasons. The first is to ensure that your posts will always hit when your audience is most likely to see and read your content, rather than posting it as soon as it’s done or whenever you’re free. The second is to maintain more consistent engagement even when you’re not available. Scheduling posts through weekends and holidays mean that your audience has content to enjoy when they’re free, without needing you to work odd hours or over weekends.
Some social platforms support scheduling already but for the ones that don’t, DrumUp provides a Social Media Management service that allows you to create and schedule posts across practically all leading social platforms. As for when to post, you could use DrumUp’s inbuilt social media analytics platform or check out this list of great 3rd party social media analytics services
Content curation
Easily the fastest way to build out some content for your social media pages is, in fact, to curate the content of others. Curating existing content not only helps you build up a rich social media presence quickly but also helps you establish yourself as an authority in the field or sector you want to discuss. You can choose to either present good content from other sources that you would like to share with your audience or you could go further and offer your own additional insights or commentary. However, you should not become over-reliant on curation as it’s important that you also provide your audience with some fresh and original content to create or maintain your own value as a social media account that is worth following.
When it comes to services that can help you with content curation there’s no shortage of choices. DrumUp provides built-in content curation as part of its social media management tools, but great choices abound to suit every need, budget and experience level. If you’re new to the world of content curation, check out this quick guide which helps you identify what types of content are most likely to perform well on your social media channels
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Professional social media management services
Of all the methods out there, this is the most expensive, but if you need good content fast, you really can’t beat calling in a professional (or a team of professionals depending on how much content you need). Engaging a professional social media management outfit gives you access to a large pool of talent to work with who will be able to work quickly to get your social media presence off the ground. Partnering with professional writers with experience in creating content for social channels is a great choice once you get started.
The less ambiguous your requirements, the faster your writing partners will be able to deliver content that meets your exact needs. So once you’ve decided on what content you need, who you want it targeted towards and how much content you’ll need a writing service can help get you to your content targets way faster than you ever could working alone.
User Generated Content
This one is a good choice for social media pages who already have a reasonable following and are looking to grow further. One pretty effective way to do this is to invite users to submit content that they have created themselves. You could make it into a competition, give them a prompt or even give them tools that they can use to make and submit their creations. A prize may help, but if you can make your request interesting enough, you’ll probably have no trouble attracting enough participation from people with no motivation beyond a chance to show off their skills and maybe have a laugh or two as well.
Do be aware though that if you’re going this route you will need to either closely moderate all the content being created before you publish it on your social pages or be comfortable with the idea of a few jokes being made at your expense (there’s usually more than a few trolls out there these days, unfortunately). On the upside, this kind of content generation usually costs either next-to-nothing or is completely free
Cross-promote content from other sources
If you’re building up content for a new social account, don’t be afraid of using content from your other social presences as well. For example, if you’re building up a new Twitter account, content shared on your blog, your Youtube channel, your Instagram account or any other channel you prefer can help you provide content for your new pages and new audiences without any hassle at all.
Of course, you do need to make sure that the content you’re sharing make sense in context and that you provide a reasonable amount of fresh, original and/or unique content for this new page as well to help it become its own entity. The goal here is to use careful cross promotion to build up a body of content while the fresh content will be more specifically designed to cater to your newest audience. You can also use your older content to help you understand what your new audience responds to rather than spending additional time performing this ‘path-finding’ task with entirely new content
Save time managing your social media accounts
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Hosting live content
The final entry on this list but certainly no slouch when it comes to getting results, creating live content is a great way to create a large amount of content both short form and long form content. Short content may take the form of a behind-the-scenes look at your company, direct promotional content for your company’s products or events or even quick Q&A session where you or a special guest field questions from an audience via social media(Think of it like a Reddit AMA that you film). For long-form content, you could consider hosting a podcast which could be in an audio-only form or have video as well.
While not strictly speaking necessary, the reason we would recommend hosting these events live is that the amount of time you spend making the content is exactly as long as the content is, to begin with; and that kind of economy when you’re trying to bulk up your content collection is hard to argue with. Services Like Youtube and Twitch lend themselves well to live content production and with Youtube, it’s easy to turn that live content into a permanent shareable video on your channel which you can then post to your social channels
Depending on where you are in the growth cycle of your social media presence, some of these methods will work better for you than others, pick the ones that work best for where your numbers are at right now get to it. Have you tried any of the methods we discussed above, or maybe have a few we didn’t cover at all? Why not share your personal experience in the comments about what did or didn’t work for you.
Image Courtesy: Flickr / Blogtrepreneur
