How to Efficiently Work on Social Media Content

It’s impossible to be everywhere at all times and social media demands can sometimes make you feel like you need to find a way to make that happen. In business, it’s important to find inefficiencies in any process, and developing social media content is no exception. Here's how to efficiently work on your social media content so you can do your best work. 

1. Find your ideal block of time for social media work.

Every business has hectic times and down times. Find your ideal downtime and use it to work on marketing content planning. Even if that ideal time is once a month, once a week, or maybe even for 15 minutes each day, schedule it and block out time to work on your social media. Consider all team members that need to be involved.

2. Use a content calendar to plan ahead.

During your social media work session, use a calendar, list, project management app, or even a spreadsheet to figure out what needs to be communicated in the upcoming schedule. What events or sales need to be promoted, what holidays are coming up, what’s on the menu, what are you blogging about this month? Get these items in a calendar and then determine what social media needs to support them.

3. Create visuals to support the content in your calendar.

We all know how important visuals are and these can be developed in batches too. Now that you have a calendar, start developing ideas for visuals that will support these communications. Don’t wait until the content needs to be published to do this. Again, work ahead because nothing is more stressful than scrounging for a photo you need to publish right away. Look through your image library, use Canva, and determine if new pictures are needed. If so, schedule time to get some new pictures or download new stock photography. 

4. Organize your content. 

As you're gathering or creating content, save it somewhere that makes sense so when it's time to publish, it's ready to go. We covered the importance of this concept in our blog post about creating folders and using a cloud storage solution.

5. Use a scheduling app to publish content for the future.

Ok, now you’re ready to start publishing content. By using scheduling apps, you can go ahead and get the content created and scheduled for the future. Both Buffer and Hootsuite are extremely popular solutions and support most social media platforms. Each will allow you to upload your visuals, select the social media channel, create the caption or post, and then schedule when you actually want it to be published.

Caution:  Don’t set it and forget it.

Even though scheduling content is the most efficient way to keep your social media channels populated, it’s not the only way you should be publishing content. First, this process can not replace the periodic value of spontaneity. There will be times that unplanned awesomeness will occur and you should definitely be ready to capture it and post about it. Secondly, there are also times that events outside of our control can make the content you have scheduled not so great. Always be aware of how political events, catastrophes, and tragedies can affect the content you have in your queue. Edit as necessary.

This process is fairly high level. Use it as a guide in creating a social media development process that works for you. The key point here is to work on your content in batches. This will not only save you time, but also a ton of stress along the way.