Want to Create More Social Media Content?
The biggest conversation we have with clients over and over is all about What. To. Post.
Everyone wants to know how to create more content for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter, and how to create a content strategy.
We have seven simple steps just for you.
We’re sharing a strategy we’ve known about for a while, and more recently started implementing more seriously ourselves (procrastinators unite later, right?!).
Just like you, we are no strangers to struggling with creating content for each of our platforms.
Not only is this system allowing us to come up with ideas more easily, but these ideas are more thoughtful, more intentional, and offer more value to our audience.
We want to help you, the small business owner, fill out social media calendar more.
You may be wondering, what is a content creation strategy?
Think of this like a pyramid. At the top is Your Idea.
1. It starts with an idea
You need one fairly big idea. One idea we always recommend starting with and repeating regularly is why you are in the business that you’re in.
As Simon Sinek suggests, Start with Why.
It’s an important place to start from because people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
Examples:
If you own a restaurant, ask yourself why you got into this business.
Beyond why this business, you can think about why you’ve decided to make a specific dish. What is the why behind your cuisine, behind the ingredients you use?
Each one of these can act as your big idea which will kick off your content strategy.
If you’re in retail, why do you carry products you carry? Why did you choose this niche or that brand?
Any of these questions can act as your big idea which to kick off your content strategy.
From hotels to hair salons — WHY did you choose this business? What lead you here, to owning your own business?
This gives you an idea of what to talk about, and it will likely give you a lot to talk about. This is your passion. This is your why.
2. Create a video
Once you have an idea, an answer to one of the questions listed above, you need to produce a piece of content.
This is your big piece of content. We often start with a video. In fact, this blog started as a video (more on that in a minute).
Create a video, and if you can, aim for a video between 3-5 minutes long (or longer— the longer the better).
You can do as many takes as you need to, or stitch a few videos together.
(If you need some video-editing tools, we make some recommendations in here.)
Once you have your full video, it can of course be posted on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (if it’s under 5 minutes)--- all social media platforms that you're using.
You can also strip the audio from the video for your podcast, if you have one.
3. Create a blog
Next, you can take your full video and turn it into a blog for your website.
And before you dismiss blogs because you’re not a writer and it’s a waste of time, consider this:
A blog is an excellent opportunity for improving your search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a great place to use keywords and to link to other pages on your website.
So, take your video and transcribe the words. Write them down and add to it as needed, to make it read a little better for your website.
Now that it’s a blog, it can go on LinkedIn and Quora, it can be linked to on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in your bio and in your stories.
4. Micro Content
Here’s where you take this one idea, and use it to make lots of smaller pieces of content.
Now that we presumably have video and long-form (blog) written, we’re going to take these same two pieces of content and re-evaluate them.
Too often we come up with a post idea, we create the piece of content, put it out there, and then we wash our hands of it and we’re done. We don’t do anything more with it.
How do you create even more content?
One thing that’s really helpful is for you, or even a friend or colleague, to look at your idea (your video). You or your friend will need to be objective in order to pull out as many stand-alone ideas from your video as you/they can.
From your one longer video, create 30-second clips of different ideas and you can then post each of those separately across all platforms.
5. Listen, Listen, Listen
From this main video and from each shorter clip, pay close attention to any comments that are made across all your social media platforms..
Use these comments and any questions from your audience and create more content from that. You can answer the question in another video, or address it in a post. You can tag the person who made the comment or keep it anonymous and general.
This also means that any comment you receive on a post on Facebook can be turned into content for Facebook, but also Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc, and vice versa.
Make sure you use them across all channels
6. Quote
Look back again at your original video and find quotations. Find a phrase that you said which stands on its own as something of value.
Once you find them, you can repurpose them.
Type them out using Canva or whatever design platform you like to use. Take the text and overlay it on your logo, a photo of you or your store, or something relevant.
Everything you’re doing through all of these steps is trying to drive traffic back to your main idea posted on your website or maybe YouTube if you want to drive traffic there.
With your video you get lots of screen grabs, you can use them to create GIFs or for backgrounds and images for your text.
Here are some examples from our team, who enjoy taking awkward screenshots of Toby from his videos.
7. Closely Examine Smaller Ideas
Take a look at all the smaller clips you have taken from within your first video.
Could these other pieces of content from your video be turned into another larger idea where this process can start all over again?
What other longer videos do you have? What other videos can you make? Take those videos and turn them into blogs.
Do you have any blogs already written? Take all of your blogs and turn them into videos.
Take all of these, and complete all seven steps. You may never run out of content again!
You don’t need to make fifty pieces of content. If you can come up with one fairly large idea you can likely get about fifteen pieces of content out of it. That’s one social media post a day for more than two weeks, just from one idea.
Fill your social media calendar, collect those comments. Take control of your content strategy.
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