How To Save Time Planning and Creating Social Media Contents

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses. However, managing a social media account, while ensuring that there is always contents to post, can be time-consuming especially if you’re juggling with a jam-packed-to-do list. Imagine thinking of what to post, crafting the graphics and the caption, and also engage with your audience in the comments, then repeating the cycle – the thought of that can be daunting. 

But with the right practices and strategies in place, you can leverage on the benefits of social media marketing for your brand and run your accounts like a well-oiled machine. The key factor here is to plan in advance and batch work your content creations. 

Tip #1 – Content Planning with Pillars

First things first: Take a big picture and outline the content topics that you want to cover for the entire month. You can consider factors such as the number of posts for each week, your goals for your brand, any important dates to note, or any social media holidays relevant to your brand. With this outline in mind, you can confidently organize your content, knowing what needs to be pushed out each week.

Sort your content into different forms of content pillars (also known as content buckets or themes). These buckets are usually how you should be crafting your content around on social media. A clear content pillar acts as a guideline during your content planning process to assess if you are tapping into them and if there is a healthy balance for each form of content for your accounts.

You can segment your content according to themes such as:

• Educational – Tutorials, guides, how-to vidoes, reviews, step-by-step and infographics 
• Fun Facts & Tips – Brand history, memes, behind-the-scenes and tips and tricks 
• Inspirational – Quotes, reviews, user-generated contents and staff features 
• Product Feature – Product postings and promotional contents 
• Festive – Celebration of any National Holidays or social media days

Once you have sorted the themes out, you can decide on which type of format will serve your content. This can come in forms like static images, videos, GIFs, stories, or infographics. Variation is essential to capture your audience’s attention, as too much of one content pillar might make your brand appear out-of-touch. Planning your content in advance also allows you to be more strategic with what you post, and making sure that you hit all the marks with your audiences.

Let’s say you are posting five posts per week. You can balance it out by sharing two educational content, one product feature video, one fun fact image, and one inspirational GIF. Your postings don’t have to be overly-complicated and can be anything that you think is valuable for your target audience.

Taking @bulletproof, as an example of how they balance content that educates, entertains, and sells. They highlight a mix of their products, share recipes and answer FAQS, and create funny, relatable GIFs. While staying relatable with their audiences, they do not go overly-pushy and salesy with their product contents. 

Tip #2 – Keep it Organized with Content Calendars

With your topic lists in front of you, it’s now time for you to just – Create! Think! Write! All into a content calendar!

Content calendars are a great help to keep you organized as they serve as a framework for what your accounts intend to share and promote across all marketing channels. When it comes to organizing all of them into one content calendar, you can keep it simple by colour-coding your ideas based on the different formats or by changing the colour of the cell once you’ve posted the post. 

In addition, with such a hectic daily routine, it is very easy for some important dates to slip your mind. Your content calendar, which is planned at least a month in advance, will inform you of that in time to prepare blogs, social media, and promo posts, so you stay ahead of the curve.

As a highly useful resource that keeps all your teams on the same page, a detailed content calendar is the way to go to save time on planning when creating your brand’s social media content.

Tip #3 – Batch Create Contents in Bulk

Content themes? Checked. 

Content ideas? Checked. 

You’re now ready to create your contents and the key to saving time is to work in batches.

Batch working is a productive way of working that requires you to focus on one topic at a time, which is said to increase productivity, boost creativity and minimize your time wasted. As Dr. Sahar Yousef, Cognitive Neuroscientist from UC Berkeley, once said, ‘The human brain works best when it focuses on one thing at a time.’ With batch working, you can avoid thinking about other tasks, helping you work more efficiently, since the brain can take an average of 23 minutes to focus back into attention after a distraction.

From static images, to GIFs, graphics, videos or even captions, you can now start creating these contents batches by batches. Whether you’re taking two hours a day for content creation or two weeks, It’s all about giving yourself the time and space to come up with content that will work.

For captions, they do not have to take a long time to create. By batching captions and following a formula, you can quickly write captions that convert your audience when you include the hook, value and call-to-action. 

Tip #4 – Schedule Your Contents in Advance 

Once all your contents are organized and ready to go, it’s time to get scheduling! 

Scheduling posts ahead of time allows you to save time, maintain your brand’s consistent aesthetic, and post at your account’s peak times even when you’re not around. As you get into the habit of planning and scheduling your content in advance, you will start to see your efforts pay off. Instead of posting just for the sake of posting, adopting the content planning and batch working routine will allow you to create higher-quality content and schedule it according to your account’s analytics. 

Lastly, the art of scheduling also frees up your time and energy in the content creation process, giving you more time to spend in other areas of your business, be it sales, admin, networking or even self-care.

Leave the job to us! 

After reading through the article, if you’re still on the fence about creating your contents in advance, why not leave the job to Plexxie? 

From handling your social media account, to curation of contents and engagement for your accounts, Plexxie has the team of experts to handle and create contents specifically for your brand to achieve your marketing goals.

With the right social media management processes in place and a great team aiding your brand, you can now publish higher volume of contents and maximize efficiency without losing quality. Say hello to work-free weekends!