You are creative — so don’t just put out content for the sake of it, make it strategic and make it work for you.
If you’ve ever woken up and thought “I don’t know what to write about” or sat in overwhelm at just the thought of ‘doing’ social media, you are not alone. And you are likely also not making the most of your creativity!
The speakers, authors and coaches we work with usually get stuck in these thoughts, and employ a very tactical mindset around how they show up. Post on social = get clients, right? Actually, mostly wrong. Post on social = get stressed, lose faith, have fun, tear hair out, feel dejected, get addicted, have creative spurt, show up a lot, have creative drought, go into hiding. Equals Pressure!
The great news is that there IS an easier way to do this.
The key, of course, is consistency… if you just groaned, we feel you and want to help you! The way to get consistent is to shift into thinking about your content differently. To start viewing your social media posting and creativity as a pool from which to draw, rather than something into which you constantly need to add new stuff.
That’s the difference between tactics and strategy. If you think of your content as something you have to keep creating, coming up with innovative ways all the time, you WILL get pulled off track, and into a bit of a pit. If you start to think of your content as something you use strategically, you’ll start avoiding those ups and downs.
Essentially, we are saying don’t just put out content for the sake of it, make it strategic and make it work for you. You’ll end up having to create less and use more!
Now, “content is king”, and has the ability to draw people to us, create opportunities, and even sign people up to our programmes. But there is no point putting pictures of your breakfast up online & thinking that will get a result. Your content needs to be more strategically thought out. Your content needs to involve these things to be effective:
· It needs to interrupt the noise — stand out, be relevant & have a purpose
· It needs to be consistent and regular posting
· It needs to have constancy of your message (don’t flit from one thing to another)
· It needs to be on brand & instantly recognisable as you
One of the biggest complaints we hear is that people can’t find the time to do their content so it fulfils these needs. Read on to learn how to repurpose your content so you can do 30 mins worth of work & get about 15 bits of content for various platforms
You don’t have to spend hours creating content.
We are big advocates of doing one Facebook Live per week & creating all the content for that week off the back of it! FB lives are how we have grown our network & they are great way to build a connection with your audience.
At the beginning of the month, plan the 4 FB lives that you will do — identify what topics your audience want to learn about, what is trending, what is appropriate and topical etc.
Then plan in one day of content planning & scheduling per month, so you stay in the energy of creating content on that day. Plan out all your live broadcasts. (see our other FB live — get link)
On this day, what you spoke about in your lives for the previous month can then be easily repurposed–. You can use what you’ve already created to create more. And yes, that means you don’t have to outsource to others to write or create ‘your’ content — so you can let go of any concerns that your voice will gets lost & the content doesn’t sound like you!
Because the content is already created, it becomes quick and easy to be ‘present’ as you continuously show up ‘on message’ and on brand in the formats and on the platforms you want to be seen on.
Here’s how to repurpose your 1 FB live into content to last you a month!
· Step 1: Record a FB live of around 20–30 minutes duration
· Step 2: Get it transcribed (rev.com, otter.ai or a VA an do this). If you want subtitles on your live (which normally increase viewing by about 20–30%) then choose to get ‘captions’ (not subtitles — that’s for translation) on Rev. You can also download it and use something like getsub.ly to do it yourself.
· Step 3: Turn the transcript into a blog and put it on your website and on medium.com.
· Step 4: Review the transcript and pick out 3–10 ‘quotable’ pieces — snippets that stand alone and back up your message, and your authentic presence. Create these into ‘picture-text memes’ that are branded (using something software like canva.com or crello.com).
· Step 5: Upload the full video onto your YouTube channel — especially if you are monetising your platform. (You might of course be using YouTube as your primary platform in which case, use the original video on here, and repurpose in the same way; the principles still stand).
· Step 6: Pick out 2 –3 sixty second segments to upload as Instagram stories & on Linkedin.
· Step 7: Pull out the audio and upload to your podcast channel.
Now that you have all these ‘assets’ you can look to schedule them across the month in the way that is most appropriate for you.
Key things to remember and do as you are repurposing to make it really work for you:
· Review the titles for the ‘new’ content — it may be worth ensuring that your original title still works for a video, or if you need a new one — especially if you’ve broken something into 2 or 3 sections. Something else may be more appropriate
· If you are posting to Instagram, make sure you #tag appropriately (build up the ‘stash’ of hashtags that you use)
· Ensure that you’re branding all your channels, your memes, content and images so people know it’s yours — the repurposed content needs to still reference back to you visually and in attribution
· Create playlists on YouTube to categories your content in your key themes. Use social learning units inside Facebook. Help people find your content with ease
· Look for opportunities to share the content in whichever format it’s in. For example, can you use the full post as a guest blog somewhere?
· Get technical help or a train a VA to do this repurposing and scheduling work for you so you can simply focus on creating content
We know that doing this takes a month or so to start working into your schedules, so start now. Get planning your lives & work out what you want to repurpose that you already have. And then work out if you are going to do all this by yourself, or if you need to connect with the VAs & content managers who can do this for you with ease. We have a bunch of those in The Connection Hub, so come and find yours!
As ever let us know what your results are from taking on this approach!