One of the things that grappling with a long-term chronic pain and fatigue challenge has done is force me to be very wise with my time. But frankly over the past six months I'd gotten so wrapped up in drawing and writing that I fell off my own best practices bandwagon.
So over the past couple of weeks I've been refocusing and realigning my intentions. And I figured that you dear reader, busy person that you are, could benefit from this realignment too.
For this week's video I'm sharing Facebook guru Caitlin Bacher's tips for multitasking your social media content creation. Yes, she IS focused on entrepreneurs, but her savvy advice works just as well for anyone.
And I adore how she is so 100% herself. She has created a style and a brand and a focus that really works for her.
To succeed in business today means harnessing social media successfully, which means creating useful interesting content beyond selling to share regularly with your fans and followers.
Remember last week I shared the 80/20 rule of modern marketing via social media - 80% of what you share should be helpful useful information and only 20% actual product, services, events etc.
But the how of doing this can feel overwhelming. I know. Take a deep breath and trust me.
I've got you covered with some great tips:
1) Schedule your social media content creation time + then cut that time down
Rather than trying to squeeze in your social media content programming here and there go ahead and schedule it. If you already do this, per Caitlin, cut the time you've scheduled in half. She advises we will always fill up the time of any deadline. If we give ourselves 3 days to do content we'll take it, but the truth is we really can shorten this down quite a bit.
2) Create an editorial calendar
This doesn't have to be anything fancy. Basically you're planning out the topics you'll be writing about in advance. You can even use your email newsletter platform if you like to schedule topics. Test it out with creating ideas for topics 3-6 weeks in advance.
Brownie points to you if you organize your editorial calendar so that it lines up nicely with what's going on for summer, fall etc. - i.e. posting about "how to bike or walk to school with your kids" for early August. Why? This will set you up to
FYI - the print lifestyle media (fashion, health, travel etc.) works about 3-6+ months in advance on stories, so your pitches need to be thinking in advance.
Yep. The lifestyle media is starting to thinking about Christmas right now.
Creating an editorial calendar helps organize your brain. In fact, you may find that you want to schedule longer content creation time instead for one long chunk of time, but do it fewer times a week (or month). Want more ideas? Check out this blog by Newscred on Editorial Calendars.
(Note: I'll be sharing more on creating strong editorial calendars this summer. You can learn more about successfully pitching the media with editorial calendars with my post from 2 years ago here.)
3) Break down your content into smaller bite sized chews of usefulness
I used to work really hard at showing how smart I am, whether it was a blog or a presentation. This was my "term paper" approach to creating content. If you do this too - stop this now - by breaking up your long winded blogs etc. into a series.
In this era of short attention spans people are looking for a small nugget of wisdom rather than a novel of new ideas. Stop working so hard and people will thank you.
4) Repurpose your social media content across various platforms
I've done this in the past but had fallen off the practice. Thank you Caitlin! You can use your email newsletters (or sections of it) as blog posts for your own website, Facebook Groups, and Linked In.
You can video or audio record the same written post for SoundCloud and/or Youtube.
You can pull quotes from email newsletters/blogs/podcasts/youtube posts as text for your social media cards on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Whew! Doesn't that feel good to contemplate?
5. Use Canva to resize & repurpose social media cards
Your social media outreach needs visual allure. And your social media cards need to be properly sized and formatted for each type of social media.
Save time and energy by using the same images and or text mixed up in slightly different ways for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Canva.com at the paid level makes this very easy to do. At left )above on phones) is my Instagram post, below is my Twitter post using the same illustration.
Above is the social media card I created with a new illustration for Twitter for Bike Month, at right is the same illustration rethought and reformatted for Instagram.
By doing this approach I created two of my most popular social media cards ever.
Note: Don't use the EXACT same posts across a variety of social media - it may save you time but it rarely works well. Instagram posts to Twitter usually don't show the images, and vice versa.
