Creating a constant stream of fresh, engaging social media content is challenging. Many entrepreneurs and marketing professionals struggle to produce enough quality posts to feed all their platforms and keep audiences interested. However, you can dramatically accelerate your content production by working smarter and more efficiently. In this post, we’ll share seven tactics to help you make social media content faster.
1. Research Content Ideas in Bulk
One of the most time-consuming parts of making content is coming up with ideas. Instead of racking your brain for inspiration every time you sit down to create a post, set aside 30-60 minutes each week to research and compile ideas in bulk. Sketch out 10-20 creative concepts you can refer back to whenever you need to make new content. Organise these in a spreadsheet or document them under categories like holidays, trending topics, seasonal ideas, etc. Having a solid content calendar and a list of pre-approved ideas removes the friction from starting posts. You’ll eliminate the procrastination that comes with facing a blank page.
2. Repurpose Existing Content Across Platforms
Reinventing the wheel with every piece of content you produce is extremely inefficient. The smartest marketers repurpose existing blog posts, videos, and other content assets for social media. For example, shorten your recent blog post on productivity hacks into a punchy listicle for LinkedIn. Extract key stats from a case study to create an eye-catching graphic for Instagram. Check your analytics to see which old blog articles get regular organic traffic and give them new life through social snippets. Repurposing should inspire 20-30% of your social content.
3. Use Templates
Platforms like Adobe Express offer beautifully designed templates for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Instead of building posts completely from scratch every time, browse templates related to your industry. Customise the images, colour scheme fonts and text in a few clicks to match your brand. This provides an easy starting point so you can have polished social graphics ready in 5-10 minutes instead of an hour. Take the time to create 10-15 on-brand templates you can reuse over and over by updating a few details.
4. Automate Posting with Tools
Scheduling social media content in advance using tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer can save tons of time. You no longer need to post updates every day across all platforms manually. Simply batch your content creation by allocating 60-90 focused minutes once a week. Load up your updates to be automatically sent out at optimal times over the next several days. This removes the friction of posting daily. Monitoring analytics and engagement still requires regular attention, but your content pipeline becomes more efficient. Just be cautious about over-automating.
5. Collaborate with Others
Consider opening up your content creation process to lighten your personal workload. Online services like Contently match you with skilled writers who can draft relevant articles and social posts for your niche for a fee. Provide guidelines on topics, length, keywords, etc, and they handle the rest. You then get to review and tweak the submissions before publishing under your own brand. Or take a grassroots approach by forming an internal content team. Brainstorm ideas together to draw inspiration from multiple perspectives while dividing up the actual production.
6. Outsource Where Possible
If you have some budget available, outsourcing part or all of your content creation is an impactful time-saver. Sites like Fiverr and Upwork give you access to an on-demand freelance workforce skilled in social media and all types of content. Simply post a job outlining exactly what you need regarding frequency, topics, messaging, graphics and more. The right freelancer will take your creative brief and generate content based on your specifications. Vetting specialists, providing clear expectations and qualifications, and maintaining oversight ensures you still control quality while saving countless hours.
7. Embrace User-Generated Content
User-generated content from your engaged followers provides authentic social proof that resonates. Running creative contests and campaigns to incentivise UGC gives you access to genuine content in an instant. Always ask permission before reposting anything and give photo/video owners proper credit. Resharing customer images showing them delightfully using your product or service drives engagement effortlessly. Compiling user reviews and testimonials into testimonial graphics is also very powerful. With permission, these can make awesome shoppable posts, leading to conversions.
Creating remarkable social content at scale really comes down to working smarter, not harder. Will you commit to trying out a few of these time-saving tactics over the next month?