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While spontaneous creative concepts can often be some of the best and most inspired, planning out your social content in advance can be hugely beneficial to your company’s marketing strategy. Being able to create an entire month’s worth of content in a single week will not only allow you more time to focus on other tasks, but it will also increase the quality and consistency of your content. Here at IDG, we recommend that you plan your content one month in advance. This will allow you to brainstorm, create, and schedule your content efficiently, leaving you plenty of time for other tasks and unanticipated problems that may arise.
Brainstorming
If you plan on creating all of your content in a condensed amount of time, it’s always extremely helpful to have all of your ideas clearly planned beforehand. Take the time to have a thorough brainstorming session at the beginning of the week. Decide on how many posts you’ll need to create for that month, and come up with rough ideas for each post. You don’t necessarily need to have a full-fledged concept at this stage, but knowing what the general idea of each post is will help guide you and save time when you start creating the content.
Visual Content Creation
The next step in the content batching process is generally to create all of the visual content, whether that be photos, videos, or graphics. This is inevitably going to be the biggest investment of time, since the time required to coordinate and execute shoots can be extensive. Try to block out entire days that you can dedicate to photoshoots, if possible. This will help you stay organized and create content more efficiently.
Writing Process
The next step in the process, for many people, is copywriting. Creating captions for all of your posts in advance will help you stay organized and improve the quality of your writing. Dedicating a block of time to writing captions will allow you to take the time to think carefully about each caption. Writing each caption last-minute before the post goes out, by contrast, will result in rushed text that may contain spelling or grammar errors that reflect poorly on your company’s image. Well thought out content that has been repeatedly scanned for errors will yield a much better result for your company at the end of the month.
Editing & Scheduling
The final step in the content batching process is to edit and schedule your content. The editing process can encompass a wide range of things, from adjusting photos in editing to fixing grammar errors in captions. You may even decide to swap out concepts entirely for a post or two. This is your final chance to look over your month’s worth of content and ensure that everything looks perfect. Once you’ve finalized that month’s content, schedule each post for its designated date using a program such as Agorapulse, Hootsuite, or Later. This will help you stay on schedule without you needing to actively keep track of which post goes out when. Decreasing the chance of human error and forgetfulness will keep your company’s content consistent, increasing your engagement.
Although planning will always help the quality and efficiency of your content creation, there will inevitably be issues that arise throughout the month. Flexibility is key, as canceled photoshoots and changed concepts are going to be common occurrences no matter how hard you try to adhere to your schedule. If you achieve this balance of advance planning and adaptability, you’ll find it surprisingly easy to create a month’s worth of quality content in just one week.
