Today, being present on social media is essential to boost your business performance. And a central topic is the creation of content you're going to offer to your audiences or communities.Creating, organizing, and managing content while understanding the codes of different platforms are tasks that can be very time-consuming. Without military discipline, it can sometimes seem difficult to get started and offer quality content to your community.
When you integrate a creative project as a content creator, you'll want to immerse yourself in the codes and values of your mission. You'll go through an initial reflection phase where you'll get inspiration and make pre-selections. This leads to different creative proposals, the big day of the shoot, and several rounds of feedback / adaptations to get your finalized content.This process is fairly similar to the social media one, with the only difference being the pace. On social media, it's every month that you need to challenge yourself to provide as much relevant content as possible to your communities, while adapting to new trends or testing new ideas.Fortunately, there's a solution to speed up production: batch content creation.
A content batch is simply a collection of photos and/or videos that you prepare in advance all at once for later publications.Much like in cooking, creating content for social media follows the steps of a good recipe:
This process will allow you to ask fewer questions while producing more and in different formats. You'll be able to run tests to learn more about your community and the types of content they're most receptive to.
If you do this process for each publication, it can be difficult to maintain textual and visual consistency. By working in batches, you ensure you maintain an editorial line and consistent "tone of voice" throughout your creation.
A few years ago, you could offer a single visual for a multi-month campaign. Today that's over; consumers on social media expect varied and fast-paced content, and algorithms have caught on by favoring accounts that post regularly. It's therefore essential to save time, and repeating the same process for each publication would be inefficient.
Being forced to publish a post urgently is a phenomenon that can happen when you're a community manager. Having to create a visual and write copy under pressure are situations that can be stressful.You'll therefore publish content quickly at the expense of its quality rather than taking your time to create content that brings real value to your community. Hence the importance of batch content creation to always have a backup plan on hand!
Everyone needs to stimulate their creativity, and it's essential to take some time every month to brainstorm (alone or even better, with multiple people).At the beginning of each month, ask yourself the following questions:
Also look carefully at the content that worked in previous months to continuously adjust based on feedback from your communities.
If you're a community manager for multiple clients, it's important to schedule a time each month to contact them and get their input on the month's priorities so you can incorporate business reality into your planning.A plan can take two to three times longer if you skip this step. You'll go back and forth endlessly and your process will be completely disrupted.
You also need to get inspiration, find good ideas, bring them to life, write convincing messages, choose the best time to publish content... Many means are available to you today to help you with this exercise, and that's what I'll focus on in my upcoming articles.One thing's for sure: you're now ready to implement an efficient content creation process for your social media!
