How to be more efficient with your social media posting

One business task that very quickly takes up my time is managing my social media.

It won’t come as a surprise that two of the most frequently outsourced tasks to virtual assistants (VAs) is inbox management and social media management!

In this blog post, I’m sharing with you some strategies and tools that you can use to be more efficient with your social media posting - before you hire that VA.

BRAND 1-PAGER: COLOURS AND FONTS

First up, you’re going to want to design a brand 1-pager. In this document you will define your brand colours, your brand fonts and any other elements that are particular to your branding (e.g. for me, this involves using my artwork). By having your brand colours and fonts locked in (side note - this doesn’t mean you can’t change them later!), it will make it quicker for you to create posts that are in alignment with your brand identity. It will also be beneficial when, or if, you do scale your business and hire team members.

If you’d like to access my step-by-step training on three ways to create a harmonious colour scheme, and also get your hands on my Canva template for a brand 1-pager… then you can sign up here.

SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT BUCKETS

Have you defined some content ‘buckets’? Content buckets are topics or themes that form the basis of your social media strategy. You’ll want to come up with around 5 buckets or themes that your content will cover.

Mine are 'productivity’, ‘creativity’, ‘living mindfully’. ‘freedom’ and ‘science’. Get these up on your whiteboard, in your business management tool (I use Google Drive and Google Keep) or in your journal/notebook.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING SCHEDULE

Next up you’ll want to determine your posting schedule. Think about how often you are committed to posting on social media, as the key is to be consistent. This doesn’t have to mean daily posting, but whatever you commit to you are going to want to stick with it. This could be posting daily Mon to Friday, or posting three times a week.

Once you have determined when you are posting, you can think about ‘rules’ or a strategy for each of the days… and I use the word ‘rules’ loosely. What I’m meaning here is essentially a list of categories, for instance, on Tuesdays you might post client testimonials or client wins (#testimonialtuesday). On Wednesdays, I tend to share quotes (related to one of my content buckets), and this is my #wisdomwednesday. You’ll also want to make sure that you are sharing details of your service or product - you are of course a business owner! You could have a regular day of the week which is for Fun/Family… sharing behind the scenes of what you get up to in your personal life. For a lot of small businesses, it’s the owner i.e. you, that is the brand.

Don’t worry about your audience cottoning on to your strategy, it’s possible they won’t see each post and even if they do they won’t be giving it that much thought. Do you notice the patterns in posting of the business accounts that you follow?

When I combine my Content Buckets with my Posting Schedule, I have a matrix (not the matrix!) for my social media strategy. I’ll perhaps record a training on this, as it will be easier to show you what I mean! Watch this space.

REPOSTING CONTENT

If you are struggling for content for your social media, you might want to have a look at my other post here on How to Repurpose Content.

CREATE TEMPLATES IN CANVA

Before outsourcing or hiring team members, you want to get your systems and processes nailed. For instance, you can create templates in Canva, and using this in conjunction with your content buckets and posting schedule you can quickly batch create posts and schedule these ahead of time.

AUTOMATION OF TASKS

You can also use automation to do the tasks that you repeat… this will save you time & money in the long run. Why not have a website or app execute the task rather than you or your team. For example, I use Zapier (which is a site that integrates loads and loads of websites and apps) to repost my Instagram grid posts to my Facebook group - I don’t need to lift a finger.

DOCUMENT THE PROCEDURE

Lastly, if you are going to outsource or hire a team member, you might want to create some videos or instructions /checklists for what the processes are, so that when you do hire you’ve got a smooth on-boarding of new team members.

I hope this has been helpful - let me know in the comments what your thoughts are. I love to hear from you.