Slash The Stress: Pre-Plan Your Content!
Do you find yourself with writer’s block when it comes to posting daily social media content for your business? The pressure of deciding what to post, creating an interesting caption, finding the perfect photo, and all of the other little intricacies of social media can be overwhelming and exhausting. Let’s try simplifying the process by planning ahead.
The first thing to do is to spend a little time brainstorming. Plan a time to sit down with an empty page (or word document) and make a note of every type of post you could create for your business. This may include specific posts like “3 Questions to Ask a Potential Vendor” to generic post ideas such as “This or That” and “Tip Tuesday.” The purpose is to create a bank of post ideas that you can quickly and easily draw from during your pre-planning session.
Next, you’ll need to pull out your calendar for the next month or two (depending on how far ahead you’d like to plan) and work with the list of ideas you’ve created to begin loosely scheduling your posts. This is a quick process of simply placing ideas on the calendar for post topics on each day (or however often you want to post to your social media pages). You’ll also want to note any special days or holidays that will affect what you post such as Christmas or days of the week that correlate with the topic.
Finally, choose photos and create captions for each of the topics you have chosen for each day in the above steps. If you want to make your life even easier, you can include hashtags in your planning that you feel are relevant to your content and your business. These simple steps will probably take a few hours but will free up space in your schedule as well as your mind. Knowing that you have a post ready to go will bring you peace of mind and allow you to focus on other areas of your business and life.
Pre-planning your content and posts is an excellent way to keep your social media on track, and it is as simple as taking the steps above. However, you can take it a step further by actually scheduling your content within an app like Facebook or by using a third-party scheduling app such as Later. It’s also important to note that some posts you plan may not be set in stone. If a post isn’t related to the particular day you have planned to post it, you can change it to another day if necessary. Pre-planning isn’t very difficult, but it will make your life much easier and less stressful!
