How to Consistently Create Content for Social Media
If you’re not maintaining a consistent content creation strategy on social media for your business—regardless of what type of business you have—you’ll find it difficult to actually leverage social media for sustainable growth. Here are 6 ways you should shift your perspective on creating content in order to build a strategy you can actually sustain long term.
Post for Quality, Not Quantity
The quality of your posts matters even more than the quantity in which you churn them out. If you’re posting every day—or multiple times a day—but aren’t investing time in researching your target audience and creating value-based content, your content is just going to amount to more noise in the feed that gets quickly scrolled past.
Create real, sustainable content that your audience wants to see from you! If you’re a content creator in the marketing space, this means posts that are actually informative and helpful for people in your niche, not personal life updates or vague posts promoting your services without proof of your expertise. E-commerce brands should be sharing product launches and updates when relevant, providing tips for using or caring for their products, and leveraging their platforms for social proof.
In terms of when (and how often) to post, find a schedule that works for you, even if that schedule is only posting one or two times each week. It’s better to post infrequently but with consistency and quality than to smash out a ton of posts that have no value or purpose.
Be Authentic, Not Perfect
No, you don’t have to film all of your content on the day you first wash and style your hair. Yes, you can film Reels and TikToks without makeup and sans fancy transitions or trending audio. In fact, I’ve found I get more followers from videos where I’m just talking to my audience as opposed to those based on trends, even if I don’t get as many views.
People care about seeing the real you, especially with solopreneurs and service-based business owners who are the face and name of their brand! The days of the curated feed are long behind us. In 2022, the most important thing you can do with your content creation is be authentic in how you show up.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
When creating content becomes too much work, cut out the excess. Find areas in your strategy that aren’t vital to your success and focus more energy on the essentials. You’ll notice on my Instagram profile, I enjoy creating graphics-based Reel covers in order to have a specific aesthetic for my brand, but this can take a lot of time! When I’m feeling burned out or too busy to keep up with everything, this extra step is the first thing to go, as most users will encounter my content in their newsfeed or Reels feed anyway without ever seeing the covers.
In addition to considering what elements of your strategy are essential vs. optional, think about how one piece of content can stretch across multiple platforms or media formats. Sharing Reels to TikTok and vice versa is the obvious example here, but you can also turn the short-form concepts from your videos into longform content like blogs or podcasts. For this blog, I actually created a Reel first before deciding it was a bigger concept that I wanted to convert into something long-form.
Choose Breaks, Not Burnout
Credit: @WorkInSocialTheySaid
No one ever feels like they can actually take breaks on social media because they fear losing the momentum they’ve built up over months of hard work. But if you keep pushing and pushing to maintain an unrealistic content schedule, you’ll eventually burn out. The quality of your content will diminish, the consistency of your posting will drop, and in time you might just give up altogether and ghost on the platform you’ve invested so much energy in!
To avoid this downward stress spiral, take intentional social media breaks, both short and long. For me, this means never posting on weekends and making sure I take longer breaks when needed and during special seasons (like around the holidays or vacations). It may look different for you, but don’t let fear of losing momentum keep you from prioritizing your mental wellbeing when it comes to social media!
Create for Business and Pleasure
This is especially important for creative business owners (social media managers, bloggers, copywriters, designers, influencers, etc.) If you’re only creating for business, you’re going to burn out.
When you turn your hobby into work, you’re compromising the work-life balance and tipping the scales heavily toward work. What was once a passion becomes a stress-inducing chore. So just as copywriters and bloggers should also write purely for creative enjoyment separate from their business and designers should make art that isn’t for a client or selling purposes, we should all be seeking a work-life balance with creating social media content!
For my social media creation and consumption, I use Instagram for business and TikTok for pleasure. Instagram is where you’ll find information about my copywriting business and insights for small businesses on how they can develop effective content and copy strategies. TikTok, on the other hand, is solely for my hobby posting. I talk about the books I’m reading, the stories I’m writing, and all the other nerdy things I love. My number one rule for posting on my TikTok is no strategy allowed. I deliberately avoid the stress of a content strategy and just create TikToks that I enjoy making!
When in Doubt, Source It Out
One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give you as a small business owner is to outsource your content creation strategy. You do not have to do it yourself in order to be authentic! You don’t have to be a solo act anymore—hand off social media, blog writing, email marketing, and anything else that just doesn’t fall in your wheelhouse of business strengths to someone who is an expert in the content sphere.
When you decide it’s time to outsource your social media or copywriting content strategy, check out my services to learn how I can partner with you for an authentic online presence you and your audience will love.
