I’m a small shop. I don’t have a huge marketing budget where I can pay someone to handle the creation of content and posting on all of our social media platforms. And even if I did have extra time to deal with the shop’s social media, it is not something I relish doing. I know social media is a necessary evil for all businesses, but most of us I believe would rather be focusing on running our shops.
For my own sanity and pocket book, I had to find what would work best for my shop with minimal investment and time. Ultimately what I landed on was reusable content with an intuitive social media scheduler. To break it up into usable information this month, I am just going to address the idea and the how of reusable content.
Reusable content is a very basic idea. Create content that applies to your business and can be used on any given day or time for the foreseeable future. A lot of businesses pay for a marketing company to create and post to their social media platforms, which can be costly, but the moment they stop paying for it they are back to square one. They either start creating the content themselves, start paying someone to create it again and post it or have no social media presence. I can tell you having no social media presence for your business should not be an option. For my shop the solution was to start creating a database of reusable content that we could pull from quickly and easily.
Personally what we have done is create folders that contain posts of similar content and save the wording for those posts for easy access. Some of these folders are Before & After Pictures, Tips & Advice, Provided Services, Funny Content, etc. This way if we want to post a Before & After picture every Monday we don’t have to go and design a post. We can just log in to the social media platform and upload one of our pre-saved Before & After picture posts and copy and paste the wording. It’s quick and simple. If we had to design and create a post every time we wanted to post something on our social media platform, it would take me or a team member a minimum of 30 minutes, and that’s if we know what we are doing. If we are using our reusable content, that 30 minutes gets cut down to less than five.
Here’s a tip: If the idea of creating a social media database of reusable content is overwhelming, just start with making one reusable post a week or create four reusable posts a month. This way, after 12 months you will have between 48 and 52 reusable posts you can use at any time for any of your social media platforms.
Another tip: After you create a social media post, have it converted into a story format also. That way, you can use the post for your social media feed and the story version for your social media stories. Posts and stories reach different audiences.
We have been doing this for a few years now and it has saved us a ton of time and effort when dealing with our social media platforms. We have a large database of reusable posts to the point that we now only create a few new ones every quarter. This way, we can revamp or cycle out some older posts.
It isn’t the perfect or even necessarily the best solution, but for my shop and my budget and time restraints it has been a game changer. If you pair this concept with an intuitive social media scheduler, you will be able to put your social media on the back burner and know that it will still be taken care of. In the next few months I plan on discussing how we create our content and also going over what we are using for our intuitive social media scheduler.
