Planning social media content made easy + free template
From Jade McAuley, Rebel Marketing
How many times have you gotten to the end of the day, or week, or month and thought; s**t – haven’t posted anything on Facebook for ages!
We’ve all been there (too, too many times) and I just wanted to let you know that there is a very simple strategy that can help make planning out your social media content easy, and therefore – doable!! (I feel like that should be accompanied by trumpets blaring royally)
And don’t worry – the accompanying image is just a free stock photo, I’m not going to make you go war room style (today).
It’s called…. theming (bear with me)
Step 1 > Download this free content planning calendar template
Step 2 > Open the template and notice that there is a band along the top of each week for a daily theme, hmmm
Basically, setting up themes for different days of the week is a super easy way to help you generate ideas for your social media, while making sure you’ve got a good variety as well. In the modern world, there can be so many choices for such trivial things (have you seen the cereal aisle lately, crazy!). When we narrow the scope and give ourselves boundaries, it’s much easier for our brains to resist overwhelm (nope, don’t know what to post – too hard basket) and use the limitations as inspiration instead.
Nothing is set in stone, what you set up for theme days now can evolve with your business and your social media audience. However, a great social media strategy has to start somewhere – and I’m sure you’ve already nutted out what your goals are, who you are targeting, what unique assets you have to draw on, the best timing and frequency for your audience and all the rest of it.
So, what do I mean by themes? There are some standard ones, such as #throwbackthursday and #motivationmonday, but this is a great opportunity to get a little creative. Look at what your goals are for being on social media – why did you start, what did you want to achieve? And then look at who your regular customers are – what interests them, why did they choose you?
To kick you off though, here are some of my favourite ones you can start implementing today.
Behind the scenes or BTS – people love getting a glimpse of how products or services come about. Just because you see it every day, you may think it’s mundane but to people outside of your industry – it can be very intriguing to see inside the “inner sanctum” of a business.
Teaser Tuesday – man, I love sneak peeks! Getting a glimpse of something that’s coming up, a hint of something new or cool or both – definitely gets my attention. Doing it every week, you’d just need to be a little clever about what you can tease about – an upcoming event you’re planning, a new product coming, some client work about to be released – have fun with it!
Agony aunt – ok don’t literally call it that, but this is basically where – once a week – you answer commonly asked questions in your line of work. You may even find that your audience start to submit questions for you to answer as well – keep a stockpile of them and voila, easy and engaging content.
Tips + tricks – judging by how many people share massive photo albums of handy hints, pretty sure I’m not the only one who likes a good insider tip. Get creative and make a bunch of branded tips in Canva and schedule those babies out, one per week.
Shout outs – recognising the talents or good news of others is an excellent way to share the love, and show your audience that you know it’s not all just about you. You could highlight clients, suppliers, other local businesses, a staff member, whoever you like! Bonus – when you tag their page or profile, you expand your reach for that post too.
WARNING > ADVANCED!!
Once you have mastered the art of daily themes, why not take the next step and try themed weeks and, gulp, months!! Resources like the Australian Community Calendar might be useful in sparking some ideas – such as Breast Cancer Awareness Month (do everything with a dot of pink and post the donation site randomly), Keep Australia Beautiful Week (post a daily pic of a staff member cleaning up rubbish somewhere in the local area) and so on.
Theming is just a way to make sure that you are posting consistently, and that it’s not a struggle for you. If you have other stuff to post on those days as well, bonus! You don’t just have to do the themed posts, think of them as your ground floor.
Good luck and let me know how you get on!
