How To Plan Monthly Social Media Content For Your Business 101
Always creating in the moment?
Feeling overwhelmed with always trying to keep up?
We know how it feels to be stuck in the rut of complete overwhelm - aka flying by the seat of your pants! If any of these scenarios resonate with you, do us a favour and keep reading!
You spend so much time trying to take the perfect picture each day to post yes, THAT same day.
Your to-do list is never ending but then you remember you haven’t made a reel this week, so you stop your deep work to film “quick” and end up finishing nothing.
It’s always when you are at the grocery store and your child is screaming but you know this is time to post with the most audience engagement, so you “quick” post, search hashtags, scroll, respond - cue screaming child!
You are trying to put your head down to get real deep work done, but you keep stopping at every DM ping your phone makes, in the end not giving your deep work or audience engaging work your best.
We’ve been there done that and we sure as heck ain’t going back! Instead, we’ve worked really hard to always have our content planned at least 1 month ahead and it has made the world of a difference. With these expectations in place, we are truly so much better able to support our clients in growing their business by always looking at what’s next, leaving lots of time to switch things up if need be, and dedicating more time to engaging with their audience and serving our clients throughout the month.
So here you have it! This is our step-by-step guide for planning monthly social media content without the overwhelm:
1. Batching your content creation
We know we keep saying this over and over again, but batch working is our favourite thing ever! We love having a note section in our phones to jot down any ideas we have around specific types of content, but saving the actual creating part for our specific days set aside for just that - creating. We recommend batch working your content creation something like this:
- Reels and video content created in 1 day every 2 weeks - tip remember to make a few outfit changes!
- Stories for IG posts created weekly at the beginning of the week
- All other static IG posts created in a single day at the beginning of the month
We love using Canva for creating all of our IG posts and stories - this platform is simple to use and has designer looking templates for everything you need!
2. Posting your content
When it comes to growing your social media account and following, it’s kind of a “you get when you put into it” vibes. But nobody has 24/7 to dedicate to creating content, so here are some tips to make it more doable on a busy schedule!
We recommend posting to your social media feed at least 3 times a week like this:
- Post reels and video content at least 1 x week
- Static IG posts at least 2 x week
3. Scheduling your content in advance - hello automation!
Posting all of your content manually in-the-moment is way time consuming, stressful and overwhelming - so don’t do that! There are lots of digital platforms that you can use to schedule everything in advance, including static posts, stories and even videos - we love using later! With this app we upload all of our content (usually a month before), drag and move posts around, preview the order of posts and automate when it is scheduled to be pushed out to our audience. Not only does this save us time but it helps us remain consistent and cohesive, win-win!
4. Engaging with your audience
We know that being “always on” engaging with your audience is overwhelming, so we recommend setting aside 5-20 minutes each day specifically for engagement in some way!
Here are a few of our favourite ideas:
- Replying to DMs and comments on your posts
- Replying to stories to your favourite accounts that you follow
- Commenting on posts of your favourite accounts
- Interacting with hashtag followers in your favourite hashtags
5. Stories each day - one a day!
As important as it is to post lots to your social media feed, it’s also important to post to your stories throughout the week. Stories are a unique way to engage with your audience on a more personal level and show up with valuable content on a whole other “spot” on your platform - what a bonus! We recommend connecting through stories at least once a day and to plan what you will post to your stories each day at the beginning of the week. Some ways that we love showing up on stories include featuring a brand Q&A, showcasing a day-in-the-life, highlighting educational tips and mini tutorials, as well as just popping in to show your face and say hi!
We hope this little guide is helpful for you to start planning ahead for the rest of this month and even the next month of your business. NEW YEAR, NEW MONTHLY STRATEGY, you got this! Let us know in the comments below if you have a different planning strategy that works for you, we would love to hear more ideas!
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Bonne Media