10 Jul Three Steps to Planning and Creating Top Notch Social Content
Creating content sounds simple enough on paper, right? But it’s anything but simple when you’re looking at a content deadline on your calendar and don’t know where to go from there. To keep your sanity, and to keep your clients happy, there’s a process that should be followed to ensure you’re checking all the boxes when it comes to content creation. Read on for the full details, folks.
Build Your Shell
The first step to any creation process is to zoom out, and ensure you’re looking at the calendar from all angles. There’s a lot to consider when creating content for a brand, so it’s key to get this stage right. This stage should include looking at the brand strategy, reviewing brand initiatives for the year or month, analyzing data of previous posts, and considering any specific promotions, seasons, or holidays.
This stage can be monthly or quarterly depending on your brand’s schedule and needs. Once you have all the information necessary you can start putting placeholders in your calendar. Placeholders help you keep the right cadence and stay on track during the brainstorming and planning process. These placeholders can be as simple as “Q1 Promotion” and “Labor Day Content”.
Brainstorm & Plan
This is where the creative process gets a little more, well, creative. Once you have a shell and your placeholders, you can start to dive deeper into how this content is going to look. You’ll want to consider tactics, platforms, and media in addition to your content idea. For example, when you’re planning your Q1 Promotion’s creative, you’ll want to narrow down what platform and which format this should be. Facebook? Instagram? Video post? Link post? All of those details should be narrowed down during this process.
Additionally, this is where you’ll want to get specific about the visuals of your creative ideas. The content producer should be able to leave this process without any questions about what’s required of them in terms of content.
Create & Execute
Lights, camera, action – now’s the time to create your beautiful pieces of content to go in your calendar. This process will need a fair amount of time, depending on how many original pieces of content are required for this round. To make this process more efficient in the future, be sure to read up on how to build your content library.
Once your content is finished and approved, it’s time to compete the final step in the creation process: scheduling. Organizing this process will save yourself a big headache. Be sure to schedule your content as far ahead of time as you can to ensure there aren’t any issues in the platform or in the real world. There’s nothing worse than the internet going out the morning of a big promotional launch …
Now sit back, kick your feet up, and enjoy the beautiful calendar you just made from start to finish. Of course, don’t relax for too long – another deadline is just around the corner 😉
