Fall in love with your social media this valentines day

It’s the season of love and for me, love is something you should feel in your business just as much as your personal life! If you’re not feeling the love when it comes to your social media, keep reading and I’m going to give you my top five practical tips to fall in love with your socials.

Planning

I touched on this in my newsletter last week but the easiest way to take the overwhelm out of socials is to plan. I personally plan during the first week of the month ready for the next month so that I have plenty of time to create and schedule my content. I find that by planning ahead, it helps me so much to take away that feeling of ‘oh god, I know I need to post but I don’t know what to post’ and also breaks up the job of ‘social media’ into smaller tasks which helps me massively. I use ChatGPT as a basis for my content planning, I’ll use a prompt like “write me a content plan for my business focusing on X goal for the month, I want to post on Tuesdays and Fridays and consider any national holidays.” This will give me a content plan that I can edit, make sure that all of the ideas are relevant and realistic (you’ll always get a random outlier in there!) and put into my own content plan ready to start creating what I need.

batch content

I batch create my content in two sections. Firstly I’ll look at any videos I need to make and I’ll put a date in my diary to do these all at once. By doing them all at once, I can make sure I have the time to prepare, firstly by having any notes and inspiration that I need to film the videos and secondly to physically prepare myself. I find doing video content really nerve wracking (you’ll notice I don’t have a lot of it but it always performs well and I’m making an effort to do more this year!) Because I know that it’s a barrier for me, I will spend time getting ready in the same way I would if I was going out - hair, make up, jewellery, an outfit that makes me feel confident (maybe a couple of options if you want this to look varied and not like you filmed it all in one day) and don’t forget the perfume! Once I’m feeling ready and as confident as I can get, I’ll film it all. I try to do the video content first because it’s my least favourite so doing it first prevents me from procrastinating it. The second stage for me is to focus on the other content such as graphics and static images. I already know what I need to create because I’ve done my content plan so I can just work through these one at a time and get creative in Canva.

scheduling

If I’m not scheduling, I’m not posting. That might sound dramatic but for me it’s so true, if I have the intention of just posting when I want to post, more often than not, something will come up and sharing a post will get pushed because it’s probably a lower priority than whatever needs my attention in that moment. If you’re struggling with consistency, I couldn’t recommend scheduling more. Find whatever tool is best for you (I use Plann for my own socials but I also use buffer, adobe, canva and meta business suite with clients) and just use it. There’s a lot of value in consistency when you’re posting on social media and scheduling will help you achieve that, plus once it’s done, it’s something you don’t need to worry about again for the rest of the month!

repurposing content

If you’re not repurposing and reusing your content across platforms, you’re making life sooo much harder for yourself. There’s definitely instances where different platforms need different content, or different platforms need an altered version of the content but not every time. I’d highly recommend sharing the same content (where appropriate) across platforms to save time and stress. I also think it’s important to remember that you can post the same thing more than once. Everyone who is following you today, may not have been following you a year ago and, even if they were, it’s likely they can’t remember what you posted this time last year! If you have content that is still relevant and reflects your current message, there’s nothing wrong with resharing it. This is particularly relevant for education posts where the content might be the same and you want to ensure that your current audience have the information even if you’ve already shared it before. Sometimes you can do this by literally reposting the same thing with the same caption, but sometimes you might want to revamp it by rewriting the caption or using the same caption with a new image. With videos, you can also repurpose them and reuse them for different messaging by either cutting different parts or using the same video with different text or music. Remember there’s no rules against this and the more you can do with the content you have, the easier it is for you and the less you’re going to dread creating content!

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My Final Thoughts…

The best way to fall in love with your socials is by being prepared, planning ahead and making sure you know what you need to do. By making things easier, you make it less overwhelming and therefore easier to commit to. If you know that social media is your nemesis and none of these things work for you, it might be time to think about asking for help, whether that’s free help like joining my newsletter or using ChatGPT to support your content planning or putting aside an outsourcing budget to get some physical hands on help and taking the job away from you. You just need to find what’s right for you and your business.