What is UP my friends and fellow busybees. Today’s episode is kind of like a part 2 from Blog 21 where I talked about showing up on social media, so if you haven’t yet read that post then I recommend you go and tune in to that one first and then come back here!
For those of you who have already read it or who are well seasoned, or at least just feeling semi sorta comfortable sometimes showing up on media, today I wanted to talk about ways to keep up with content creation. Because with all of the different platforms and all of the different types of posts you can do, it can totally seem never-ending and be overwhelming. Especially if you have a business that you are simultaneously trying to work in and work on, in addition to marketing it on social media. There’s a reason that social media manager is a full-time job in most businesses, and they get paid pretty well-- because it’s a lot of work! So if you’ve been doing it all on your own for whatever length of time, let me just take a second and say I see you, I commend you, I know what it takes, and you’re doing great sweetie. If you get the reference, then you are truly my people.
So let me start off by acknowledging the obvious, but I want to explicitly state it so that you know that I know: absolutely every single one of us is at a different place in our social media and content creation journey. Some people have never used these platforms before at all and are just trying to figure out what all of these features mean and what the platform is all about, and some people have grown up using these platforms since they were 8 and know the ins and outs and the intricacies of them. Mix that with the unique personality of every person creating content, and that’s why we have such a wide diversity of content and creative concepts on these apps. It’s awesome! There’s literally millions of unique people on there to watch content from.
But because there’s so many people on there, it can become tempting to want to do alllll the things to try and grow and reach those people, those potential followers and potential clients.
But like I said, there’s a lot that goes into putting out a piece of content. You need to film the content, and there’s a ton that goes into that including lighting, angles, potentially equipment and then actually doing whatever you’re filming. You also may do some scripting before or after for the voiceover. Then you might need to edit it by trimming out some parts and making it all flow together seamlessly. Then you need to put it into the app, make sure you tag the right people or brands, do some hashtag research and pop those in there, and add in a caption that’s ideally engaging enough that people will read it but is also informative and best case scenario, also search engine optimized so that when people are searching for videos like the one you’re putting out, that yours pops up.
Then you press Post, and ideally the platform Gods will be in your favour that day and it will actually post.... if not, you'll have to redo that process again, and maybe gain and again until it actually complies (I'm lookin' at you, Instagram...). Then once it actually gets posted, you're hopefully engaging in the comments of the post after it’s up there, too. So… that’s ONE piece of content, on one platform. If you’re someone who tries to upkeep a presence on multiple apps like Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Pinterest and…whatever else, you can see where the creator burnout or fatigue could come from.
But, we do know that it is a beneficial way to market us and our businesses, so we do these things time and time again. And hopefully, you enjoy doing it, at least to some degree! I love creating content in different ways and find it fuels me up to do so, but that’s not to say that I haven’t had to rush to edit something together some days because I took a break from it or didn’t feel like doing anything.
After today’s episode, I hope you’ll feel like you have a toolbox available to you with ways to keep up with content creation and have it be a sustainable practice for you long-term, by working smart not working hard.
Before I give any tips and tools though, I just need to say: please make the content you want, that makes you happy. Don’t feel the need to copy or replicate what others are doing and finding successful– it’s working for them. And if you did the exact same thing, would it work for you? Potentially. But that wouldn’t be you in that content- so eventually when you get tired of being like everybody else and get more comfortable on the camera or whatever it is and your authentic personality (which is great BTW) starts coming out, it’s going to come across as inauthentic because it will be different from what you were doing. So start out genuine, because not only you but also your audience will really appreciate it. The people who blow up often do so because they are being unapologetically themselves and authentic. There’s millions of people on these platforms– seeing the same person replicated over and over again honestly gets super boring. Stand out and be yourself, babe, I promise it’ll stick.
But before we jump in feet first, just a quick second to tell you something super excited that has recently come to fruition for me and my business -- I am officially an affiliate with Fusion Mineral Paint, one of my favourite paints to use on projects for me, my clients and the pieces I list for sale. This is a brand I stand behind, they're a family-owned Canadian business and quite honestly, their products are the bee's knees so I am so excited to be able to partner with them! So if you have been meaning to try them out, or if you already know and love their products but have been paying full price for them, might I recommend you try out this link/promo to get 10% off your order from Fusion Mineral Paint. It won't cost you anything extra (in fact, you'll save money!) and it also helps to support me and my business, so I can continue to bring you all I know about the furniture painting and refinishing world.
Okay okay, now back to the tips for how to keep up with your content creation- let's hit it!
My first tip is great from an efficiency standpoint, and it is to batch create your content. Now, this one may or may not be the approach that works best for you and your brain depending on the type of person you are, however I would recommend you at least try it out and give it a fair shake even if you’re someone who doesn’t like to plan things ahead of time or finds themselves short on time in a week.
When you time block a set amount of time to create all of your content for a certain period of time and do all of the work at one slightly longer period of time in the week but then it’s all done and you can wipe your hands clean of it until next week or whenever you need to make more is, you free up your time and your brain to other types of projects or planning. It does usually mean that you need to go into that work session with a plan to implement to make it go faster, but the approach really does ultimately save you time because you’re able to whip everything out at once instead of having to get yourself back into the mood to write copy for your captions or edit videos again each time.
The next way to make creating content more sustainable for you by cutting down the amount of time it takes to do it is by utilizing templates whenever possible. Whether you have a set stack of hashtags to use in your post that you can pull from a larger document, you have templates on Canva that you just pop in the new information or photos, or you create a template for the format of your podcast show notes, this will be a huge time saver. It’s such a good thing to keep in mind as you create new products or are starting new projects, because if you think ahead of time about the fact that you will be repeating a certain task over and over, you can save another copy that’s more neutral or whatever to be used as a template and customized as needed.
The next way to keep up with your content creation doesn’t sound super related, but I promise it is. I recommend keeping an eye on trends and even taking a look into your analytics to see when most people are online on the platforms that you’re posting and trying to show up and post your content in and around those times. The theory behind this is that ideally, this will be when many people are online, for example in the evenings before bed, and you will get increased growth and engagement on your content. Because it really doesn’t matter precisely how often you post on your account on any platform, it’s just about how that post performs and if you are doing what you have control over to optimize the posting time, then you can be allocating less time overall to creating this content since you’re seeing something like double the growth. That one’s maybe a bit of a stretch, but if nothing else, looking at your analytics doesn’t hurt so just give it a try!
This next tip I think might be the most valuable mindset shift you can adopt when it comes to creating content, and I would like to sing it to you in the tune that it was taught to me on TikTok if I may: everything is content, everything is content, don’t forget to film it, don’t forget to film ittt. Everything is content! Just film what you do. It’s the easiest thing ever, you have content literally all around you everyday. The options are truly endless, so don’t overthink it and put more time and energy into it than is needed. If you want to and you have the time to have a content plan and everything planned out that you want to do, then great! But if you don’t, then if you have been recording the things you have been working on, you have endless videos to utilize and create content out of.
Which reminds me– keep in mind, you are likely the only person who is seeing your content that you put out. So if you posted about a certain thing last week and then you have another post this week that’s about that topic and you are worried you might be annoying because you’re repeating yourself… nobody noticed. Don’t worry. Reduce, reuse, recycle baby, keep on posting. I think the statistic is something like only 10% of your audience sees any given thing that you post. And if they’re seeing everything, it means they either love you and your content because they’ve been interacting with it and spending time on it for it to end up in their algorithm, OR potentially they’re hate following you and they see both things and think “omg they just talked about that last week!~” and in both of those possible scenarios, the repetition doesn’t matter and won’t lose you a follower who is genuinely interested in you and your content.
Honestly, you can even just straight up repost some of your content from awhile ago that performed well and see if it does the same again. I would do this one sparingly but if you are low on content but feel the need to put something out anyways, I’ve absolutely done that before and on certain platforms, the post does really well again. Or, the kind of golden mashup of both of these approaches is to take a well-performing post from before and re-edit it to either change it up slightly by re-recording a voiceover or doing some editing to make it more succinct and then seeing how that content performs.
Not gonna lie, I do do this and actually did it quite recently on TikTok because I had a tutorial that I knew was a good tutorial but the video wasn’t edited all that well because I whipped it out too quickly initially, so I brought it back and edited the video and did a new voiceover and it performed even better than it had initially. That was one week ago and although the video is still reaching more new people, at the time of filming, that one video has gotten me 3,444 new followers. Which is another example of why putting in a bit more time to looking into what will perform well can save you time grinding by making more and more content in the future, since you’re exceeding your growth expectations.
And to add onto the whole “everything is content” mindset, learn how to best use that content that you capture to the fullest! Creative concepts for content can be created easily after content has already been filmed. Take videos you took of every process of a furniture makeover- that can turn into a Before and After video with a transition, it can turn into a video tutorial with text on screen to a trending song, and then you can take that same video tutorial and instead of text on screen you do a voiceover walking the viewer through the process, and then you can find a trend or trending sound that you can show the before and after videos to (bonus points if you use a filter or feature like the greenscreen effect while doing so) and then you can take one specific clip of one step in your process and do an educational video with a voiceover explaining how to do that step and why you’re doing it. Not to mention that those are just options using a video format like Reels or TikTok or Shorts. You still have those Before and After photos and staged photos to use my friend. That right there can make you weeks of content, depending how often you generally show up on the platforms.
And maybe you don’t post that content all at once, either because you don’t want to be repetitive or because you don’t want to mess with the aesthetics of your grid with so much repetition. Then that means you have a ton of content in the bank, hopefully already edited and trimmed and captioned and tagged and hashtagged and just sitting in our drafts for those days when we fully intended on getting a post together but something unexpected came up and we ran out of time. Perfect, we have a Plan B ready for times like these!
And again… if, at the end of the day, you don’t have these things prepared yet or a good system in place so you get to the end of the day and you didn’t end up creating a post but you told yourself you would today… give yourself some grace. You can skip a day and it won’t kill you- listen to yourself and your body and don’t overdo it just for an Instagram reel or a carousel post. Maybe you usually post on certain days and you think your followers will be disappointed if you post it a day later… I bet they won’t. And even if they messaged you because they were waiting for some groundbreaking content and you let them know you just needed to take a break for a day, I would bet a lot of money that if they are a reasonable human being, they would absolutely know a way to resonate with that feeling and they would understand completely. We want this to be sustainable sweetie so don’t kill yourself over it, got it?!
And something you may not know about me… I love little motivational messages. They literally always get me fired up, and I keep a running list of ones that are especially catchy or speak to me in the Notes app on my phone. So I’m going to end every podcast episode with one of those that I have noted down over the years, in hopes that you leave our time here each week feeling inspired, motivated, and ready to take on whatever comes your way that week.
So this week’s Mel’s motivational message is: You’re useless if you’re juiceless.
Alright, that’s it for now, I appreciate your time, and I’ll catch you guys next week!
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