Gathering a ton of social media content at once may sound like a headache, but the amount of the amount of time and effort you’ll save in the end can be priceles.
In this post, we’ll go over the benefits of gathering and creating a social media content bank, along with some key, practical steps you can take to get it done.
Getting your content organized is key to your social media marketing success. This is especially helpful when your dynamic duo: your handy content schedule (or calendar) + content bank are in play.
Hand-in-hand, your schedule and bank will eliminate the day-to-day content haggle – saving you time and giving you more room to flex a little creative muscle.
Here’s how to do it.
Itemize all aspects of your brand
Step one to getting a social media content bank together is to know what aspects of your brand you’d like to show your audience. This includes lifestyle content, user generated content, brand attributes, upcoming product launches or special dates, social media goals or benchmarks and giveaways – so basically, everything you’ve got going on with your brand.
At this point if you haven’t created a content calendar, it’s time. Remember that none of these items have to be developed past knowing that you’d like to highlight them or that they’re coming up. This is all about being prepared.
If you already have a social media content schedule or calendar worked out, this step may be a little redundant so you can go on to the next.
Gather all existing content old and new
Now that you know what you want to talk about (or you have your social media content calendar worked out) it’s time to look at all your social media content – or lack thereof.
Gather all the content you’ve created, and anything you have but haven’t posted yet.
Pro tip: Some of those older photos can be re-purposed for throwback posts, backgrounds and more.
Create a system
You then need to create a place to put all this social media content you’ve just gathered.
Creating a system will help you streamline your efforts, especially if you work with a team. I keep it relatively simple and like to create one folder for every month, plus one labeled “For Posting” and one labeled “Used”, but you can figure out what system works for you. If you’re on a team, both Dropbox and Google Drive are great basic options for keeping everything organized, and everyone on the same page.
Now that you have your content organized, you’ll be able to see what gaps you need to fill. You’ll realize if you need more videos, for example, or certain types of content, and you can get cracking on filling in those gaps.
Bank messaging and captions too
Part of your social media content bank should include messaging and captions. The messaging that goes along with your images and videos is just as important as the content itself – banking messaging is a great way to save time on recurring campaigns (like cross promo tweets), when you have an image but no caption or to inspire visuals.
Banked messaging can also help when live tweeting at fast-paced events.
I don’t want you to read “content bank” and think “Aahh! I have to create content for a year!”. You can create banks for a few weeks at a time, based on your schedule, or in smaller batches for individual campaigns or events.
When creating content banks for shorter campaigns:
- Consider the duration of the campaign or event and how frequently you will post about it.
- Consider using images that can be used more than once in the campaign.
- Again, bank the messaging that will be used to promote the campaign.
The initial time investment into creating content banks can be big, but will make the posting process a much smoother one for you, and your team. Since the images and messaging are done, all you have to do is plug them into your social media automation system, or copy and paste them in when it’s time.
Think of all the things you can do with that time. Analytics, sourcing more content, learning to use new tools or time to get a little creative with giveaways.
Get to banking.
This post was first published on Dhariana Lozano’s’s blog.