Content Batching: How to Use It for Your Online Business
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Comments: We all know how important social media is as part of a wider content marketing strategy but finding the time and resources to plan, create, and post content can be hard.
That’s where content batching comes in. Allowing you to post consistent content that your audience loves, content batching is the secret to social media success.
Creating batch content will save you time and brain power that can then be spent on other areas of your business.
If you’re wondering how to batch social media content then read on to find out.
What Is Content Batching?
Content batching is exactly what it sounds like, creating a batch of content in one go that can then be used across a set period of time.
For example, if you’re planning to post on social media once a day, rather than writing out your captions every time you post, you can write captions in bulk every week, fortnight or month.
Content batching is a productivity technique to help you make sure your digital marketing strategy is running as optimally as possible.
It allows you to dedicate resources to planning and creating your social media content while saving you time in the long run, making posting on social media as stress-free as possible.
Benefits of Content Batching
There are various benefits to content batching including:
Saves time – Creating a batch of content in one go will save you time. Instead of having to dedicate time every day to creating content when you may have other, more urgent tasks to complete, content batching lets you tick off all of your content in one creative session.
Knowing your content for the next week or month is ready to go allows you to focus on other areas of your business.
Reduces stress – If you plan, create, and post your content all on the same day you run the risk of having last-minute stress over what to post. This is especially useful at busy times, like during the holiday sales. Content batching takes the stress out of a social media strategy as you always know you have a post prepped and ready to go.
Creates consistency – Consistency is key to a successful social media strategy. It’s no use posting every day for a week and then going silent for a month. Content batching lets you plan your content in advance and ensures you have a consistent posting schedule.
It also enables you to create a cohesive social media appearance as by creating your social media content in advance, you can see how it will all look together and the brand visual it will create.
Room to adjust – Once you’ve begun posting your batch content you can analyze how it’s performing. If you notice certain types of content are performing better than others, you can adjust your content plan accordingly. Having a batch of content ready-made allows you to tweak your output based on your audience’s preferences.
Content Batching: How To
Are you ready to begin creating batch content for social media? These six tips will help you to get started!
Start With Content Pillars
Step 1
Before you begin content batching you need to identify your content pillars.
Content pillars are around three to five key topics that you’ll consistently create content around for your social media channels.
Your chosen content pillars should reflect your brand and be something that your target audience is interested in and likely to engage with.
Using content pillars to form the foundations of your content strategy ensures you are creating a consistent brand online. By choosing topics that relate to the target keywords from your SEO strategy, you’ll also help to give your search rankings a boost too.
Content pillars make batching content much easier as you always have a topic or idea to start with that you can then build your content around.
Know What Works
Step 2
When it comes to planning your social media content, you need to know what works and what doesn’t.
Just because you’ve seen fast-paced video content performing well for one of your competitors doesn’t mean it will automatically do well for you too.
Take a look at the analytics for your previous posts and assess which ones are performing particularly well.
Reviewing your analytics will give you valuable insight into the types of content and posts that your audience is engaging with.
Ask yourself:
- What type of content performs well?
- What type of content doesn’t perform well?
- What themes have generated the best results?
- When was the best-performing content published? What time of day?
- What CTA (call to action) was used in the caption of the best performing posts?
Once you know what types of posts are the most successful for your brand online, when content batching in the future you can be sure to include as many of these as possible.
Get Creative
Step 3
Finding inspiration and coming up with new creative content ideas can be tricky. With so much online noise it’s not always easy to find unique ideas that haven’t been done a thousand times before.
You can use your content pillars to help form the foundations of your creative ideas and each post should always relate back to one of your pillars in some way.
When it comes to coming up with creative content ideas think about:
- Are there any key holidays, calendar dates, or business events coming up that you can post about?
- Review frequently asked questions for your niche and use these to form your educational content.
- Analyze current social media trends and see if any relate to your brand.
- Check what content you have already created that can be repurposed.
Structure Your Ideas
Step 4
A content plan is a great way to ensure your content is meeting the requirements of your wider social media strategy.
Putting your ideas together into a content plan allows you to plan out the content including when it will be posted and the content pillar and theme it will link to.
A content plan tells you exactly when and what you will post and should provide information such as captions, assets, hashtags, tags, and a date and time to post.
Structuring your ideas into a plan lets you see exactly what content batches need creating and ensures you’re spreading your content out methodically.
Create Your Content
Step 5
Once you’ve put together your content plan it’s time to start creating your content.
When it comes to batch creating your content there are various different elements that you’ll need to cover including copy and captions, images, and videos. We’ve put together some top tips for creating each below.
Copy/Captions – When writing copy and captions for social media posts remember that you may be working with a limited character count. Think about how you will hook the reader and use line breaks and emojis to help keep them engaged. Don’t forget to include a CTA at the end!
Images – There are various ways you can create and source images for your content. You can take them yourself of course and if you do then be sure to make sure the images are in focus and high-quality. Alternatively, you can use stock images or user-generated content from your audience.
Video – Video content is a great way to connect with your audience and is becoming increasingly popular on social media. If you decide to film videos, keep them short and sweet, you need to hook your audience within the first five seconds. We also recommend writing a loose script for your video before you press record.
Schedule Your Content
Step 6
Once you’ve planned and created your content we recommend scheduling it to really maximize your time and productivity.
Scheduling your social media content in advance means you don’t need to worry about remembering to post at a specific time or on a particular day. Instead, you just need to dedicate an hour to scheduling your content for the week(s) ahead.
Scheduling your content is an important step in the content batching process as it allows you to plan ahead and prepare your social media strategy.
By creating and scheduling your content in advance you don’t risk scrambling around on the day to find something to post on social media.
There are various tools you can use to schedule your social media content in advance including Sprout Social, Asana, and Hootsuite.
Content Batching: Summary
Using a content batching strategy will help make managing your brand’s social media presence considerably easier.
By dedicating specific time to planning and creating content you can ensure you’re utilizing time and resources effectively. Content batching allows you to avoid the last-minute stress of not having any content to post.
If you want to start the process of content batching (and we recommend you do) the steps to follow are:
- Identify your content pillars
- Check your analytics
- Brainstorm your content ideas
- Put together a content plan
- Create your content
- Schedule your content
Don’t forget to let us know in the comments if you try content batching for your social media channels!
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