Whether you’re a social media pro at a marketing agency or the in-house marketer for a single company, you understand how essential it is to keep your content fresh and on the move. The world of social media is expanding and becoming more competitive all the time, so it’s important to keep up the pace, even if no additional resources are available to you.
Here at Gain, from talking to our users in 51 countries, we understand the challenges you face. That’s why we’ve put together a list of everything you need to create content faster while maintaining your high standards.
1. Conduct Monthly Content Planning Sessions
One of the most important things that allows you to create content faster is a clear vision. Whether you’re a team of ten people or a single person, an appropriately mapped-out strategy is key.
Conducting monthly planning sessions and utilizing a social media management tool with a calendar feature like Gain helps you stay ahead of the curve. You can use these planning sessions to build your posting schedule with tried-and-true content, which will show you where gaps exist.
Once you have mapped out your posting schedule with all your available assets, you can concentrate on peppering in with fresh new content. Looking ahead can help you create content faster and earlier.
2. Batch Create
Next up, we have content batching, which is the ultimate time-saver when it comes to spending less time creating content.
The key to successfully batching content is understanding the length of the trend cycles on each platform. It’s no use batch creating a month’s worth of TikTok posts as the video formats and popular audio tracks don’t usually stick around for long. Trends can blow up overnight, but peter out in mere days.
To batch efficiently, the first thing you need to do is create content pillars, which will help you stay on track. Once you’ve determined the key topics you want to cover, you can bulk-create content, blending aspects that are timeless for your branding with what’s hot right now.
Keep things cohesive, be mindful of your posting schedule and how it may interact with upcoming events, and diversify your content mediums to keep batches feeling custom-made.
3. Utilize AI
AI need not be a daunting prospect for a dynamic social media team. Despite scary headlines about robots taking our jobs, AI can be an asset amongst your social media management tools if you know how to leverage it.
AI can help when ideas are thin in the writer’s room. With the right prompts, tools like ChatGPT can get the creative juices flowing. AI can also do legwork on the social media analytics side, assessing customer behavior, preferences, and engagement metrics.
You can even use AI tools for content creation, as it can offer new variations on existing assets. AI can free up time and energy when utilized to its full potential, allowing you to focus on quality and create content faster.
4. Don’t Create Fresh Content Every Time… Repurpose Instead
Social media management is a balancing act, where you’re constantly being squeezed to create more content and produce higher engagement, with the same resources. This is where repurposing content for social media comes in.
Primarily, you should identify content that has performed well in the past and brainstorm ideas of how to freshen it up. You can take old content, like an Instagram reel, and swap out the audio for a song that’s currently trending. You should also consider changing the format to make existing content fit for a different platform.
With Gain’s social media management platform, you can use our engagement monitoring tool to identify your best-performing content and then harness that data to recycle your popular social media posts at later times, thereby expanding your content’s reach.
5. Leverage Templates
Part of a smart social media strategy is understanding how to use all the tools at your disposal. You don’t have to be a pro at graphic design to create high-quality content. Create content faster using social media content templates like those available on Canva or Adobe. You can create slick and cohesive posts for your clients without the heavy lifting.
6. Use Social Media Management Tools
There is a wide variety of social media management tools on the market to help you streamline various aspects of your workload. Identifying your specific pain points can help you choose the best tool for your needs.
Tools can help you with things like organizing and planning content, collecting analytics data, and automating your approval workflows.
Our tool, Gain, offers all the usual social media management features plus automated content approval workflows. Instead of chasing sign-offs in endless email chains, Gain allows you to create unlimited rounds of approval for all your stakeholders, invite all your collaborators, and enable in-context communication.
Collaborators can comment in context, and all those comments become part of the content in Gain as a detailed, time-stamped log or content history. Once each collaborator has viewed and approved the content with one click, it automatically moves along to the next person, saving you valuable time that you can better use for content creation.
7. Outsource Specific Content Creation Tasks
As a social media professional, you’re used to wearing many hats, but why not use the help of specialists to save you time and keep the quality of the content top-notch? If it’s within budget, consider outsourcing specific tasks, like photography and copywriting. By outsourcing these tasks, you can create content faster and use the time saved to focus on management and strategy.
8. Create a Swipe File
To constantly create, you need to stay inspired, and to do this, we recommend creating a swipe file. Creating a marketing strategy is like creating a recipe, blending different elements to end up with something just right for you. A swipe file is a place where you can gather ideas and inspiration, and you can pull it up when it’s time to create content, just like a mood board.
You can use a spreadsheet, a text document, or even collect physical pieces of media to surround yourself with marketing that inspires you. Whenever you feel like you’ve hit a wall, you can look through it to get the ball rolling again.
9. Use User-Generated Content
An excellent way to create content faster and save yourself labor is user-generated social media content. This involves repurposing and reposting content customers have made featuring your brand, such as written reviews, photos, or videos with positive feedback.
Harley Sheffield, a marketing manager, shares her two cents on user-generated content and its potential impact:
Social media users appreciate authenticity, and recommendations from other users build brand trust. One study found that 68% of millennials believe that user-generated social media content is a good quality indicator. This, coupled with the time it saves you content creation-wise, makes it a win-win.
The Bottom Line
In an industry where speed is everything, getting your content out there as soon as possible is crucial. Haste and quality don’t always go hand in hand, but if you use the tools at your disposal correctly, you can create content faster without sacrificing quality.
Speed up the process with Gain, the social media management tool that helps you manage all your clients in one place.
Try Gain for free (no credit card required).
