Whether you have an emotional, moral, or societal aversion to using AI, I’m going to give a quick and dirty plan for developing an authentic social media content strategy in your own style and voice.
You can especially use this if you’re camera shy, or you tend to get in your head about how other people perceive you.
Important: This content strategy is for people with something to promote
First things first – this strategy applies to people who already have a business plan, and/or have at least put the finishing touches on their actual creative project. My advice relies on you being obsessed with your thing.
My advice presumes you’ve already done the necessary work to warrant a content strategy that you’d need to promote yourself and your work on social media.
The premise of this plan is that you (the business owner/creative mind behind your project) are personally so obsessively passionate about your chosen subject matter that, if given an endless opportunity to discuss it with an eager audience, you might never run out of things to say.
Basically, you could talk about your work forever. That’s how personally connected & invested into your business (or creative pursuit) you should be BEFORE you make a website, or start promoting anything.
Because the website (and your marketing) has one purpose: to earn you money. Which means the website needs traffic, and to drive traffic you have to promote it. And if you’re going to promote a website YOU HAVE TO TALK about it online. And you have to have so much to say that you don’t care who gets tired of it. Because you DONT GET TIRED OF IT
Strategy step 1: You make the base marketing content.
Write your blogs in bulk. I always recommend clients write as many as they can over the course of two weeks. Aim for twelve. This way you’ll have at least one new blog a month, at the ready.
Strategy step 2: Make summaries of your base content.
Try to summarize each blog twice. First, make a short overview of the post. One or two paragraphs is fine. For the second summary, try to recreate the same blog in a different way but decently shorter than the original. So now you have one blurb summary, and one almost identical medium sized summary. You can use these summaries as the text for your email newsletter, followed by a direct link to the blog article.
Strategy step 3: Chop and screw your summary content
Play around with each summary you’ve made and pull out 5 sentences that you’ll use for social media. When we share links on social media the ones with at least one sentence of intro text are more likely to be clicked.
Additionally, you can always pull random sentences from your blog and use those as captions.
Strategy step 4: Curate a gallery of images that relate to your blogs.
Ideally each of your blog posts should have at least one image. But for a social media content strategy you’ll want to have unique photos for each caption you’ve derived from your summaries.
I use Unsplash to search for images related to the subject matter my clients write about, or that match their industry. Then, I upload them to bulkresizephotos.com to optimize the images for quality and storage. You can read more about that here.
Putting together the pieces of your content strategy.
If it takes you two weeks to write all your blogs, and a third week to craft your summaries and extract captions from them, you might spend a fourth week pairing your images with the captions.
There are three very important things to remember when you’re working on your content promo:
- HAVE FUN. It can be boring and monotonous and even overwhelming at times. But try to be excited about the end: A library of content covering 3 months to a year.
- BE TRUE TO YOU. If you don’t want to do TikTok dances or get glammed up or put on a persona and a voice then don’t. Your content should match your core business message (or the message of your art) and your own personal communication style. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Just write whatever you want, any way you want.
- YOU CAN ALWAYS DELETE. If you start getting psyched out about lack of engagement, or you start getting the ICK off your own posts, okay so delete it. That’s fine. I promise you nobody cares but you.
Bonus Strategy Step: Use Go High Level to schedule out your content across social media platforms.
Go High Level is an all-in-one digital marketing software for small to medium sized business. It connects to a variety of major social media platforms including: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok. Inside their social planner you can upload media and captions, and schedule each of your posts months at a time.
To learn more about Go High Level or to develop a custom, personalized promo strategy together, set up a call with me this week!
If you’re completely lost in the sauce for how to bring your creative idea into reality or where to begin planning your business, grab my one-on-one creative coaching here.
You don't need more ideas. You need a plan.
Do you need help going after what you want and figuring out your next steps? Book a one-hour consult and let's build your roadmap.
BOOK YOUR 1-ON-1 →
Did this article help you?
Let me know what you think in the comments.