Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: When it comes to
building a brand or marketing or business
on social media, it's pretty safe to say that
the content you actually create a cross these
social media platforms is going to be one of the key
drivers as to your success on whatever social media
platform you may be posting on. But something that I've
actually experienced over time, over the course of
creating content on a ton of different social
media platforms is that the content creation process
itself is often something that content creators spend
far too much time on. And they don't have
a streamlined, efficient, yet effective
content strategy. When you have a streamlined, efficient, effective
content strategy, it frees up so much more
time for you to actually do the other things within
your business that truly matter and can help that business grow and
make more money. Because at the end of the day, if all you're doing
is creating content, we really have is a
time-consuming hobby. You aren't leveraging
the audience. You're building off the
back of that content, which is what you need to
do if you want to actually grow a business off of
the back of social media. So that's what I want
to talk about today. I want to teach you how to plan and create
your social media content strategy so that it is efficient, streamlined,
and effective. Hi guys, My name
is Ethan bridge. I'm host of the social media
marketing school podcast and the guy behind the Instagram
page and Ethan bridge. And like I said,
I've been creating content on social
media for years now. I've recorded over
300 podcast episodes. I've posted thousands
of pieces of content across various
social media platforms. And I've gained some
experience over time with regards to the
content creation process. And that's why I want
to make sure that you guys also have
a streamlined, efficient, yet effective
content strategy. So if that's what you want
to learn about today, Let's dive straight into the first module, and
I'll see you there.
2. Module 1: Generating Content Ideas: So something that
I discovered very early on in my content
creation journeys, that I was actually
creating content on a daily basis and coming
up with these ideas for each piece of content that
I would go into Create on the day that I was creating
that piece of content. And it became incredibly stressful because if I
didn't have an idea, I'd spend 30 minutes and hours, sometimes even longer
trying to come up with an effective idea of which I thought was actually
going to be able to provide value to my audience. And I wasted so much time. And the most annoying thing was is that I would have ideas throughout the week for some silly reason I
wouldn't know down, actually end up them
forgetting what that content idea
was when I actually wanted to come and
create piece of content. In this module, I want
to teach you exactly how to come up with endless
social media content ideas. And this is still a strategy
that I use today and it's important when you come up with those ideas that you
write them down, you keep them somewhere, whether that's in the
notes on your phone, the classic old pen and paper, or maybe even in a
notion worksheet. So how do you find
content ideas? What are some other
ways you can generate different content ideas because there are so many
different ways. So let's dive into the iPad and just
dive into the view of the platforms and
strategies that I used to come up with all
of my content ideas. Generating content ideas. Firstly, I'm going to talk through easy ways that
you can do them yourself. And that is simply
your own experiences. At the end of the day, you're
on a journey yourself. If you're a business owner, if you're trying to
build a personal brand, you're going to come
across challenges, problems, and you're going to have to try and solve
these problems. But you shouldn't just look at that as a problem
that you're facing. Because if you're
facing this problem, then it's likely that somebody else is going to
be facing this problem. So use this as a
win-win scenario. Not only you
overcoming a problem, you can turn this
problem and now the solution that you
found into a content idea, into a piece of content that somebody else is going
to find valuable. Because you now
have a solution to a problem and somebody else
could have that problem, which you now have
the solution to. So it's perfect for those people that are following
you along your journey or trying to mimic what you're doing and experienced
the same outcome. So from your own experiences, you will have problems and you will find solutions
to these problems. And you can turn this into a
little bit of a story here. So you could tell the story
of how you came across this problem because
somebody might be going through the same scenario. And then how you then had
all found the solution. Because then people can then implement that into
their own strategies. Your unexperienced as well. It could just be a
day-to-day scenario where somebody influenced you
and you posted about that. I found this piece
of content really interesting, bang, content idea. And it's just
something you can put out there pretty simply. Or it can be something
that made you feel good. Or one of these classic
Twitter quote posts is something as crime
across your mind. Tweet it. Take a picture of that
tweet screenshot it. You can post it on
Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever social media
platform you may post on. So you can just have a simple quote post,
but you get the point. Your own experiences
are arguably some of the best content ideas because it shows you
as a person as well. It shows you, it
opens up yourself to your audience
because it provides that connection to
you personally, because people get to see that
you're only human as well. You are experiencing problems. You're not this perfect
person across social media. You have problems in
new overcome them, but you simply help other
people also overcome their problems by
providing them with the solutions that
you also find. Your own experiences
are fantastic. Now, as a social media
content creator, it is your job to keep
an eye on trends, especially when it
comes to things such as TikToks and Instagram reels, trending sounds, trending dances or trending
audios, you name it. You need to make the most of
trends when they come along. It doesn't necessarily
simply have to apply to TikToks and
Instagram Reels. You may just see people talking, talking about certain
scenarios wherever it's about a platform update or an inch piece of industry
news that's going to affect everybody that
comes across it. You need to be keeping your
eye on these things so that you can have a state
of reactive marketing. That's what it's called. Being able to react
to something quickly, add your spin on it and
make the most of it whilst all of those
eyeballs are on that trend. You don't want to be someone
that comes across a trend six months late and people have no interest in it anymore. It's no longer a
trend at that point. And if you post doing that trend six months
down the line, it's gonna make you look
a little bit silly. We don't want that. We want you to be on the
money right at that moment. So keep your eye on trends. Make note of them, or
try and react to them there and then
efficiently do that. Now, let's dive into a few different ways now that you might not
thought of before. So simply, and I don't know why people don't do this more. If you have an audience already, ask them. Ask your audience. At the end of the day you are creating content
for your audience. You aren't creating
content for yourself. They are the people that are
going to be consuming it. So if you're creating content that they
don't want to see, you're never going to be
providing value to anyone. So the best thing to do is ask your audience problems
they may have or content. They may want to see more of what you could simply
do if you're on Instagram, you could put up a
question sticker. Simply ask them, Hey guys, look, I'm planning my content for
the next couple of weeks. What do you want to see more of? What problems you
currently facing? What ideas would you
like me to expand on? I've spoken about in the past and people
are going to come back with responses and tell you exactly what they want to see. You might see that
certain people were asking the same things
over and over again. And that's clearly an untapped
idea that you haven't spoken about before
because there's lots of people asking for it. And that's when you need to
jump on that and provide the audience with what
they are asking for. Very simple, yet incredibly,
incredibly effective. Now, let's move on to a couple of pretty cool
apps that you can use. So number one, core. Core is a questions
and answers website, and you may not have
thought that you could use it to
generate content ideas. You might have
thought it's a place for you to ask questions. But if somebody is
asking questions, That means they want an answer. And you can look at all of these and turn them into your
own content ideas. So let's have a look. So-called core are up here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to
search in core here. Okay, Let's keyboard is far
smaller than I expected. So we're going to search in
Quora social media marketing because that is simply something that I myself
talk about on social media. So we're going to search up
social media marketing here. And you'll see along the side, we actually have ways that we can sort all of the questions that have been asked on core. So what we are going
to look at and filter between all the questions
and the answers. So we can go on questions and you don't really
want to search by all time because you
can see that some of these questions
are from years ago, especially when you
come on answers, it tells you how long ago they were posted. So
at four years ago. So instead, we want
to be searching quite recently so we can look like
past year or even better, I would recommend
you look within the past month because
then that is on topic. It's something people were
asking me about recently. So you know, it's something
people wanted to know about. So here we go. You've got an answer here, which is the thing I'm going
to talk about in a minute. But you can see all the
questions have been answered. What are the careers in
social media marketing? What is the best social media marketing costs for beginners? But what is social
media marketing? Back to basics. Then you've got
what are the best strategies for social
media marketing? What the trends rising and
social media marketing. So you've got all
of these different questions that can just be instantly flipped on their head and turned into content ideas. You have no excuse here. You've got pages and
pages and pages and pages and pages of questions
that people are asking. You also have the answers
to these questions. Sue almost aren't having to come up with the
solutions yourself. You have the solution there, you can read the solution, innovate upon it, add
your own twist on it. Don't copy it word for word because you want
to make it your own. You have the basis for a good response for
that content idea. And that is what we need. So that you have
the Content ID and the solution to that
piece of content. The next website. And this one is ridiculous
as well. It's amazing. And that's answered the public. So what you do is you
come on this website here to answer the public.com. And again, you can just
type in what your niches. So we're going to type in
social media marketing. For the sake of the example,
We're gonna hit Search. Now. It now categorizes your search between various
different things. Right now, you can
see here we have social media marketing,
75 questions. And what you can do is you
can actually zoom in and you can see all of the various questions
that it generates. How social media for
marketing affects business, how social media
monitoring is done? Which social media
marketing is the best? Who uses social media marketing? Why social media
marketing is important? All of these various questions
that it generates for you can be turned straight
into content ideas. Then it has 56 prepositions. So again, social media marketing
for real estate agents, social media marketing
for charities. And you've got all of these, all of these prepositions again, that can be flipped into
your own content ideas, 40 comparisons, social media
marketing or management. Social media marketing or SRM, is a form of, again, all of these can be flipped
into content ideas. There alone. There are over a 150
content ideas for you. You have no excuse. It can
be done for any topic, just typing your word and
there your content ideas. So I've given you there five amazing ways
that you can come up with unlimited content ideas. I want you to keep
a bank of these, write them down so that when you come to actually create content, you can just look into
that bank and pick. Because I used to waste so
much time coming up with ideas on the spot and used to
frustrate the **** out of me. So please keep your
bank of these ideas and ensure that you're keeping
on top of your ideas.
3. Module 2: Planning/Scripting Your Content: Now the next stage in my content creation process
is all about scripting or preparing my piece
of content for the design phase a
little bit later on. And you'll see why I do this
when I start designing. But the planning
phase is incredibly important because it
streamlines the rest of it. Especially if you're
recording video or you're going to be
designing that text later on because we can
have templates that we plug this text into and that's what the next module is
gonna be about. But here we're going to talk
about effectively scripting and planning your
piece of content. So if you're scripting a video, you need to understand
there are pretty much three or four main
elements depending on whether you want the final
one are not in your video. So let's talk about video first. So video firstly,
we have your hook. How are you going to attract people to the video
in the first place? You need that first
five seconds, those first three
to five seconds of that video to attract
attention right away. This is how we're
going to do this. Three ways to improve x hat. Do you struggle with, here's the solution for when people hear these things
they want to listen on because they want to hear
the value. Very simple. Your hook needs to be short, yet effective in order to stop people from scrolling
on social media. That is so much competition
on social media nowadays that you are competing with pretty
much everyone. So if you don't have
an effective hook, and the same goes
for normal content, not necessarily video. You are going to fail. Nobody's gonna watch that video. So you need one to come up
with an effective hook. Two, we need to build interest. Why do they need to
know about this? What are the consequences
of not knowing this? Because then people
aren't going to want that solution even more. So then point number three, you provide the solution. If you don't provide
the solution, you're just going to leave
people disappointed. It leaves your piece
of content incomplete. So then we need to
provide them with the solution to the problem or the hook we had
in the beginning. Then finally, it
might be good to finish off that video
with a call to action. And for those of you who don't
know CTA, cool to action. Now, single image posts on various social
media platforms. Pretty easy, just
that first slide. But if you're on LinkedIn or you're creating
a Twitter thread, or you're creating an
Instagram Carousel. There is a certain
formula you can follow to effectively engage
people with your content. And that is the Ada formula. So Ada stands for attention, interest, desire, and then action. It's, it's pretty similar to
the structure of our video. You have the hook
which is grabbing the attention and you
build up the interests, solutions that desire
that the people want it. And then action is
called to action. But with a carousel on
Instagram or LinkedIn, or we get ten slides. I'm going to draw
ten boxes here. I hope I leave
myself enough room. And I apologize that they
are not all the same size, but we're going to go with it. So slide one is the first
slide that everybody sees and that is obviously
going to be our attention. We want that hook, we
want to draw people in. The next three to four, I recommend three slides. We want to build
up the interests. Like I said, why
is this a problem? What are the consequences
of people not knowing this? It builds up their interests
to fulfill the desire, which is the solution. So then the next slides, we're going to provide
them with the solutions. And then finally, because you provided them with
all this value, they might want to give you a
little something in return. So we call them to action. This here is the structure that essentially most of your content is going to be revolved around. Now with a carousel, you don't necessarily have
to use all of these slides, so you may only need to
interest slides and therefore, three desire slides,
you can get rid of those and then select the
call to action at the end. And then your carousel only be seven slides, it's up to you. You don't have to use all ten. But in that scenario, we did. So once you put your structure now down,
you can start planning. I suggest if you're
writing your carousels to plan all of that
content within word, within your notes so that you can get ready to just plug in place that text right
into your templates. And I'm going to show
you my own templates in the next module. So planning, right, in word, Sasha notes slash Google Docs. It doesn't matter,
just somewhere. You can plan the writing, what you're gonna have on
each letter, your carousel, what you're going to have
on your single image, post, you name it for video. I wouldn't script
it word for word. I found that people, when
they script word for word, it just sounds like does
sound like they're talking, it sounds like they're reading the script and
you don't want that, you want it seem natural. You want to be natural as
possible on social media. So I would just give
yourself bullet points, small pointers of what
you need to talk about. That way you aren't
reading from a script. You're just looking
at it and going, I just want you
to talk about and then it's off the
top of your head. And that sounds more, much more natural and it's
far more engaging. So that is how we are preparing
our pieces of content. And you understand why this
is far more streamlined than people actually just coming
up with the idea on the day, then writing it as
they're designing. The designing is taking
far too long because in a minute I'm gonna give
you the key to everything. So let's move on
to the next stage.
4. Module 3: Creating Templates: Now in this module I'm
actually going to explain the thing that has
arguably saved me the most time when it comes to creating content
for social media. So if you're going to listen
to any of these modules and actually take action on
any of these modules, I recommend that you do, but for this one, and that is because
in this module I'm going to be
discussing templates. Having a template
that I can just plug in place my text into, eliminated the entire
design process and took it off my hands. And for me, that was the most time-consuming part of the content creation process
because I'm not a designer. I am by no means
a good designer. So I found a style of
content that works for me and created templates that
revolve around that style. And that's why I write all of my text in a Word document or a Google Doc and then
simply copy and paste that text
into the templates. And then I just export
the finished product once I finally finished creating
that piece of content. So why don't we take a look at the template that
I've used for the past, probably about a year now. Let's dive into my computer. So here you can see that
I actually create all of my content in
Adobe Illustrator. Now you don't actually
have to create your content in
Adobe Illustrator. You can create your
templates in Canva, which is free and
probably far simpler. Now that we've gotten used
to using Adobe Illustrator, this is what I continue to
use for my actual content. And you can see that if you
go into the layers here, I've labeled them
all accordingly for the slides and everything. So this is all very well organized and I know
where everything is and what I need to do when
I'm creating my content. But what I will do when
I'm creating my content, you'll see here I have five sets of slides that I can use my
carousels and I've got all the single
image stuff up here. It's all just very
well organized. So I can write out five carousels for the week if I wanted to create five carousels, and then I just plug
in place the text into the slides that they apply to. Then I just explore
whatever this may be. So if I click Control O, you can see that this is art
board number one to ten. So I'll export Artboards
one to ten and that becomes my first
carousel, or 11 to 20. Or if I just wanted to export
this one quote right here, then I would export Artboard 61. So you can see right here how
the design is done for me. That was the most
time-consuming part, yes, creating these templates
will take you time and you will have to adapt them to your style and find a
style that works for you. But once you have created
this template, it's done. You don't have to
create another one. That's it. So you put in the
effort and time upfront to then save countless more
hours in the future. You can see here I found a
design that works for me. These are my value
points right here. You've got my various
style of titles. You've got my different call
to actions that I have on the final slide
that I can copy and paste into whatever template
I want it to be in. You've got my list templates. I've got my Christmas
template, of course, that's only used once a year, but it comes out every year. Don't you worry. Then you got my single image
templates at the top of my quote templates and
another call to action. So you can just see here
how everything is there. Everything I need is right
there in that template. I've even got more elements
at the top if I want to use them when I'm actually creating the
content down there. So if I want to use an arrow or set of arrows or
this call to action, or the sequence of numbers. I just copy and paste it into the template when
I want to use it. And it's there. It's all done for me. I'm
not having to go about designing and creating a
new post every single time. It saves me so much time
and I recommend you do go ahead and spend the time creating the templates
for yourself as well. You can do this for
video content as well. You can still access if you use Premiere Pro and you want that, you want subtitles
on your videos, you can save a text
style that can then be used as a template for the
rest of the subtitles. You use an all
your other videos. Just create templates,
cover all your bases. Create the template once, then you don't have to do it
again and it will save you time in the future. But this is the one thing in the whole content
creation process that has saved me the most time. So if you're going
to take action on anything like I said, take action on this. Templates are phenomenal. You write out all of your carousel content or
your single image content, all of the actual copy, the body of texts in a
Word document beforehand. Get all of that done. That then is the only
really time-consuming thing of the actual content
creation process. But once you've done that, you
can just copy and paste it into the slides or into the
template that's relevant. And then export. Really is that simple. So please, if you haven't
already start creating some templates and ensure that you're saving
time wherever you can.
5. Module 4: Writing Engaging Post Captions: Captions, Instagram captions because some people love them. When you read the captions, it's almost like an essay. It's just packed full of
value and they're great. But then again, some people hate them and they will just simply put an emoji or a song lyric. Today, I want to teach
you how to write the perfect Instagram
captions so that your audience begin
reading them, loving them, and
wanting to learn more. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight
into some tips. Tip number one,
people always ask me, how long should my caption be? Should it be sure?
Should it be long? Because I'm seeing all of
these different people and they have various
different caching strategies. In my opinion. Go long, it's there, you've got
the character count. Use it to your advantage. You've got to remember that
the people who actually read your captions are the
ones that will be the most interested
in your content. Let's say you create carousels
like me, for example, value-based posts that people have read through ten slides. Not many people
are going to want to go and read that caption. But those that do are expecting good things from
that caption because they've just consumed a value-based post that took them ten
slides to read through. So you've got to deliver
for these people. It doesn't matter if
people don't read it. What you're doing
is you're providing this fervor value for
those that actually do. So, don't just have
an emoji there. Use it to your advantage. Tell a story, tell people
how it applied to you. Go long. You've got the character
count there to do that. In my opinion, you need to. But the second tip, I
do want to swiftly move onto compliments this first. Sure. Have a long caption. It will work great. But this caption has to complement the post that you
have just made them consume. It baffles me. When I consume a
piece of content, go and read the caption, and there is no relation between that caption and the post
I've just read confuses me. That almost stops me read in that caption because
it makes no sense. So your caption must compliment what these people have just consumed
in the post itself. For example, when I create
a value-based post, what I like to do
in my caption is say how it's applied
to me in the past, relate it to something. So people can then get
that emotional connection or understand the context in which this
value needs to be used. Or it could even be an extension from what
you have already written. But the thing you need to
avoid is repeating yourself. People have just read your post. If you're talking about
Instagram growth and you've mentioned that they
need to engage a lot. You don't need to
tell them again in the caption that they
need to engage again. Instead, what you could
do is provide them with an applicable
engagement strategy. Because it leaves
them wanting more. And this solves another problem. If you've told them in your post that engagement is the
key solution to grow, then that leaves them on
a bit of a cliffhanger. They're thinking, Cool, I
know that I need to engage, but how do we do that? What's the best strategy? How should I be engaging? Who should I be engaging with? Use your caption to
solve that problem. So now your post
has not only become enlightening in the fact that you've told them
they need to engage, but you've also solve
their problem on how they actually engage. But that wouldn't have been
possible if you hadn't used the caption to your
advantage to do so. So the captions that
you are writing, please make sure they
complement what you've written. Add further value. Tell a story, make it relatable,
add some context, whatever you wanna do, just make sure it
relates back and write something that people
will actually want to read. But don't repeat what you've
just written in your post. So the next thing we
want to talk about, if we're writing long captions. If we're writing
multiple sentences, we don't want this to just
be one big block of text. Human mind is going to
look at that and go. I don't want to repeat that. I can't be asked to read what looks like a chapter from
a Harry Potter novel. Instead, you want to
break it up and make it look as easy as
possible to read. What I love to do is I actually use an app
called flocked. It helps you write
your captions and it formats them in a way that
once you copy and paste it, the caption will appear
exactly as it does on the app. Because I know that on Instagram some people
have some trouble where you may hit Return and it
goes down a couple of lines, but when you actually post it, it doesn't have that
same formatting. So you've just spent all this
time writing your caption. To post it. And then
it look all our form, which is very frustrating
because it takes time and then you have to go in and you have to edit it again. But this app called flocked. Once you go onto it, whatever way you see it on the app when you
copy and paste it, that's how it appears on
your Instagram caption. So what I love to do is I'd
love to go into this app. And when I'm writing out, after every full stop, I will have a line break. So it breaks it up very nicely. So there's no long
paragraph looking text. It's simple. It's broken
up. Easy to read. And when you've just
got one sentence broken up every single time, it's much easier for
someone to look at that and go easier to read. There's not as much texts there. Because even though you've
got the same amount of texts, just because it's not bunched
up into one big paragraph. People look at that
and go, there's not much that, there's
not as much text there. When in reality there's
exactly the same, but because you've formatted
it in a better way, it's easier to consume. So if you're writing
long captions, break it up every full stop. Add a line break. Just easier to read and you'll actually get more people to
read it in the first place. Now the final thing
that I want to mention, and it relates back to a point
I made earlier because I said that those that read your caption or the
most interested in your content out of anyone else because they've
consumed everything within the post itself. And then they've gone on
and consumed even more within the caption
because they saw the value in the
post you provided. These people were primed. You need to have
a call to action at the end of your caption. Give these people
were next step. Send them in the direction
you want to send them, because they will most
likely do so because you have just provided them with all this value may
have solved a problem, provided a solution to something that they've been looking for for a while that
could potentially revolutionize their business. If you create content
like mine, of course. However, if you don't, then tell them where
they need to go next, they're just gonna go on to
the next post in their feet. And we don't want that
we want to retain that attention and
have a call to action, send them to your website, get them to book in a cool, direct them to another
social platform you may use. For example, I sometimes
send people to the podcast or get them
into my Facebook group. You name it, but make sure
that there is a call to action there for those that want
to take that next step. And another example is
something I do quite often. At the end of some of
the carousels I create, I ask my audience a question and then a simple call to action of comments, your
thoughts below. Now, if these people
read my post, see that comment
below, call to action. But then they read my caption. It's likely that by the time they get to the
end of my caption, they would have
forgot the question that I asked them in the post. So I like to do is repeat
that question again at the bottom of my caption to remind people of the
question I was asking. And again mentioned that
same call to action. So it refreshes and sends
them to the comments section. Now that could be the same
with anything you do. At the end on the final
slide of your carousel. You may send them to
your Facebook group. Make sure you
repeat that call to action at the end of your
caption for those that read it, so that they aren't reminded
of what they need to do. But use that caption. Use it as a chance to direct people to that next step and
have that call to action. That does just that. Now you might be thinking,
Oh, this is a lot of taxes is a lot of writing. Well, if you get to that call to action point, you
can break it up. What I like to do is just have a few dashes which breaks up the caption itself
from the call to action. And then I have a
few more dashes, and then I have my hashtags. So it just separates everything so that people can
read each part and understand what each part is in more detail and more clearly. So break it up, make it look as
neat as possible. Use the app flocked
to help you format that caption exactly the way you want it so
that when you post it, it appears in exactly
the same way. That wraps up my caption tips. Number one, we had
go long, right? As much as you want to write, get it all off
your chest because those that read it will number to make sure that
the caption you write actually
compliments the post. But don't repeat what the piece
of content has just said. Number three, line breaks. We don't want one big
paragraph of text. We want something
that's easy to read, something that is
entice people to read in the first place because
they're going to look at it and go. That looks simple. Read that now, rather than that, a lot of texts, I don't
want to touch it. So break it up, makes it look
far, far easier to read. And then final
point, make sure you have a call to action. Give people that
next step they need to take because
those that do read your caption or the most likely
people to take that step. And that's it. That's how you write the
perfect Instagram caption.
6. Module 5: Repurposing Your Social Media Content: Now that you've actually
done the hard work, you've created, the
primary piece of content. You can do the easy
bit now and re-purpose this piece of content for as
many social media platforms as you possibly can. Because if you're creating
an Instagram carousel, you don't really just want to post this on Instagram
because it can just be exported in a
different way and be posted to various other
social media platforms. So that's what I want to
talk about right now. I want to be talking about re-purposing your content
for other platforms. And I'm gonna give
you some ideas of what you can actually do. Let's say you record a TikTok. Great. You've got to TikTok
there, but you also have a real and Instagram rail. But you also have
a YouTube short. If you're going to
upload it to a TikTok, make sure you're also uploading
it to reals and jaws. Now, let's say you
create an IG Carousel. When you're creating
Instagram Carousels, you export them
as JPEGS or PNGs. But if you export
as a PDF document, that now allows you to
upload it to LinkedIn. As a carousel. You can instantly repurpose that carousel for a
carousel on LinkedIn, or you can then upload it as a Twitter friend
and various images. But that doesn't
have to be in PDF, that will still be in the jpegs. But that is one of the key
ones people don't know about because they
don't know you have to export it as a PDF, but it's so simple. So, so simple. Let's say you
create a blog post. Completely different
content format here. That's a long form
piece of content. That's read it, read and
post it as a podcast. Perfect. Something else is growing. If you want to start a
podcast, by the way, very, very simple way you can do that and I'm not going
to talk about it today. I can make a completely
other course about it, but we can upload that via
a website called anchor. You can take a look into that. There might be a small
YouTube tutorial, something you can watch. But let's carry on. So we've got TikToks
has rules and shorts. We've got IG carousels as
LinkedIn carousels also, you just have to
export it as a PDF. You've got blog as a podcast, but let's say you record a long form video,
long-form video. Obviously, you can just keep
that as a YouTube video. But you could also
break it up into clips. These clips can become
all of these up here. Tiktoks, reals, shorts. But they can also
become IG videos. Facebook videos. You name it. You've just got to think of as many ways as you can repurpose these content that you've already created because
you've done the hard work. Literally. Just
now got to think, okay, I've done that. How can I post it
on other platforms? What do I need to
do to effectively posted on these platforms? You may need to do some
tweaks here and there to adapt it to the contents
style that you see on those platforms and provide extra captions for
them or slightly tweak the language you're
using or the hooks you may be using or the
design you may be using. But arguably you've done the real bulk of
the work already. These minor tweaks may
only take 510 minutes, but allow you to grow across various social media channels. As a result. There's one final thing I
want to tell you though. All of these ideas can be posted as pins on Pinterest. And that's how you can
grow on Pinterest as well. Every single post on whatever social media
platform you may create. Let's add them as a pin
to your Pinterest board. So they're just some very simple ways that you can actually repurpose your content because
you've done the hard work, but this is going to streamline your entire social media
strategy because it allows you to effectively
repurpose all of your content, get the most out of it, and put it across all of the various social
media platforms, not just the main one
you've created it for, which is obviously
very, very helpful.
7. Module 6: Should You Use Post Schedulers?: Now the next thing I
want to talk about when it comes to streamlining your content creation
strategy is post scheduling. Now this is something
that is tossed around as to whether
is it a good idea, is it not a good idea? So rather than go through and show you how to
share your content, because you can look
at that online. You can use if
you're on Instagram, instagram Creator Studio, if you want to schedule
across various platforms, you can use platforms
such as Trello or later. They're all fantastic if
you want to use them, look up YouTube tutorials. Today, I wanted to
discuss a few things, the positives and negatives of post scheduling so that
you can make the decision for yourself as to whether you want to do this in
order to help save time for your business or if
it's something that you're willing to take the hit
on not post schedule. And I spent a little
bit more time on your content
creation strategy. So any further ado, let's dive into the iPad again, walk through some positives and negatives of post
scheduling. So positives. And to be honest, you can counteract some
of the negatives, but we're talking about
that in a minute. So positives of post scheduling. Obviously, number
one, organization. When I create my content
for social media, I batch create my content. So I will sit down on a
single day of the week and create all of my content that I need to create for
the following week. It's that simple and
that's simply saved me so much time because
I get into a flow state. I get into the content
creation process and I just don't
stop until I'm done. If I were to create a piece
of content every single day, it's stopping and
starting and you don't get into that flow state
and it takes a far longer. So I can create on
it in a single day, seven days worth of content in an hour, an hour and a half. But alternatively, if I were to do and create a piece of
content every single day, on the day of posting, it probably took me
about an hour each time because I just don't get
into it quick enough. So batch create all my
content on a single day. So when it comes to
scheduling that content, if I just do it all
on the same day, once I've created all seven, I'm very organized for the week. I know that I have a post going live every single day
because I've just created seven pieces of
content and then showed you each one piece of content
for each day of the week. Bang, done, I'm organized and I don't have to
think about it again. That's it. I know it's going to
post every single day. So if one day I'm really, really busy and don't actually
get around to looking at my Instagram or whatever
social media platform I scheduled that
piece of content for. It's fine because I still
know I've posted and kept consistent with
my posting schedule. So organization is
obviously incredibly, incredibly vital
when it comes to content creation strategy
because you want to stay consistent
with that posting. Schedule. Scheduling
your content beforehand whilst you've, once you've just
finished creating is a great way to just
stay organized. It's because it allows you
to keep up your consistency. Fantastic. Now, in
relation to consistency, it allows you to have
consistent post times. Because when you are
using the schedulers, it allows you to select
a time in which you want that piece of content
to actually go live. And obviously, if you
can get your audience into the routine of coming
onto Instagram or Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, or TikTok, whatever content
platform you may post on. If you can get them into
the habit of coming onto this platform or x time every single day
because they know you will be posting at that
time every single day. Fantastic, because that's
going to help increase your engagement rate
initially on that post, which obviously is going to
help increase the chances of that platform pushing it
out to a wider audience. Whether that'd be on
the Explore page, the For You page, the suggested tab, you name it. Because of the initial
engagement you're getting, the platforms,
look at it and go, hey, this is doing really well. And that's all because
people know you post at roughly that time
every single day I'm finding a good time is gonna
be different for everyone. You have to test various
different times, but once you found it and you can post it that time
every single day because you set a scheduler to post at that time
every single day, the initial engagement rate
on your content is going to increase because people are gonna be coming back
on the platform to see your piece of content because they know you are posting at that time
every single day. So allows you to have
consistent post times. And then finally,
it does save time. Because you are in
that flow state of the content creation
process and you are scheduling all
of your pieces of content is going to be far easier to just
put them all up and do it at that moment
than every single day go, I'll go and I need to post
a piece of content today. Let me go sit down, find the piece of content in my camera roll or find the
piece of content on my laptop. Upload it, add the caption at the location and my
hashtags, you name it, you have it all there ready, done, just get it in the
scheduler, put it out. It's going to save time. And as I said at the very beginning
with the organization, you don't have to think
about it in your day. You know, it's going to
upload every single time. So you just get on with whatever you're doing
and you don't it doesn't matter if you've got
a full day of meetings or sales calls or actually delivering for your clients can just do because you know
your content is scheduled, it's gonna go up your social
media sorted for today. Don't worry about it. So there are some positives. Negatives. Unfortunately,
sometimes tech fails. You might get a
notification saying, Oh, the scheduler has failed to push your piece
of content today, or it might not have worked, or you might have scheduled
it for the wrong day, or you might have
just not ticked a little box which stopped
it from doing something and it happens that could
ruin your consistency. And if you forget to
do it multiple times, you could go days without
posting and not realizing because you haven't been on
the platform because she thought you said to
them When you hadn't, she can't always
rely on technology. So if you are very
attentive when you're actually scheduling the
content and you know, you do everything right? Perfect. That's going to help.
Diminished amount of mistakes you make and the
amount the tech may fail. But you can't rely on
it every single time because sometimes it
might not post for you. You can't rely on it 100%
because that's technology. Yes, things are getting better, but there are still
issues sometimes. So if you want to stay 100% consistent and you know that you're going to post
every single day yourself. That's obviously a way you
can ensure that reliability more because it's you
doing it and it's down to you and then
you can trust you. You can blame yourself for the mistake rather
than the tech. And then mistake number two
or negative number two, I should say, it might be a
little bit less authentic. If you're trying to
build a loyal audience, you need to respond to
them in the moment. And that if you posted it at the same time,
every single day, when you upload that
piece of content, obviously that's
when you're gonna get that burst of engagement. If people comment on
your posts all the time, that's going to be
when they comment. If you share that piece of content and you're not on
the platform at the time, then it's unlikely
that you're going to be there to respond to these
comments in the moment. So it's less authentic
on your behalf. And people might not
trust you as much or build that strong
relationship with you because you aren't replying
to them and you aren't engaging or replying
to your own audience. But if you're there
and uploading the piece of content yourself, you can just give
yourself 30 minutes after every time you upload to respond to comments or engage
in certain conversations. To ensure you are
building the relationship you want to be building
with your audience, which is obviously going
to help you over time. But alternatively, if you know your posting schedule
to upload at a certain time every single day, you can eliminate both of these
negatives because you can see my post has failed
to upload today. Let me just quickly
upload it myself to avoid missing the
day or if you know, it's going to post at 11:00 AM every single
day, you know, hey, let me be on my phone
or on my laptop at 11 o'clock to engage with my community at this
time because I know when this piece of engagement
is going to be my highest, the only time where these two
negatives will always stand is when you don't have
the time to be on the platform or you're too busy, or you simply forget. So yes, they can
be canceled out. But it is something
to be considered. So considering these things right here that we've mentioned, decide whether you want
to use a post scheduler. Yes, using one will
save you time. And this is what this
class is all about. But in my opinion,
they're not essential. Let's put it that way. So push scheduling,
decide for yourself.
8. Module 7: Analysing Content Performance: Next thing I want to talk about, and this is something
that comes over time, something that you're
going to have to adapt to, something that you're
going to learn to do over time and get
better over time. And that is analyzing the
content you have created in order to influence
the content that you're going to
create in the future. And if you're new to whatever platform
you may be posting on, then this is something that you're gonna be doing
further down the line. So it's good to know about,
but not necessarily something you can do now because
you haven't created any content to
analyze or haven't got the data to look at. So as a content creator, you obviously want to
be creating content. You know your audience wants to see or that your
audience finds value in. You're gonna be able to see that determined by the
data or the value of the metrics that the posts show as to how well your audience has reciprocated
that piece of content. So for the sake of simplicity and from
my experience alone, I'm gonna be talking through the different Instagram
engagement types that you need to be looking at in order to then analyse and react to create
your future content. So obviously with Instagram,
it's very simple. We have likes, we have comments, we have shares, we have Saves. But then some little
additional ones we can look at if we want to, is our engagement rate overall. The overreach of the post. We can have website clicks. You can simply have follows. Those are just a few
example the metrics you can look at and obviously
they are all going to tell you different things. And that's what you need to understand as a content creator. So your likes and your comments, likes is simply people
are going to come across it and if they like
the piece of content, they're going to, they're
going to double-tap. They're going to let
you know that, yeah, I enjoyed this, this was good. But likes arguably are probably one of the
least important. Doesn't really tell
you that much. Because some people really like your content
but don't like it. So I wouldn't worry too
much about that one. So we're not waiting until
about Babylon. Comments. On the other hand, now we're getting to the
important stuff. Comments, conversations. Did your piece of content start? Conversations within the
industry didn't make waves, did it actually get
people interested enough where they
asked you a question or did you then have a bit of correspondence in the comment
section with them and build a little bit more
of a relationship with that person where you provided
them with fervor value. It allows you took continue to prove your expertise
and provide further value. Or simply see whether somebody enjoyed that piece
of content because they genuinely told you
they did whatever they disagreed or had
some further thoughts. And it's just a
great way to build the community around
your content. Comments. If you'd get more of them gray or as long as they're
good comments, of course, you don't want people
roasting you or telling you that your piece
of content was rubbish. Now, shares, shares
imply that your piece of content was good
enough for everybody else in their followers
to see as well. If your piece of
content is being shared by hundreds of
people. Fantastic. Because not only is that
more organic reach is telling you that this
piece of content was so valuable that these individuals actually wanted to share it
with all of their followers. Also, it's not only is it benefiting you from
the organic reach, it gives you great
insight as to say, Hey, look, this was
great for everyone. This applied to so many different people
and so many people resonated with it that they wanted to share
with more people. And says, resonates here. And then I'm gonna
put high values also. And saves is another one
of my favorite ones. Because the good thing about
say if is it tells you that that piece of content you've just created
was so valuable, so insightful, So
mindset shifting. The somebody is been willing
to save it because they want to refer back to
it at a later date. They don't want to
just scroll through and look at it once
and that's it. They may have double-tap,
like if they save it. That means it was so
valuable to them that they think they're going
to go back and read, consume that piece of
content in the future. So again, we're
going to put value, I'm going to put
re, consumption. But to be honest, this is
also going to depend highly on the outcome you wanted
for that piece of content. So the amount of engagement you go on that piece of content may not matter to you
whatsoever because it may not have been an engagement
you are going for. You may have wanted
to make product sells or generate leads or get DMs sent
from these people. That is another good
one that it tells you haven't written that
down there, here. Dms. But hey, look, you're
going to get conversions. You wanted to drive
people to your website. These don't really
matter to you. What really matters is this
one here because you wanted that piece of content to
drive website clicks. So you may get low engagement. But if you get incredibly high website clicks, it
doesn't matter. That's all you wanted from
that piece of content. Or if you wanted to generate DMs from that piece of content. Fantastic, as long as
the dm's are high. Piece of contents perform well. So you have to look
at every piece of content individually
depending on the outcome you wanted
it to achieve to determine its
overall performance. And then as the content creator,
you need to look at it, analyze the metrics and go, hey, look, that one
didn't perform well. My audience clearly didn't reciprocate well to
that and they didn't look at it, they didn't like it. I went through as much of that. But you may see certain
topics coming up time and time again that get really
good engagement rates or drive really good click-through
rates to your website or generate a lot
of conversations in the DMs and you can go, okay, this one, on the other hand, performed
incredibly well. What was it about this piece of content that made it
performed incredibly well? And you can then
delve even deeper. And that's how then
you can start adapting your future content to perform similarly to the best-performing content
you've already posted. So essentially you do a
**** of a lot more of what works and **** of a lot
less of what doesn't. That is what being a content
creator is about practicing, posting, analyzing, improving,
and repeating the process. Very, very simple. So that's it. That is how you are analyzing
your current content to then influence how you
create your future content.
9. Conclusion and Class Project: That does actually wrap up
today's Skillshare class. I just wanted to thank
you all for tuning in. And I do really hope you found some value from what
you've listened to today. But for your class project, I'm actually gonna make
it pretty simple for you guys because I actually
do want you to take action. I've come across some Skillshare classes in the past where people's clothes projects
have been really complicated and people
just haven't taken action. But from this, all I
want you to do is go out and write a list
of 30 content ideas. So go back to module one
and recap on the ways that I taught you how to come up with endless content ideas. I want you to plan
30 content ideas. So you've got 30
days of content for the upcoming month and you can post daily every single day. You don't have an excuse. And then from that you can
then obviously go ahead and create those 30
pieces of content. But having those ideas
in the first place is what's going to
really kick start this content creation
journey if you haven't already and help you maintain
that consistency over time. So use the methods
to come up with content ideas for your brand, for your niche, and
write down 30 for me. And you can share those
content ideas with the rest of the students by posting that
in the project section. Because if you did
enjoy the Scotia class, my name, as I said,
was eaten bridge. I'm host of the social media
marketing school podcast. There are actually over
320 podcast episodes all about social
media marketing. So if you enjoyed what
you've heard today, you can go over to listen to
the podcast and consume way more social media
marketing content is on pretty much all
podcast platforms. Apple, Spotify,
Google, you name it. So head over there typing Social Media Marketing
School and you will find me. But if you've got
any questions with regards to anything
that I've mentioned, please feel free to reach
out to me on Instagram. My handle is the ethan bridge, or you can simply leave
a discussion point in the Skillshare section
below. But that's it. That does wrap up today's
Skillshare class. Thank you so, so
much for tuning in. And guys, honestly feel free to tune into my
other classes as well. There's tons of other
content with regards to social media marketing,
copywriting, Instagram, engagement
strategies, you name it, so check them out as well. And I'm sure you'll be satisfied with what
you've come across. But once again, thank
you all for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed.
Ethan Bridge, Social Media Marketing Coach
