Content, like so many things, sounds big and scary when you first think about it for your small business. I hear this a lot from clients – ‘but what should I post? I don’t really have any content!’
Spoiler alert: you have all the content you are ever going to need in your business already. Whatever it is that you do, your audience are going to want to know about it. Small businesses thrive when they share what is going on with them, the highs, the lows, the new products, the office cat, once you get head around content you’ll have more than you can ever post!
Start today – Get your content sorted!
But if you don’t know where to start then that doesn’t make you feel much better.
So, let’s get started! What are you working on today? How would you share that on your social channels? A quick description of your day would work well as a tweet. Instagram is clearly all about the visuals, can you take some pics throughout your day to use? A flatlay of your desk, the venue of your next meeting, a boomerang of a new product.
Don’t worry too much about posting in real time to start with. That means, just take the pictures and videos when you get a chance, don’t worry about posting them at the same time.
I often take pics throughout my day, note down ideas for captions, scribble things down while they’re in my head. Then I make time to sit down and go through them, to create the content by making them into something that works for my social channels. I’ll put filters on my flatlay, write a caption and post it, pop that boomerang on Stories, take this caption and write it up into a blog post.
Work that Workflow
To start with, go with what is feeling easiest to achieve. If taking and posting pics is a good and easy workflow for you, then focus on that, don’t try to force writing a blog post a week and then worry that you’ve not done it. Explore what you’re enjoying and see how you can build on that going forward. Could your caption make the basis for your next blog post? Great, then that’s half of it written already.
Experiment. Take loads of pictures, boomerangs, videos, write up your notes. See what you’ve got and where it might work best. Then see what your audience think. They’ll show you what they like best and you can then start to explore that a bit more. Try out new features that you’ve not played with before – gifs on your Instagram Stories, tagging other local businesses in your posts, sharing Stories that you are mention in to your own Stories. Until you’ve given these things a go, it is hard to know what they will look like or decide whether you like them.
Build it and they will come
Once you’ve had a play around you will start to find what works for you. It might be that taking photos and video as you go along and then spending 10 mins at the start of each day posting from what you’ve got. It might be that you have a commute you can use to get things shared. Or you might want to post things straight away.
You can also use a scheduling tool, something like Buffer is great to start out with and will really grow with you. Scheduling tools help you by letting you write and create posts for all your social media channels, but then you can decide when they go out. So you can write four or five tweets at a time, and schedule them to go out one a day over the week. Or you can put together a post about an event and make sure it goes out during the event, or afterwards as a follow up.
Repurpose with Purpose
Repurposing content is just a way of saying that you can use content in many different ways. If you’ve written a long proposal for a client, would part of that make a great blog post, or whitepaper-type download for your website? If you’ve taken photos throughout the month, can you use them in an email to your customers to show them the highlights they might have missed out on?
Don’t think that just because you have produced something with a specific project or goal in mind that it might not be useful again elsewhere. Even events can be shared again – hashtags that celebrate ‘Throwback Thursday’ encourage you to share things all over again, this time with the benefit of hindsight!
There are so many challenges to social media, so let’s not make content one of them. Your small business is great, and showing that off doesn’t need you to start from scratch, take a look around you and find the content that’s already there.
That’s so much for reading my post! If you liked it then do share it, wherever you share your own content! Find out more about working with me, and get in touch to chat about your next project.
