When I first started on my journey in social media, it was back in April of 2010 when I worked for the Beer Store. That’s a company here in Ontario that sells beer for the major breweries. The union for the Beer Store, UFCW has a charity partner, The Leukemia Society of Canada.
All over Canada they raise money in different ways to help leukemia research and a few years prior to 2010, they created a bottle drive with the Beer Store to raise money. In time this had become the largest bottle drive in the world.
As the bottle drive started I was encouraged by my manager at the time to become a “Team Captainâ€. That meant I would be in charge of my stores efforts and make sure we had volunteers the weekend the bottle drive was hosted.
The first couple years were small and simple, in those first couple years I relied on the marketing department of the Beer Store to promote the event and I made sure to have our store ready.
A couple years had passed and I knew we could do better so I teamed up with a fellow manager so we could combine our efforts. Working together to promote the events we had at each other’s store as well as our district would help raise a lot more money than the two of us would competing.
This was done in many ways including using my contacts with the local media to set up radio and TV interviews. In 2010 however, I knew we could do even better so I created a Twitter account. Having no real marketing background I had to learn on the fly as we tried to promote each event. The following year, I created a Facebook Page and then an Instagram account the year after that.
There was no plan or strategy to how I used these platforms other than just posting and tweeting as we went. Doing that, I hoped we would get people to show up and attend our events. Even though I had no strategy, with the existing marketing plan that was already in place through the Beer Store it worked out for the best.
Over time I was able to learn how the use of storytelling worked in our favor and that having a plan in place with clear goals went a long way in reaching a bigger audience. This is something that I am grateful for as I have taken what I learned back then as well as everything I have learned since to create Russtek and create newer, better strategies to help my clients grow.
Something I learned as I started Russtek and wished I had back when I was with the Beer Store supporting the Leukemia Society of Canada was batching my content so I wasn’t wasting so much time on social media and in turn helping others and working on the events.
If you’re just starting out or someone that is using social media on the fly to create content, I’m here to tell you there is a much better way. I see this a lot in the restaurant industry but it happens all over. You have a burst of inspiration and make sure you post about it. Or you have an offer or sale on a particular day and when you have time to step away from the tasks you have for the day, you post about it.
When doing this, there is no plan or structure to your social media and although you may get some reach, in the long term this will not work for your business. You need a strategy and a plan to create content that has clear goals.
When creating content, the first thing you will want to do is make sure you know who your audience is. Marketing to a large audience that may or may not be in your target market is wasting your time and it’s wasting your money. Once you know who you want to market to then coming up with a strategy is much easier.
One you know who your audience is and have strategy with a clear goal in mind it’s now time to start creating your content. Doing this you will want to remember two things, the 80/20 rule and the three E’s. This is where you are creating more content that provides value to your audience instead of just pitching them all of your offers. Second you’ll want to create content that first Educates your audience, second you will want to create content that is Entertaining and lastly you will want to create content that is Engaging.
As you create this content you will first want to plan it out and brainstorm the type of content you will be creating. This is where you come up with the type of content you want to publish, what topics you’re going to talk about and so on. Once you have this completed, you will want to make sure you do your research so that you can stand out as the true leader and an expert in your industry.
Lastly it’s time to create your content. When you’re doing that, batch all similar content together. Are you creating content with quotes? Are you creating funny and engaging content? Are you creating videos?
Creating all similar content is going to help you save an enormous amount of time and once you’re finished, will leave you with the time to work on what matters most to you.
Lastly you will want to schedule your content out to the platforms you’re on. You can use free tools like Creator Studio from Facebook or something like Hootsuite, TweetDeck or countless other platforms that work for what you need.
As you schedule your content out the one thing you need to remember is, once it’s scheduled you can NOT forget about it. A mistake that happens far too often is a business will schedule out it’s content on each social media platform and then forget about it.
To that I want to remind you that social media is a way to be social with your audience and a way for you to build relationships with your audience. After your content is scheduled make sure you have time set aside for engagement so that you can help your organic reach.
Hopefully this helps get you started but I wanted to take things one step further.
Currently I’m working on a few big projects that will help you with all of this and something that will be a game changer for you and your business. I have teased this before and because of that, I was going to stop promoting my social media bundle package so that wouldn’t conflict with what’s coming.
I wanted to make sure that after you read this blog, you had everything you needed to create content and have no issues or anything holding you back so for a very short time I will be keeping my social media bundle up and running.
What is that? That’s an offer I have to get you started. I’m giving you 30 Days of Social Media content for free! I also have a few other tools like the content calendars I use on a daily basis.
This means you will have content ideas at your fingertips and can skip your brainstorming step as well as the content calendars I use so you can easily plan out all of your content.
If you’re ready to take action and start saving time while creating your content, don’t wait! Click that button below and start by getting our 30 Days of Social Media Content!