We understand how frustrating and time consuming it can be to plan content and have it ready to be posted the next day. An easy solution to this is content batching! A practice that will help you plan a large amount of quality content in a short time thereby saving you precious time and peace of mind! Keep reading for 6 Tips on Content Batching.
1.How do I get started on content batching?
The first thing you need to do in order to start content batching is to get yourself a good reliable planner to stew your ideas. After all, the process of content batching is about coming up with as many good ideas as possible. In addition, it’s encouraged to have a concrete plan for what your content demands and needs are. Think about what you need most… story templates, posts, infographics, captions, poll ideas etc. to have a clear list of your target content.
2.Planning Session
A great tip to start your planning session for content is to set a timer for 15 to 20 minutes. Setting a timer will help you brainstorm in a focused environment for a given amount of time. At this stage, don’t limit yourself. Furthermore, write down anything you can think of, don’t stress about getting a bit off topic as you will regroup and organize your ideas in the next steps!
3.Connecting Ideas and Regrouping
Once you have a list of brainstormed ideas all written down, go over them and try to categorize similar ideas together into “content buckets.” Keep in mind the audience you are aiming to target with your media, with that set in stone, you will have a much easier time organizing ideas into larger units and don’t worry about a few stragglers! You can bank on your lone ideas and save them for later, you might end up using them at some point and as you are grouping content ideas, try not to close your creative side up as you might come up with more ideas as you organize!
4.Planning and Creating an Outline
Once you have a solid list of ideas that you feel confident about moving forward with, take a thorough look at it and see how you can further organize, these are a few suggestions to consider:
-
Do you have ideas that can be grouped into a series?
-
Is there a specific order you would like to present your content in?
-
Do you need other collaborative efforts?
After you feel confident about moving forward with your fully adjusted, edited and organized ideas, start working on the next step which is creating an outline and transferring your ideas to a calendar. Consider first how often you will post because the key to unlocking a valuable and genuine audience is through providing them with consistent and quality content. The actual calendar organization of your content is entirely up to you! A few tips are to consider using a separate calendar for your content batching work, this will help ensure that all of your ideas are written down clearly and you can have additional points including when content goes live, who might need to be contacted, analytics etc. written down to help.
5.Content Creation
Typical content creation includes creating graphics, sourcing images, writing captions, finding hashtags and so much more. Although these tasks seem ordinary and quick, they can actually be quite time consuming so we strongly encourage you to allocate some time (whenever you are free or can!) just for content creation. Much like the initial timed brainstorming session, a dedicated time slot for this will allow you to just create content in a focused environment and trust us when we say, your future self will thank you for it!
6.Scheduling and Final Edits!
Once you have finished planning and creating all of your content, all you have to do is schedule it to go up! Much like creating content in advance is helpful, scheduling content ahead of time is even more helpful as it allows you to put everything in line to go live at one time, which saves you a lot! You can always schedule in advance directly on the platform such as Facebook which allows you to pre schedule content across itself and Instagram or, you can use external but approved programs (to protect your accounts!) to schedule content across an array of social media platforms. Such programs include Later or Facebook Creator Studio.
We hope you found these 6 Tips on Content Batching useful. Now that you are equipped with the right tools to navigate content batching, feel free to expand and discover more as you go along!