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You’ve become a content creator… Now what?
Creating your own content can be liberating and exciting. It’s awesome to start sending your work out into the world, but can lead to a feeling of deflation if you’re not getting the traction you’d like.
The answer: social media.
Social media is a constantly moving machine that must be fed with content in order to grow consistently over time. If you neglect your feeds, or are inconsistent with your posting, it’s harder to market your content to your audience and retain loyal followers. Building your presence on social media directly leads to converting more people into followers and clients in the future.
So, how do I do that?
Content creation workflows help to link your social media accounts together and tailor your content for each site. If you’re wondering ‘what next?’, here are 5 workflows to implement as a creator to help your social media thrive and give your content the spotlight it deserves!
1. Plan Your Content
Planning ahead is key to keeping consistent in content creation. Generally, it’s considered good practice to plan a month’s worth of content in advance. You can get inspiration for your content from the time of year – are there any events or holidays coming up? – or from the topic you cover – are you hoping to educate your audience?
Overall, what message or value do you want to bring to your audience and potential new followers? Plan your posts around these values.
2. Create Video Content
With the rise of TikTok and the continuing popularity of YouTube, videos are a solid way to present your content. I suggest that you start with a long-form video – for example, a video on YouTube about SEO. From there, you can pull out highlight points and create shorter clips to spread across social media, with a link to the long video.
The smaller clips should in turn generate interest (and clicks!) in the full version of the video.
3. Have Systems in Place to Help You with Live Content
Live streaming anything from gaming to current events has become an extremely popular way for people to deliver content. It can help to maintain your audience by letting them connect directly to you.
However, a downside of being live is that there will always be unforeseen hiccups with technology (audio dropping out, video glitching), the scenery (people interrupting, loud noises), and going off on tangents about something unrelated. In order to keep your content accessible and helpful, you should have systems in place to stop the main points from sinking into the general chaos of a livestream.
As an example: You can highlight points in your stream that you’d like to refer to. I use an Elgato Stream Deck with hot keys to mark these points and provide them as Video On Demand (VOD). Not only does this make sure content is accessible after the stream, it also helps your audience to find what they’re looking for without having to scrub through lots of other information.
Once you’ve marked your main points, be sure to watch them back and see if they hold enough value to share. Save your content and back up the main points for editing. Hate editing? Hire a video editor (my contact page is here, juuuust saying!).
4. It’s Never Too Early to Work with Brands
There’s a misconception among content creators that you have to reach a certain number of followers or have a verified account in order to work with brands or make sponsored content. This isn’t true at all – if your following is organic and interactive you will reach more people than someone with a million bots. Reach out to companies in your niche and ask for sponsorships, affiliate links, or products. Eventually you can even collaborate and create your own products!
5. Have Fun and Be Passionate
The most important thing of all to remember as a content creator is to enjoy what you do. It can often feel quite mechanical to do all of the behind the scenes work that goes into content creation, so you have to have that initial passion for your content, or you will burn out super quickly. Find that spark that lights you up inside!
These 5 workflow tips are a good starting point for getting your content out there. Hate social media and would like a hand? There are many people who can help you (including me *wink wink*).
If you found this article helpful, I encourage you to join my free monthly newsletter. In it, we talk about content creation in general, as well as tips on video editing for beginners.
See you next time!
Ashley