Creating Killer Content for Social Media
The struggle to come up with content for social media is real and you face this reality everyday. Being aware of the need to stand out among the crowd is something that you instinctively get but how do you come up with enough content to be consistent in a face-paced social media world?
Truthfully, the content is not very difficult to access – you just need to know where to look. My suggestion, look at what you’ve already done. Here are a few suggestions of what I mean.
Creating Content for Social Media from Blog Posts
If you run a blog you most likely have several dozen posts which are already packaged and finished. Have you gone through these completed works and extracted every last bit of social media content from each of them?
Look for short snippets of text that carry the main idea of the main content without requiring the entire post. Once you find these short snippets use a tool like Spruce or Pablo to turn them into shareable images.
Creating Content for Social Media from Video Clips
Have you recorded any videos (interviews, broadcasts, trainings) that you can steal clips from?
Every other week I hold a Google On Air show called #dactalk which provides young entrepreneurs with a look into the successes and failures of entrepreneurs pursuing their dreams. The entire conversation is recorded and afterwards I break up each episode into small clips. From the one large video I am able to extract upwards of 10-12 shorter clips.
Video is so rich and not only can individual clips serve as individual pieces of content but the dialogue can serve as the foundation for future blog posts.
Creating Content for Social Media from Social Media
Yep, that’s right! There are so many social media sites that you may contribute to it’s logical to ask what kind of cross posting could you do?
Recently I’ve been using Periscope to share idea on building an online business. These videos, once recorded, disappear into the abyss of Periscope – except, I can opt to have the video saved to my phone once it’s finished airing. I import these saved clips into my computer and then quickly edit them with an intro, an outro and cut out any irrelevant clips and then upload them to my website, various social media channels and YouTube.
Facebook and Twitter also provide the option to embed past posts onto a webpage – meaning that the past content you’ve created could live forever on your website. Could you do a weekly post of most popular Facebook content, embedding Facebook posts into the entry and then shoot that out on Social Media?
The Ultimate Goal is Scaling Your Content
It’s unrealistic to think you can create 100% organic content multiple times a week. Maybe if you have 1-2 people who’s role is 100% content creation you could accomplish that but I am almost certain that you do not have that luxury. The next best (and quite honestly, wisest) approach is to stretch the content you have. Get as much use out of everything you do and you’ll find you have much more content available than you ever imagined.
