Wasting Time on Social? 3 Steps To Batching Social Media Content
Are you wasting time every week creating content for Instagram, Instagram Stories, Facebook, or even YouTube? Would you rather save your energy, time and money week after week? Batching content for social media is key!
Danielle Welch shares 3 steps to batching content. She also shares cool tools to help you batch. Danielle is a social media coach and digital marketing strategist and she educates small businesses and entrepreneurs how to take ownership over their marketing strategies…and batching content is one of those strategies.
Connect with Danielle:
Facebook.com/danielle.bridgecd
http://www.socialwithdanielle.com/guide (FREE GUIDE)
Full transcription available at the bottom of this blog post
Before you go, I’d love to connect with you and give you some gifts to help you grow your online presence!
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Full Transcription:
Hey ladies. Welcome back today. I have a great guest on the show. Danielle Welch is in the house. She is a social media coach and digital marketing strategist, and she educates a small businesses and entrepreneurs how to take ownership over their marketing strategies and batching content is one of those strategies. If you want to save time and batch content successfully, this episode is for you.
Hi, Danielle. Welcome to the show.
Hello. Thank you so much for having me here. Thank you. And I’m glad you’re here now, today. I know we’re chatting about batching content, but before we dive in Danielle, tell us more about you and your business. Okay, so I’ll take it back just a few years back to 2013. So that’s when I got my introduction into the digital marketing world, I was actually brought into a major agency. If I said their name, you would know them because they’ve actually been around for like over a hundred years. They were one of the original phone book companies, and they obviously changed over the years, but I was brought into that organization as a marketing consultant. And I primarily focused on working with local small businesses in transitioning them from traditional media to digital media. So I got my foot in the industry there, um, worked there for about four years and I really fell in love with like local small businesses.
And when I say local small business, I mean like the people that you would use a phone book to find, you know, the local chiropractor or the local plumber or restaurant or you name it. Right. And I fell in love with that type of business and working with them because of their stories. Right? And there’s, most of them are very family oriented and a lot of their values lined up with mine. So working in that agency, falling in love with small businesses. I started to kind of advocate for them. I noticed that a lot of small businesses were heavily educated on the world of digital marketing. So they didn’t always know what they needed right. When it came to marketing their businesses, especially online. And in that time, 2013, 2014, that’s when Facebook really took off in the business space. Right. And all of these apps that people were using where like, Oh my gosh, like, should I be there?
But I don’t want it. Like, I don’t even internet. It was a lot of things that I would hear from these business owners. Like I don’t even know how to answer that. And so, so I ended up transitioning out of working for the agency for various, for various different reasons. Um, but that’s when I decided, you know, I feel like there needs to be representation for these local small businesses. And so I decided to start my company bridge consulting in design and the summer of 2018. And I primarily focused on website design at first, because websites are something that you buy at once and, you know, you can buy it once. And for local small businesses in a town of 20,000 people, they don’t need a lot, right. A bells and whistles, but there were agencies out there charging tens of thousands of dollars. And I was like, you know what?
I think these businesses can get something that is a little bit more affordable to started with website design. And I quickly got more requests for social media than website design. Cause they were like, okay, I’ve got this website, but it’s not doing anything for my business. Right. Remember there’s a lack of education. Like they didn’t understand that a website doesn’t just mean the phone starts ringing. You know? So then it was more like, can you help me with my social media? And I very quickly transitioned to doing social media management, primarily content management for local small businesses. And that is grown into, um, now my business services, um, a couple dozen different small businesses. And it’s not a lot because as a mom preneur, it’s just me, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got virtual assistants and things like that, but it’s just me. And so I’ve had an opportunity to now expand into there’s a lot of small businesses that I want to reach, but I can’t do it all myself.
And instead of growing this massive agency, I instead want to empower small businesses to start to do some of the stuff themselves so that they can save themselves money, you know, every single month. So there’s kind of two components to the business where yes, I can work with people one on one, but I’m more passionate about giving people in business owners, specifically the tools that they need to do their own social media so they can save time. They can save money and then they can feel educated and making even grander decisions for their business. And so that’s kind of where we’re at today.
Well, that’s really cool. And I love that and I love what you’re doing. So let’s dive into our topic today. We’re focusing really on content. What is batching content for social media
So that your content is the concept or philosophy. Like I hear a lot of people get philosophical about this, but it’s the, it’s the concept of ultimately taking an entire week or months worth of social media content and really condensing that creation and scheduling and planning time into a one set block of time instead of piecing things together throughout the month. And I’ll kind of explain it in this capacity, you know, for me and my business, just as an example, when I first got my business started, I was just every time in the middle of the day, I was inspired by something. I’d go make a post. Right. And that one post like finding the perfect graphic writing, the perfect caption, it could take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to get that done because of the other distractions that kind of come up when you’re creating content or you’re like, well, is that exactly what I want it to look like or say, and you kind of start to overanalyze things.
And so if you take 30 minutes to an hour, one time, um, per day, and so let’s say one day per week or every day per week, that’s seven hours max in a week that you’re probably creating content. Right. Um, the issue with that is that seven hours. So 49 to 50 hours in a month of creating social media content on a daily basis, or what I teach is with batching content, you have the ability to take that amount of time and actually condense it into like maybe one day for an entire week, because what happens when you do that is you can set up hour to two hours and you can just do a massive brain dump. Right? And you can just, every idea you it’s like I tell people, start to write one or two ideas of what you want to post about. And I promise you, like, you won’t be able to start, stop writing. You know, if you’re like a hand writer, like I am the writer’s cramp kicks in about 20 minutes later because you’ve got all these topics down or typing it out. And then, so it’s a matter of taking all of that work and kind of condensing it into a shorter timeframe. And what that does is it ultimately it yields the results of less time put into your social media content throughout the month, which is when you save time, you’re saving money.
I’m a huge fan of batching content for social media. And I think as a mompreneur, it’s so important for us to learn the skill and it does take time to learn it. I think in the beginning, a lot of money
We’ll be overwhelmed with the concept of batching, but once you practice it over and over, it becomes so much easier. So who can batch
Content? Like what types of businesses are we talking about?
So this is a question I love to talk about because I think there’s this misconception that you have to have a lot of different things to talk about in order to batch your content. And that’s not really the purpose. The purpose is, do you want to save time? Right? I was thinking about your, your audience specifically, Alison as mompreneurs, like just to put this as an example, any type of business really falls into this, but it’s really somebody who can create content that is engaging content that is informative or educational content that is promotional, um, or service maybe, or talking about how you can help your ideal customer. Anybody that can come up with content that can fit those three categories, really bashing content is four. So it’s kind of a trick question into saying like batching content is for everybody. And specifically the mom manure the solo business owner, the person who wears all the hats in the business, batching content can be your literal best friend, because it gives you the ability to have more time and more freedom back into your day to day.
It’s like for me, I just booked gymnastics class for my four year old daughter starting on Friday. The last thing that I want to have to think about on Friday as I’m getting ready for her first day of gymnastics and getting a one-year-old ready to sit there in a gym for an hour and I can’t let her touch anything because you know, she’s not supposed to be there anyways. It’s like the last thing I want to think about is like, Oh shoot, I also need to make a social media post today. And so it it’s really for anybody who, um, is wanting to save time and maybe even work ahead, I went on vacation this weekend and it was like, I didn’t have to create any content for Thursday through today because I did it ahead of time, you know? And it just frees you up. You know,
Now here’s the ultimate question. Cause I have a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening. What are the key elements or steps to batching content.
Okay. Key elements. Um, and I’m a list person. So I’ll give it in the form of a list. Um, number one, um, planning. So setting time aside to plan out what content you want to create for, let’s say the next month and how you can look at planning. You can break that down is one dot a, okay. Is, do you have any special sales or events coming up in your business in the next month? If so, you need to Mark those dates on a calendar. So you know, that, that is the day let’s say you’re going to run a sale on Thursday, you know, August 25th or whatever that Thursday might be. Then you need to promote ahead of time for that. Right? So once you get your key dates in the calendar, then you can work all the rest of the content around that. So planning comes first one dot B could be like planning what your topics are going to be or the captions.
Okay. So you do planning that’s number one. Number two is creating now there’s this really just kind of depends on the business type. I think if your business is more visually or product driven, you might want to start with creating your visuals first. But if your business is more service based or inform informational, then maybe you want to start with creating your captions. First. I kind of recommend like you figure out what works best for your business, but creating is about writing your captions and creating your graphics and then step number three. So we’ve got number one is planning then creating and then scheduling. And then in the scheduling piece, I recommend inside of my mini course, it’s the essential social media tool kit, a couple of different tools that I have found to be very useful for my idol audience, which is again, local small businesses who they really are not tech savvy.
So I’ve, I’ve introduced like the simplest of apps to use. And that’s, that’s um, not Trello. Trello is for planning. I use creator studio inside of Facebook cause it’s free and it’s easy to follow and it’s one place for Instagram and Facebook. But I also recommend buffer because you can have three accounts for free on their platform. Those are the two scheduling tools. Now there are a lot of tools out there. And I know that plan only is something that I’m actually going to start to look into because I’ve heard it talked about a lot on your podcast, your Alison, but there’s so many scheduling tools that can be used, but it’s planning, creating, and then scheduling. I feel like if you do that flow and that process an hour for planning an hour to two hours max for creating and then 30 minutes scheduling, cause everything’s ready to go into the apps. You can create an entire months of content. One piece of content every day for 30 days, I think in less than four hours,
How you broke that down into three pieces. Because when we talk about batching content and you hear it all the time from entrepreneurs and coaches out there on social media, like, Oh, you need to batch your content. But to think about that as a mompreneur when you have so many other things going on in your life, it’s almost overwhelming. So I love how you break that down. And you know, our listeners like really, you can take planning one day, you can create the next day. And then the third day you can do all the scheduling. So it’s not like it all has to be done in one day. You can certainly break that up in your week. And what I love about your concept of planning, creating, and scheduling, you can take that skillset. And we talked about social media today, but you can also start applying that to other things in your business, like your email campaigns, you know, a lot of that stuff. And then you also talked about creator studio and buffer. I’ve never used buffer. I’m a fan of plantarly I’ve been using that for years, but I do love creator studio as well, because that is so cool. How you can work on your Facebook posts and your Instagram posts all in one platform. So it’s really, really cool.
Yeah. If I can touch on creator studio for people that are looking to, for me, when I started my business, I had to keep my overhead low, you know, like there’s so many flashy tools out there. Like I won’t name some of them because I don’t use them anymore. But when I found that Facebook came out with creator studio, it’s got an analytics tool inside of it. It can help you to see like which posts performed better, which videos perform better, like everything that you need for Facebook and Instagram in one place. I think it’s a great way that can learn about your contents, um, performance as well. So I’m a huge fan of that. It’s also free and I’m a bargain shopper. So I like free, um, as long as it’s high value. So that’s awesome. So your information today was on point, uh, batching content, number one, we’re saving time.
And then with the tools that you gave us, we’re also saving money. So I know the mompreneurs who are listening is going to love this information. So Danielle share with us, where can we connect with you on social media? Okay. So I’m the most active, um, on my Facebook. So, um, my Facebook is just Danielle Welch, bridge consulting, and design. I do have a free Facebook community where I do a lot of live trainings. Um, I’m very active in there. Um, I know that a lot of mompreneurs though are extremely active on Instagram, so they can find me on Instagram at Danielle dot bridge CD. Those are the two places, um, that I am the most active and I love to do a lot of live trainings. Um, the biggest reason behind that is, is again, it goes to my company’s values of just empowering and educating people, right? So that they can utilize the, in grow their businesses as the greatest capacity without feeling that overwhelmed. Right? So I do a lot of free trainings. Those are the two best platforms for people to reach me. Super cool. And I will make sure that all of your information is in the show notes. And Danielle, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you so much, Alison. I appreciate it. Love what you’re doing, love the impact that you’re having with mompreneurs. So I’m excited to keep listening as well. Thank you.
Thank you for tuning in today. If you love today’s episode, then please head over to iTunes, social media for mompreneurs and leave a review. Your review helps grow the show and don’t forget head to boss, lady, and sweatpants.com to grab all my freebies and hang out with me on Instagram at Alison Shoals. I’ll see you soon.
