How to Put Your Social Media on Autopilot

Do you feel like you…

• Spend a lot of time writing content daily and wish there were a faster way to do it?
• Struggle with staying motivated to plan and write your content?
• Need a more streamlined process for organizing your content strategy?

You’re in luck. Keep reading to find out the best tips and practices for automating your social media, ensuring that you have a consistent, value-driven presence without needing to spend more time than you have on it.

Pre-Plan with a Content Calendar

Truth: the cause of your stress, the lack of inspiration, and the amount of time you spend writing content all revolves around your process for writing it.

The solution? Using a content calendar and planning ahead.

Whether you want to divide your time up by…

• Spending 30 minutes each day writing
• Writing for an hour one day for the whole week
• Planning the entire month out in a few hours

This process will ensure that you get it done and quickly. If you tend to have busier days, it may work better for you to focus on the second or third option, as it’s easy to become inconsistent if you’re writing your content day-by-day and get caught up in meetings, deadlines, and projects.

SEE MORE: Social Media Content Calendar

Choose Your Tools

Long gone are the days where we have to do things manually and post in the moment (except for certain circumstances, of course). If you really want to save time, automation is the way to go. Some of our favorite tools include:

1. Scheduler: Hootsuite or Buffer
2. Trending Topics: Google Trends
3. Organization: Asana
4. Curated Content: Google Alerts
5. Graphic Design: Canva

Having a tool box full of resources that you can turn to when planning your content will make your content that much more engaging, impactful, and valuable.

Leverage the ⅓ Social Media Rule

What’s one of the biggest struggles we hear from our clients? Having no idea what to post.

When you’re caught in a pinch, follow the ⅓ social media rule, which states that…

• ⅓ of your content should be promotional: articles, podcast episodes, service promotion, etc.
• ⅓ of your content should be engaging: quotes, questions, testimonials, etc.
• ⅓ of your content should be curated: an article, course, podcast episode, etc. from another source

Incorporating all three themes of content into your calendar ensures you’re providing value to your audience while diversifying your posts.

Repurpose Your Content

Anyone who tells you that you can’t reuse your content is wrong. If you’ve spent the time, effort, and maybe even money planning your content, why not reuse it? Especially if it’s content that performed well, you’ll want to leverage it as much as possible to continue to get more traction and engagement.

How do you repurpose content? Take a “long-form” piece of content and break it down into bite-sized pieces of content, such as:

• Writing a blog post
• Providing a snippet of that blog post in a newsletter and encouraging your subscribers to click through to the blog for more
• Creating multiple social media posts from that one blog post to promote it

Through this method, you can usually take one piece of content and quickly turn it into 3-5 pieces of content, saving you a lot of time and brainpower.

Have you found a system that works for you for planning your social media content? Share it in the comments below.