Author Taylor Rice
Taylor is a content creator at TW Media, a digital marketing agency based in Orange County, CA.
The thought of posting original social media content every day, or even several times a week, can be overwhelming for many. Taking a photo or video, editing it, writing a caption, researching hashtags, and posting it to various platforms is a lot of work and can be very time-consuming.
There’s a reason why social media is our full-time job at TW Media.
However, there’s a strategy for creating social content that can save you precious time and energy while still ensuring that you post high-quality content consistently: content batching.
What is content batching?
Content batching is a productivity technique in which you create an entire week or month of social media content in a few days. The exact time frames can vary depending on what works for your schedule (e.g. dedicating one week to batching one month of content or dedicating one day to batching one week of content), but the process is generally the same.
Content batching can sound like more work at first, but it’s actually the most efficient way to create content — and it ensures that you never miss a day of scheduled posting. With content batching, you can focus your creative energy on one set of tasks instead of jumping from photography to editing to writing, which allows you to create a more cohesive and consistent social media strategy.
How to batch content
Before you begin creating your new content, analyze your previous posts and see how they’re performing. Which types of posts get the most engagement? Which platforms are you gaining the most traction on? Knowing this can help you determine what type of content would be most lucrative to create going forward.
Brainstorming
Once you have a grasp of your analytics, have a sit-down brainstorming session. Dedicate an hour or even a day to getting together with your team and planning what content you’re going to create on each day. Gather together any holidays or notable days that month so you can create content tailored around those events. We highly recommend creating a content calendar which lays out all the days of the upcoming month so you can see exactly when you need to post and can visualize what will be posted on which days. Having a well-organized content calendar will help you in every step of the content batching process.
Image Sourcing
Once you know what you’re going to post, you then need to create that content. Source your photos for every day of your content calendar, whether that’s having a photoshoot, downloading stock images, or creating video. This may need to be done over the course of several days if you’re scheduling photoshoots with models or clients that have their own schedules, but the image creation process should ideally be done in one phase before moving onto captions.
Caption Writing
Some people prefer to write their captions before creating images and some prefer the opposite. It can also fluctuate month-to-month depending on your photoshoot schedule. Whichever you choose, set aside a designated time to write all of your captions for the full duration of the calendar. When writing captions, we recommend you always include two things: a good hook and a call-to-action. The first line of your caption, or the hook, should draw users in and stop their scrolling. It should be captivating or interesting enough to encourage them to read the rest of your caption. Each caption should ideally end with a call-to-action, or CTA. This is something that encourages users to interact with you or your content. You can ask them a question that encourages comments, provide your phone number to book your service, or tell them to tag a friend who would enjoy the content. You should also do hashtag research doing this time and compile a list of 20-30 hashtags that are relevant to your niche and content. Posts without hashtags are likely never going to be seen outside of your existing follower base; they’re key for substantial growth on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Scheduling Your Content
Once you have your photos, videos, captions, and hashtags created for every post on your calendar, it’s time to schedule that calendar. There are hundreds of scheduling tools to choose from which allow you to automate the posting process, further decreasing your active work time and ensuring that your content is consistent every month.
While batching content may seem overwhelming the first time you try it, we promise that it gets easier and will save you a ton of time, frustration, and missed posts in the long-run. Content batching is how social media management firms stay on top of content creation for multiple clients, and it can help you step up yoru social game as well.
Not sure where to start? Check out our 2022 Social Media Content Calendar for a full year of caption prompts and content concepts to get you started.