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Creating Social Media Content
The age of social media to promote your brand has been here for years and it is evolving rapidly. The most time consuming task of any business is developing a social media strategy and creating content to post consistently on multiple platforms. Your posts need to be eye catching and engaging and for the last few years, video is rapidly becoming the number one medium.
Your content does not necessarily need to be 100% generated by you nor do you need to find ways to continually promote your product or service. In fact, blatant self promotion can turn your audience off and make them feel spammed. You DO need to promote what you’re selling but you should keep those obvious posts down to once a week or so. There are many other ways to engage your audience and funnel traffic to your website or online sales platform.
Add value to users lives
-Create “How-to” videos
-Offer incentives
-Campaign for social causes
-Share positive statistics about your product and how it might help them
-Share user generated content that’s informative
Design your content for maximum engagement
-Eye catching photos
-Short snappy video with music – TikTok is an easy app that will combine your video with music and allow you to save or share that video to other platforms.
-Be funny – audiences love to share funny videos and photos
-Audience Polls – engage your audience by asking for their opinion.
-Interact with your audience; reply to their comments quickly.
-Include user contributed content
-Structure your text so its brief and eye catching – audiences have short attention spans so a snappy headline and quick bullet points are better than a wall of text.
Chose the best times for posting:
Each social media platform has optimal times to post to insure the most users online but a good rule is early morning on Weekdays. Tuesday – Friday are best. Weekends have the lowest engagement.
How I can help
If you know that you need to be more consistent in your social media posting and can’t afford a full time staff, there are ways I can help. I’ve been working with several companies, both in the long and short term, to create eye catching content and raise engagement. Here are some of the services I provide:
Content Creation – Custom photoshoots
We’ll sit down and discuss your content needs and how best to capture images and video that give you you eye catching posts constant with your brand or strategy. Those can include:
– Product shots
– Staff headshots
– Fun Video
– Drone footage
Post processing of your existing images: Going through your photos and fine tuning them for color correction, contrast, filters or style, cropping and vignetting and sizing them to the exact specifications for each social media platform.
Retouching is very detailed work on facial blemishes, shine, wardrobe wrinkles, product, background clean up and takes your photos to the next professional magazine quality level.
social media management – I work with you to create campaigns geared toward promoting either your brand or a specific product or event. I create or collect the raw assets from you and schedule posts as often as you or your budget will allow. We can use your existing media or I can create some of that content for you.
Flexible for your budget:
You can engage any or all of these services as you need them. I am able to find a solution for most any business and budget.
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“The missing link between your social media goals and the actual content”
The need for social media content has never been more necessary than it is today. Over 40% of the worlds advertising is done online. In 2018, global online advertising and social media has eclipsed TV ads by over 100 billion dollars!
To be consistent with social media posts and advertising you must constantly be creating content. This can be a daunting task unless you have a full time staff to create that content for you. If you’re a small to a medium sized business and you’ve been vowing to be better at building and targeting your social media audience but you just don’t have the budget to hire a full time person(s) to organize and generate that content for you, what are your options?
The Challenge: You’re too busy running your business to be consistent about posting or advertising on social media.
The Solution: Hire the right people to create that content for you. When you’re ready to get organized with your social media posts – there are a few ways to go depending on your budget and on how much you’d prefer to do yourself.
Social Media Manager:
If you have the budget and have frequent events, sales or products to promote then you should look into hiring a Social Media Manager. This is a freelance contractor who takes on several clients and is responsible for consulting and outlining monthly schedules for all of their social media posts and then posting them on multiple platforms such as; Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Think of them as a marketing manager. The average cost: $250-1,200 per month for medium to large business.
For small businesses, the down side of going this route: There is a “missing link” between planning and creating the content. You would still be responsible for either hiring a graphic artist or creating it yourself. The average cost of a good graphic artist: $50-$75 per hour.
For smaller businesses there is another option:
For those small to medium sized businesses that only post on social media a few times per week and cant justify the expense of a Social Media Manager plus a graphic artist there’s a simpler way to go. It will require some discipline and getting in the habit of pre-planning your posts.
- First, there are “free social media calendars” online. Download one that works for your business.
- Sit down and look at the messaging you want to post each week for the next few months. Look at your event or product schedule and get ahead of it. Holidays are also a good reason to create your posts or ads.
- Hire a good graphic artist and photographer “as needed” to create that content for you so you’ll have it ready to coincide with your schedule.
How I can help.
Photography: As a professional photographer, I’ve worked with many local businesses to create dynamic images they can use to promote their brands. While most of those shoots are large in scope, I’ve also designed scaled-down shoots to help them expand photo assets for all of their social media posts. If you hire me to shoot assets for you, we start with a free consultation to see what kind of events, images or products you’re promoting. We determine which images you already have in your library or which ones you can create yourself. From there we determine where you would benefit from more professional photos. Once we’re organized and ready to shoot, I keep it as low key and low impact as possible so we don’t disrupt your workplace. The shoots include all of the post processing needed to take this simple shoot to a truly professional level.
Graphic design and content creation: This is the “missing link” between your ideas and seeing them come to life on social media. Having extensive graphic design experience allows me to craft your social media messages in any format you need. I’ll go over your calendar and make sure we have all of the information and assets we need to create all of your posts and I stay in close contact with you through out the process. Whether you’re providing me with images you’ve taken or we use images that I have shot for you, I’ll make sure any photo we use will pop on the screen.
I can design multiple photo/slides for instagram and Facebook stories, animated posts, animated gifs, video editing and video posts. One of my strengths is to offer you options and tailor the posts to your brand.