We know you’re all a bit short on time this week. Between Easter holidays and Anzac Day coming up, there’s not a lot of time to schedule your weekly content. Instead of letting it slide, we’ve put together 5 things you can do right now to make sure your content plan doesn’t fall to the wayside. Here are a few ideas, apps and resources to cut down the time it takes you plan, create and schedule your content each week.
Imagine what you’ll be able to do with those extra hours when we go back to 5 day workweeks!
1. Facebook Ads Library
Hit a wall with what image to use, with what words and where to say what when? Sigh, I get tired just reading that sentence. If you need some inspiration to push out the three posts you need to schedule for next week (yes, you should be scheduling all three at once!) check out the improved Ads Library. A couple of weeks ago Facebook changed the way that their Ads Library works in line with their goal to be more transparent about advertising.
You can literally use the search bar to find and bring together all ads of a certain category on all of Facebook’s platforms. For any topic. In any industry. You can filter by country, active vs. inactive, and then even choose only specific pages to view. That means, if you have a page who’s content style you look up to, you can see all the ads they have ever created. It’s an amazing resource for inspiration.
What this tool is great for is finding out what other organisations are doing that you want to emulate. It’s especially helpful when you need to push out a few posts and are feeling a bit of creative fatigue. You can see the different formats, images and topics that people are using and then take that knowledge and replicate the format with your own unique spin.
2. User-generated content
It’s like a mandarin tree this time of year. FULL of low-hanging fruit. That’s why just about every brand in the book is using this strategy. It’s easy, free, quick and makes everyone involved feel good. It’s the “word of mouth” currency of the 21st century- and we all know how powerful good word-of-mouth marketing is! Social campaigns that incorporate UGC see a 50 percent lift in engagement (Salesforce).
There are a lot of tools out there to gather and sort through user generated content (USG) but the best is – using your own hashtag. If you don’t have one yet – CREATE ONE! Make sure you’re giving your community an excuse to connect by creating a unique, identifiable hashtag to use in their caption (ours is #changetheworldevent). Then, when they’ve shared a photo that gets your team excited, you can repost it (with permission and credit, of course!) with a short blurb in the caption of why it’s meaningful to you.
Stay posted, this week we’re keeping it quick, but we’ll revisit the User Generated Content world soon to give you some more tips on helpful platforms and best practices to drive results!
3. Hemingway App
Bogged down with blog revisions? STOP! Just stop. As Tina Fey says “People who write for a living know writing is the worst. Printing is fun. Hitting command P is fun. Everything before command P is a nightmare.” YES. #Preach Tina.
However, one tool that helps us streamline our writing process is the free tool “Hemingway App.” It allows you to copy and paste your entire post into one page and then tells you which sentences are difficult, where you can simplify vocabulary and when you need to cut the bulls** that bogs down the editing process. Think of it as your mom reviewing your essay before you handed it back in grade school. Sometimes you just need a new set of “eyes” on it to speed things up a bit.
Experts say when writing for your blog, you should aim for a Grade 6-8 level. Take out the jargon. Stop using unnecessary commas. Mix up your sentence structure. And give yourself a time limit on how long you can spend with Hemingway. 80% perfect is better done that 100% perfect and still sitting in your Google Drive.
4. Create a fill in the blank post
Let your audience do the work for you. Experiment with using a fill in the blank post to engage with your audience and hear what’s on their mind. It’s a great way to connect with your community in an authentic and easy way. It entices your audience to engage with your content (which we all know is rewarded!) without having to use those pesky no-no words like “comment below”
If you run a conservation group, ask people “My favourite place for an Autumn walk is ______ “.
If you are trying to come up with fundraising campaign ideas you might ask “The reason why I give is _____”
It’s quick. It’s easy. It’s sort of like audience research and it prompts those who might see your page in their feed to actually engage, which helps them continue to see your content in the future ahead of other pieces that might not be getting interaction.
5. Anchor Video App
Did you listen to a great podcast this week? Or have an “AHA” moment in a meeting? Do you have a story you want to tell (we know you do!). Try out the video feature on the app “Anchor” to create a quick to produce content piece that is perfect for Instagram.
The app allows you to quickly convert an audio file into a moving video with words from the transcript. You can choose the colour scheme that best fits your Instagram aesthetic and add a caption to give some context as to why it resonates with your cause. Because it is moving, it also works well in the Stories format. It entices viewers to pause on your post while scrolling in order to finish the sentence they are reading.
Download the App and have a play. If you already have an audio file in mind you can upload it and have a video ready in less than 5 minutes. If you only want to record a small part of something you’ve heard this week, you can record your own voice in the app to avoid time cutting down the audio file to the particular part you want to share.
We know you’re short on time this week- so we’ll leave it at that. We love what you’re doing out there, so keep on keeping on.
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