If you’re anything like most entrepreneurs I know, you’ve probably spent your fair share of time agonizing over which social media platforms you should be regularly posting content to.
You’ve signed up for all of them at one point or another, tried to start the habit of posting regularly, and then most likely, fallen off and given up on all but your one or two favourites. Maybe you even gave up on social media altogether (*raises hand*).
Even when you tried batch creating content and scheduling it to go out in the future, it felt impossible to create the sheer amount of content necessary to slot into your scheduler to post with the regularity you’d like.
Add the fact that you have no idea what kind of content performs best on each of the social platforms, what the strategy for each is, and pretty soon you found yourself bogged down in research before realizing that you were in way over your head.
You decided that social media will have to wait until you could afford to hire a social media marketing agency.
If you’ve been through this before, I’ma tell you right now. You were waaaaay overcomplicating content creation for yourself.
Content creation, even a large amount of it that appears on every major platform, doesn’t need to betime-intensive, you don’t need to have cracked the code on each of the social platforms, and you most certainly don’t need to be racking your brain to come up with unique content for each and every post.
By creating solid Flagship content and understanding how to quickly and easily repurpose that content into the other two types of content you should be creating, Conversational and Awareness-Building, you can create a system where, once you’ve created your weekly podcast, blog, video, etc, you can generate dozens of additional content almost on autopilot.
This is exactly what we help our clients do using podcasting as Flagship content, but it’s easy enough to set up on your own with whatever type of Flagship content works best for you!
Shifting Your Mindset Around Content
One of the biggest problems that holds back people like us who believe deeply in our work and care about how we present it to the world, is perfectionism.
We don’t want to put anything out that we’re not entirely proud of. We worry that people will judge us for every single thing we publish, be it a $1500 workshop, a podcast episode, or an Instagram Story that will be gone 24 hours from now.
If you’ve ever felt this way, I’m right there with ya. But the thing is, we’re flattering ourselves.
NO ONE is paying as close attention to us as we think they are, except our moms who we wish would stop commenting on every post…
I’m a big believer in the power of good branding and design, but I’m a bigger believer in the power of good content, and an even bigger believer in the power of the relationships that your content should be working to build.
Every social post you publish does not have to be professionally designed, and in fact, most content creation tools make it really hard to put out something that is really, truly hideous (just make sure you stick with the templates and you’ll be fine).
Every post should, however, address some subset of your audience specifically and have a defined purpose in furthering your relationship with them, whether that’s an introduction, a peek at your flagship content along with an invitation to check it out further, a conversation prompt, an opportunity to work with you directly and so on.
That sounds like a lot of work…
If you’re still looking at each piece of content individually, yes, it does seem like a lot of work to handcraft each piece of content with its own specific purpose to its own specific subset of your audience on its own specific social platform.
But we’re not looking at it that way.
If you’re creating good Flagship content you probably already have all the content you need hiding inside of it, and, with only a little digging, can unlock a near-endless supply of content as long as you keep producing your podcasts, writing blog posts, recording videos, etc.
Take this blog post for example. Once I finish writing this, I’ll take about ten minutes to create and schedule ten pieces of content that will each go out to three different social platforms over the next year on autopilot.
That’s 30 distinct posts created in ten minutes thanks to having a solid content repurposing system in place. Even if you have a $50/hr virtual assistant (you could get a $5/hr VA to do this), that’s a little over $8 for 30 posts from one piece of flagship content.
Thanks to this system, I currently post 6–8 times per day on autopilot across the social platforms I’m active on. All of it on autopilot.
Design vs Awareness?
You may have noticed I mentioned that I create ten posts that all go out as-is to three different social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Each of these posts has a simple graphic that uses one of four templates.
Yes, each platform has different character limits, image size formats, norms, communities and strategies on how to “win” at each of these platforms.
Yes, my posts look repetitive when viewing my feeds.
I don’t really care about any of that.
After years spent not posting on any social media channel with any regularity, I figured that posting less than optimized content — as long as it was useful or interesting and not spammy — was better than not posting at all.
And you know what?
Despite not taking the time to learn the strategies or create perfectly formatted content I have people engage with the posts, follow them back to my Flagship content, or even reach out regularly on each of the platforms and start conversations.
Oh, and yeah, I’ve had people apply to work with us at Counterweight Creative because of this content as well.
If you have one social media platform that you already have a following on and system for creating content for, stick with it. Go above and beyond on that platform and use it as your primary means of conversation with your audience
But for the others that you’re not even using right now?
If you have something to say, get your name, ideas and work out in front of people even in a less than perfect state. You can always hone your design and presentation later if you decide you need to. My guess is you won’t.
Take imperfect action
If you’re already creating Flagship content of some kind, you’re 90% of the way there.
With a little thought and some time spent setting up your content repurposing system, you’ll not only be set up to create a steady supply of content from your future podcasts, blogs, videos, etc, but you can also start repurposing your back-catalog of Flagship content as well to start populating your feeds immediately.
Every single piece of content might not be up to the standards you set for yourself before publishing anything. But more often than not, those standards are a way for us to hide, to keep from sharing our work and being judged for it.
If you believe in your ideas, your perspective, and your work, it’s time to get it out there, polished and prettied up or not.
As Harry Truman said, “Imperfect action trumps perfect inaction.”
He got it.
Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.
- Why Wouldn’t They Just Google It? - March 14, 2021
- Before You Can Market Your Podcast, You Need To Create A Marketable Podcast - March 11, 2021
- Podcast Promotion & Marketing Are Different (Here’s How to Use Each Effectively) - March 10, 2021
