If you want to earn an income from your blog, as a social media influencer or blogger, having a system in place for creating content is key. As with anything, those who treat their blog as a business do the best. Often this means, creating systems that ensure you’re able to consistently create content. One way to do this is to batch your social media content.

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. When we were younger, we learned how to determine which things were similar and which things were different. The purpose of teaching young children similarities and differences, and later, how to compare and contrast is paramount to their success in organizing information and expressing ideas in a clear and coherent way. Sounds pretty similar to what we want to do with our content, right?

So, by working through one specific task related to content creation at a time, known as content batching, we’re more focused on the task at hand and are able to be more efficient since we’re not switching things up on ourselves every 20 minutes. Your brain has time to process and you’re ultimately more creative this way. Plus it’s a huge time-saver. When you switch back and forth between tasks, your flow is off and one task can tend to suffer. Staying focused on writing several blog posts at one time and then setting additional time to source images for all of the blog posts keeps you on task and you’re able to keep fewer tabs open while you work (both figuratively and literally).

Why You Should Batch Your Social Media Content

The number one reason you should batch your social media content is that it saves you time. When you can sit down and focus on writing or even just outlining several blog posts in one block of time, you shave hours off of the entire process as a whole.

Time-blocking is a great way to help you stay focused on one content-creation task at a time.  If you’re creating content for a blog, allocating an hour or so for content research and SEO is a great way to start. Once you know what you’re going to create content about, you’re better able to begin the writing process. Batch-writing in one day or throughout the course of a week for the following month will keep you on track and in the writing mindset.

Tools to Help You Create Content Consistently Through Batching

Resources That Help you Batch Your Social Media Content

A content calendar is a great place to start when working toward batching social media content because it allows you to input all of your content ideas in one place where it’s easy to see and access. Many creators use special planners, both paper or digital content planners. Other creators prefer to use resources like Google Spreadsheets, especially when working with a team.

Keeping a content calendar is also helpful for brand owners who create products or services. Plugging launch days into your content calendar or noting when a product goes live, will let you see where you need to create marketing content leading up to the launch.

Once you have the content ideas laid out, it can be helpful to create a space to save graphics, social media post copy, and images, newsletter content, or corresponding video content. This way, when you’re ready to begin batch-creating, you can choose a specific ‘bucket’ to hone in on and create several pieces of content around each bucket at one time.

For example, if you’re going to work on three blog posts one day, creating a template with tools like Gutenburg blocks can help you whip through the various blog posts easier. When you want to create tweets that relate to blog posts, simply draft out the copy that corresponds to each blog post and keep it in a file. Consider carving out time one afternoon with a fellow blogger or accountability partner and go on a fun fashion photo shoot together. Once you’ve got the blog post, photos, Twitter, and Instagram copy ready, it’s time to schedule your content, which can also be done through batching. Scheduling apps like MeetEdgar, Hootsuite, SEMrush, Buffer, or Tweetdeck allow you to strategically schedule when your posts and updates go live.

Another Helpful Way to Save Time When Creating Content

Sometimes you’re just pressed for time or just don’t have the bandwidth to create content. This is where outsourcing content creation can be a helpful addition to help you batch social media content. One simple way to do this is by purchasing content to act as an outline.

Purchasing content under Private Label Rights (PLR) is one easy way to batch social media content.  As a creator, you can purchase PLR content that you can use for blog posts, e-books, videos, and social media posts. You’re free to use the content as-is or edit to make it fit your voice and audience. PLR content is a great way to shave time off of your content batching schedule because you already have an outline to work with; it’s just a matter of making it your own.

When Shouldn’t You Batch Social Media Content

Now that we’ve made a case for batching social media content to make your life easier and ultimately help you reach your business and brand goals, there are times when it may not be a good idea to batch content. Unfortunately, in many cases, you won’t realize this until that time comes. If you’ve scheduled content around a fun family vacation or your latest shopping try-on, and you wake up one morning to the news of a national tragedy or major world event.

While we can’t predict the future, it’s important, as a brand, to not be tone-deaf to world events. If something tragic happens in the news, that essentially has the whole world talking, it makes good business sense to cancel any scheduled content for the time being. Posting about the gorgeous new shoes you found when the country is reeling, may come off as insensitive. You may consider posting something related to fundraising or if it aligns with your brand, some sort of introspective; until then, look to other brands and read the room as to when it may be deemed appropriate to continue with your scheduled content.

Be Realistic About Your Content Creation Process

Batching your social media content is supposed to be helpful and work for you to make your life easier. The key to ensuring it’s a streamlined process, however, is being honest about how much you can realistically get done during one time-blocking session. Before you jump into batching your social media content, you’ll want to have a general idea of how long it takes you to do each task you wish to begin batching.

For example, If you know that it takes you about 2 hours to create a quality blog post (after you’ve fully researched ideas and SEO) and you only have 3 hours to work with, understand that you likely won’t be able to breeze through two blog posts. Use that extra hour to schedule some content or begin researching next month’s SEO ideas. Knowing how much you can accomplish in one sitting will keep you from getting frustrated with the process and will ensure your success in staying consistent with the technique.

You already know that if you’re looking to grow your brand, you should be providing valuable content to your readers. Being a successful blogger and influencer is more than just posting to your blog, taking great photos, and posting them on Instagram. Take control of your time and your money and set aside some time to regularly batch your social media content and watch your business soar.

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