Creating content on a regular basis for your business can be one of the most time-consuming jobs that you do in your marketing or business administration as a whole. So working out ways that you can make it easier for yourself, become quicker and be creating better content is obviously a win-win for you and your business growth. So I thought I would take the time to jot down here my top five tools that I use to help with my content creation for myself in my business and also my clients to literally make content creation dream.
Canva
The first tool that should become your bible for graphic design (your post graphics and stock images) is Canva. Which you have a most likely heard of before because it has become a huge player in the small business world. Canva is a graphic design tool that comes with a range of premade templates and a very well thought out interface that makes it super simple, quick and easy for anyone to create amazing graphics. You can be the worst person with computers or technology but still look like a professional graphic designer when you use Canva for your business. Where Canva comes into its own, is with its time-saving abilities, through the way you can set up templates and then duplicate them super easily to quickly create content every month.
This is the way we can use Canva for content creation. First, create one file that is your monthly content plan with each of your posts designs in it. So then you have the one file that set up (use 1:1 sizing as that suits Insta and Facebook best) and it would have your 12 template/images in it that are to be used for each post in the month. This is if you are posting 3 posts per week. If you are posting 5 times per week then you would have 20 template/images in your file. Then at the end of each month when your planning your content for the next month, all you have to do is duplicate that template file and name the new file with the next months name. Then you can just go through and change at any of the text and images for the upcoming month using all the same templates that you have set up for your brand. Then just export all the images and you’ve got your images or graphics for the month sorted.
Super easy, super consistent! Which is the most important thing, that your brand is represented consistently across your social media platforms. And it literally makes creating your images or graphics for the month a dream.
Trello
I use Trello for my planning out of my content, matching all my images and text together, keeping track of what needs to be written or scheduled and keeping all my posts archived in case I ever lose my Facebook or Instagram accounts. It is also the best program if you have multiple people working on your social media or contributing to your content or approvals. Trello is a free online collaboration program that enables you to set up boards with lists and cards that helps you to organise your ideas and plan everything out. I have a board set up that has a list for me to write my posts, then I go through and add images to each card. This helps me to be able to see all my images in there so it’s very easy to keep track of all the posts. You can also add labels for different types of content (post, reel, blog, edm). To see quick at a quick glance what content you need to add, you can set up different lists and move your cards around in the various lists depending on what stage they are in the content creation process. This is super handy if you have a social media manager on board as when they are looking over your posts or editing them or scheduling them for you, so then you can go in and write your posts and then they can see which ones are ready to be scheduled and then just schedule them in for you to save you a lot of time.
Pinterest is a great tool for inspiration and gathering content ideas. I use Pinterest to see what is most relevant in my industry right now and get ideas for photoshoots for graphics for my feed and more. You can type into Pinterest your content topic and it will come up with a heap of ideas of things other people have already created that will help spark ideas for content for you and your business. Make sure you only use it as inspiration though and don’t steal peoples ideas.
FB Creator Studio
The Facebook Creator Studio was released a few years ago and it’s a scheduling tool for Facebook that also works to schedule to Instagram as well- which is why I love it. It is a free tool that you can find through the Facebook backend and I use it to schedule all of my social media posts to Facebook and Instagram so then I don’t have to worry about scheduling to Instagram at all. You can use a social media scheduling tool, but I don’t like to pay for them when I can use this program for free and it’s going directly through Facebook. They are also updating the program all the time which means that it’s getting better and better for using as a scheduling tool. Make sure you try out the Facebook Creator Studio if you’re looking to schedule your posts and you’ve never scheduled before as it’s a great tool to get you started on scheduling to both Facebook and Instagram.
Google Docs
I use Google Docs mostly for bulk content creation because I find it a lot easier to just write about the things I know freely in a Google Doc rather than trying to write individual things individual posts. So what that generally looks like for me, is I will open the Google doc on my phone or on my computer and just write. I generally will do this away from my office because I find that I am more inspired and write better if I’m in a different environment. That sometimes looks like going to a cafe, sitting outside in my backyard going to the beach or the park just being in a different area. Then at the top of my Google doc I’ll write the topic that I’m writing about and then I’ll dot point brainstorm a number of different things about that topic and then write just a paragraph on each thing. I find this is a lot less stressful when it comes to getting my thoughts and ideas out of my head. Then this can become different posts on social media. I also use google docs to write a blog post so I do the same thing where I will go to a different environment, open up blank Google doc and just write my blog post out in a really freely way without thinking too much about it. I just write as the inspiration comes to me and the content that I really want my reader to know or learn. I then always have the Google docs saved in folders about each topic and I just really find that it helps to have all my content in one location.
So these are five tools that I use when it comes to creating content for my blog posts and social media posts. I hope that they help you. I would love to know what tools you use, if you use the same ones or different ones and let me know if you want any more information on how to actually use these tools to create really great content.