Social media content generation? A pain in the ****, for many people. But it is possible to expend minimal time and attention on your social media content, while still benefitting from it. I promise.
Whether you’re after more exposure, more work or more money, the success of your efforts rests on your consideration, beforehand, of themes and topics for your social media content.
Social media content: First, a story
My father-in-law, John, is a no-nonsense person. A plan is a promise. Every decision is informed. And lunch is ideally served at 1pm. Not 12pm. Or 2pm.
My father-in-law doesn’t eat breakfast, so by lunch-time he’s hungry. And because he does most of the cooking, the timing of meals is entirely under his control.
As you can imagine, John is highly efficient and eminently reliable. He dislikes inefficiency. A lack of direction. What he calls verblonzering.
In English, verblonzering means wandering around, lost and aimless.
When it comes to social media content, John would rather starve to death than think about it (never mind actually use it), but that’s not the lesson. The lesson is this: without a solid-if-basic plan for your social media content, rooted in real objectives, themes and topics, you’re just verblonzering.
Social media content: Themes & topics
You need to be strategic. Deliberate. Maybe…a bit of a control freak. Here’s how:
Define your objectives. What do you want to get out of your investment of time, energy and attention?
- For example, do you want your audience to know that you specialise in change management? That you’re an expert in African wildlife rehabilitation? That you can repair anything containing a motherboard?
- These would be your broad social media themes and you would create and share social media content in and around these areas in order to seize interest from the right social media users, AKA your fish.
Going one or two levels deeper, what are the topics you might cover to win and retain that interest?
- For example, because I’m a professional keynote speaker, I always want more stage talks, ideally in sexy foreign countries — but also in Richards Bay or Nelspruit or Bloem or wherever.
Because my most desirable audience for the keynote speaking I do is multinational organisations, and my current most sought-after themes are creativity, confidence and AI, my topics might be…
- Creative Idea Generation
- Un-Installing Impostor Syndrome, and
- Writing Using AI.
Going even deeper, I might write social media content on sub-topics like:
- Using analogy (creativity),
- Accepting compliments (impostor syndrome), and
- Writing mega-prompts (AI).
This way, every post has a purpose.
Cool? Cool.
That’s it: social media content generation, in a very small nut shell. You’re welcome.