Crush Your Social

Toni
If you've ever stared at a blank screen on posting day, wondering what the heck to say, and if content creation feels random or exhausting, this is a good episode for you. I'm going to build a post live on the podcast, and I'll take you through the steps that I go through to actually create the post. It'll be fairly simple, maybe repeatable, but it'll give you an idea of how my thought process works when I'm creating content. Because content creation, let's face it, can be hard. It can be hard to create content that people will want to read or watch. It's hard to find an angle and a headline that makes people interested.

[00:00:51:08 - 00:01:05:23]
Toni
And whether they know it or not, they're always scrolling thinking what's in it for me. So I'm going to create a post, and you get to see my process or hear my process. And I'm going to put the post on my Instagram page so that you can see what the post looks like.

[00:01:09:06 - 00:01:09:07]
(Music)

[00:01:09:07 - 00:02:20:05]
Toni
What is the first thing that I do when I need to make a post? The first thing that comes to mind is that I go and look for a topic. So I know what my pillars are. One of them is social media marketing strategy. So if I'm looking for a topic on that pillar, one of the ways that I do it is to go to Amazon book reviews. So I'm on Amazon book reviews right now, and I'm looking for the books that are on social media marketing strategy. And there's tons and tons of books on this topic. And I'm noticing that they're all getting four and five star reviews, which tells me that the idea is definitely needed and the books that are out there are doing well. But if I'm looking for like a topic, then how's a good way that I would find a topic? I'm going to click on the reviews of a book. Here's a book, social media marketing, blah, blah, blah, comprehensive guide. I'm going to look at the two and three star reviews to find problems that people have that the book doesn't address and or four and five star reviews to figure out what worked well. But what I'm finding with this particular topic is that there's a lot of four and five star reviews, not so many twos and threes.

[00:02:21:12 - 00:02:39:23]
Toni
And what it's telling me is that people are looking for a social media marketing strategy. So with that in mind, what's my process for creating a social media marketing strategy? So if I want to be seen as the thought leader, I don't want to take information from another book. I want to use my own process.

[00:02:41:00 - 00:04:07:03]
Toni
So after I found the topic, I'm going to do a mind map. And what a mind map is, is just a giant piece of paper where I put all kinds of circles around the topics that I want to talk about. So when I create a social media marketing plan, what does that look like for me? So I'm going to outline, I'm going to write it out and outline all the steps that I go through when I create one. And then I'm going to make a post out of it because I know people are looking for that. They're really interested in how to make a social media marketing plan. So of course, the first thing we do is figure out what we want from our plan. We define our objectives. So I write out different kinds of objectives that people might have for a social media marketing plan. And then I write down audience identity. There's a circle for that. So there's a circle for the defined objectives. What do you want? What are your goals? A circle for audience. So who are you talking to? And I define that. Then I have a circle for content strategy. What is that? Part of a social media marketing plan is also to get people off the platform. So what would I do with that? I do a lead magnet. I do a circle for the lead magnet. And another part of a social media marketing plan would be SEO, search engine optimization. So keywords, how does that work? Then I do a circle for stories. So you need to do a story strategy on your Instagram if you're using Instagram as your social media marketing plan. And then metrics measurement, data analytics. There's a circle for that.

[00:04:08:03 - 00:05:14:22]
Toni
There's a circle for engagement strategy. So all of these parts go into my social media marketing plan. So I make circles and then I define each of the subtopics under the circle so that if somebody wants to follow it, they know, oh, OK, the first thing I'm going to do is define what my objectives are. The second thing I'm going to do is define my audience. Who am I talking to? And there's specific characteristics around that audience. The third thing is the content strategy. What does that entail? And then as I go through each of these circles and I outline each one of them and I fill them in with the information that I know I use that works for me, then I can make the post. So once I figured out the topic and I figured out the angle, the angle is how to crush a social media marketing plan. So that's a good angle, how to do something. And then I outline the topics or the steps that I personally use to create that thing. Then I need to make the design. So after that, I go into Canva, I open up a page and I figure out like how do I want to present this? Do I want to present it as a timeline? Do I want to present it as steps?

[00:05:16:00 - 00:07:29:12]
Toni
But because I ride a motorcycle, it's kind of part of my brand. I'm going to try to pull that in and I'm going to use a roadmap picture. So it's an infographic picture. It's just a little roadmap. It's an element in the Canva design elements. And I put that little road right in the middle of my post. Then I'm going to make little stops that look like little motorcycle stops that are circles with each of my components of my marketing plan, my social media marketing plan. And then I'll have a headline for each one or a subhead. And then the points underneath each one that tell you what those elements are that make up that subhead. And then after I've created the design, I've got my headline, I've got my keywords in there because it's social media, it's marketing strategy. All of those are keywords for me. The next thing I'm going to do is download my design and then I'm going to make a caption. So the next step about creating a caption is to create something that isn't repeating what's in the post. So I like to use chat GPT because I've created some custom chat GPTs for my own brand that knows my knowledge base and knows my angle and how I present information. So I can put a picture of this post that I've made that is a roadmap. I can throw it right into chat GPT and say, hey, create a caption that has a hook that's engaging. If you can find a statistic that works with it, find me a statistic that will support it and also give me a CTA to book a call. And out pops a caption from chat GPT and I can either redo it or like it or edit it or figure out how I want to do it. So I've got my caption and then I will pull up my hashtags and I have lists and lists of hashtags that I've curated over time around all of my content pillars and the hashtags that I will be using range and size of 5,000 posts on a hashtag page to about 500,000 because that's a really good range where you can still rank and get seen. And I'll use somewhere between 8 and 15 hashtags. Then I'll schedule the post, plug in all the information and that's it. Pretty simple.

[00:07:30:15 - 00:08:23:04]
Toni
That's the long way to create content. When I do this process with one post, it takes about 8 to 10 hours. It's a long time because you're mapping everything out, writing it all out. What's easier for me to do is to create several posts through batching stages of content. So maybe I'll have 8 topics that are under one or more of my content pillars and I'll set the topics based upon research like what I just talked about with the Amazon.com or questions people are asking, whether it's on the platform and you look at topics that are trending around a topic, questions that are trending or headlines that are trending or answerthepublic.com. You can plug in any topic and lots and lots of questions will come up with the who, what, when, where, why framework, which I love.

[00:08:24:10 - 00:10:13:15]
Toni
Then the next session that I sit down to create content is fleshing out the topics so that I have the points that I want to make. So I write the content and each of these sections takes about 2 to 4 hours for about 8 posts. And then after you flush it out, you can either design your post and then create your headline or go either way. Headlines are pretty quick. You can use a headline generator. I use several different ones. None of them come to mind off the top of my head, but I'll put some in the show notes. Design your content. So if you're doing Canva posts, you'll sit down at your computer, you'll do your designs. If you're doing reels, you will script out your reels and you'll maybe want to do 3 or 4 at a time and then record. And then editing all of the reels is another step. So each of these things you do 3 or 4 or 5 posts at a time. And once you're done, you go to the next stage, which is for me, the caption. And the captions are pretty quick because I already have the content of the post made. I just need another angle coming from the caption or I need to maybe flush something out with a little more information. So add your hashtags. You've got your keywords and you're done in about 8 hours to create 4 to 8 posts if you do it in stages versus 1 post at a time. Now that we've created the post, go to my social media, go to my Instagram or even my LinkedIn because it'll be there as well and check out the posts. It'll say something like, "This is the post I created for my podcast." And it will be a carousel post. However, the post that I created is actually an infographic. So you'll get to see the actual infographic and the steps that are on the infographic that I used as I walked you through the process.

[00:10:15:03 - 00:11:08:23]
Toni
Creating a post has a lot of steps to it. It can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. So once you have your strategy in place and you know who you're talking to and you've got all those pieces and you want to make a piece of content, go to Amazon Books and pick a topic that's in your pillars and do some research and figure out what questions people are asking around that topic and use that as your topic. And then go to Chat GPT and input to Chat GPT. Act as an expert marketing strategist. Here's my topic. Tell me everything you know about this topic and see what it comes up with. Figure out if there's an angle that you can take or a story that you can tell around it that's different than what Chat GPT comes up with. And then create a simple design, use a template on Canva or turn your camera on and talk about it. And then you've got your post. Now get out there and crush it.