A SIMPLE 8-STEP SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION PROCESS

DO YOUR RESEARCH
Any good process starts with research. Sure, everything is content, but that doesn’t mean you can just post whatever you
want on your social channels and call it a day.
Before you start creating content, you need to know what kind of content resonates with your audience, or your potential
target audience.

If you already have a solid following on your social channels, you can start with your social media analytics. These will
help you understand what’s already working for you, so that you can model this success.

But society changes fast, so you can’t limit your research to your own accounts. Social listening is a good way to get a
sense of what’s happening in your industry, and what people are talking about when they talk about your business on
social media.
Finally, keep an eye on trending hashtags, topics, and audio. You won’t necessarily want to jump on every trend that
comes along, but you’ll spot some good digital content creation ideas that may help your content achieve greater
engagement and wider reach.

SET GOALS
Now that you have a sense of what’s happening in your industry, you can start to set some goals for your social media
content. Are you trying to drive people to your blog? Grow your following? Make sales through social commerce? Maybe
all of the above?

The kind of content you create will vary based on what you want it to achieve. For instance, your call to action will be
quite different for a sales post versus a post designed to build brand awareness and engagement.

It’s a good idea to get specific with your goals using the SMART goal-setting framework. This forces you to think in
detail about what you can achieve with your social content, and how you might get to where you want to be.

HAVE A CREATIVE BRAINSTORM

Whether you’re a one-person shop or you have a large social team, take some time to get some ideas up on the
whiteboard. (It doesn’t matter whether the actual whiteboard is literal or metaphorical, just that you gather all your ideas
in one place).

This is “no bad ideas” time. Everyone on your team has unique experiences with social, both personally and
professionally, that will inform their content ideas and expectations. Allowing everyone to share freely brings all that
knowledge into your shared braintrust, where it can morph into high-quality social content campaigns.

ASSIGN ROLES
Remember all those components of social media content creation we mentioned above? If you haven’t already got team
members assigned to each of those tasks, the time to do so is now.

It’s also time to set up a solid social media approval process, so everyone understands where their work fits into the
overall picture, and how their deadlines impact the rest of the team.
If you are a small business owner, you may not have anyone to assign roles to. Don’t panic! Remember, everything is
content. You can start out by creating all your content on your own. It doesn’t have to be complicated or take up a lot of
your time.

Even large teams don’t have to do everything themselves. This is a good time to think about whether you want to
outsource some digital content creation tasks to freelance writers or designers. You should also think about how to source
and incorporate user-generated content, and how to include curated content in your social media marketing strategy.

Finally, consider whether you want to work with outside content creators — aka influencers. This could be for a specific
campaign, or an ongoing relationship.

BUILD A CONTENT CALENDAR

A social media content calendar allows you to plan your content mix across social channels, so you get the most value
from your digital content creation efforts.

We’ve created a content calendar template to help you plan how to use content resources across your social accounts. For
example, say you want to drive social traffic to a new blog post. You can use your content calendar to plan out when to
post the relevant Facebook post, TikTok, and Instagram Reel.

Your content calendar should also include your ongoing content needs. For example, every week Hootsuite shares
a roundup of the week’s blog posts on Instagram Stories.
Here’s how to set up your content calendar using our free template.

https://youtu.be/v4XTAeDB7eA

SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

Once you’ve filled in your content calendar, it’s time to set your content up for publishing. Sure, you could post each post
manually at the assigned time, but that’s a huge timewaster that also sets you up to make simple mistakes like typos and
broken links.

Scheduling content in advance gives you a real-time view of your content plan and allows time to double-check all the
details. It also simplifies your workflow by condensing the time you spend publishing content into one block, rather than
having to interrupt your work throughout the day.

BUILD YOUR CONTENT LIBRARY

There’s no need to create every piece of social content from scratch. On your busiest days, you’ll thank yourself for
having the foresight to create a content library.

Any successful social post can be made into a template for future posts. You can also add approved images to your content
library, whether those are created in-house or acquired from a royalty-free resource.

As your content library grows, you’ll have more options for creating new social content without recreating the wheel.

8. ANALYZE YOUR RESULTS

The content creation process ends back where it started. Analyze your results to see what worked and what didn’t and use
your findings to guide your research and planning into what to do next.

Set some new goals and do it all again.