How to Streamline Your Social Media Workflow as a Marketing Team of One

With all the responsibilities that come with starting and building your own business, it's hard to imagine how you'll ever have enough time to build your social media following if you don't yet have the budget to hire additional help. In this video, I break down the process to streamline your social media management workflow so you can show up consistently online with less time and stress.

STEP 1 — PLAN (00:24)

MINDSET
Before you do any social media marketing, be realistic with the goals you set for your business and make sure they’re consistent with the resources you have available to you. Are you…
- a solopreneur bootstrapping your business?
- A small business with enough budget to retain a marketing assistant and/or freelancer?
- A medium sized business with an in-house marketing team or outside agency?
Your goals will differ greatly depending on the option you most closely identify with. If you’re a solopreneur who struggles with posting and engaging consistently on social media due to limited resources (e.g., no marketing budget to hire marketing support, enough time in your day, etc.), it’s unrealistic to expect yourself to be a content machine pumping out a social media post a day on multiple channels and 4 blog posts a month, not to mention other digital marketing activities like email marketing, paid social campaigns, and the other non-marketing responsibilities you have as a business owner.
GOAL SETTING
With that said, if you struggle to show up consistently on social media, aim for an easily obtainable goal that you KNOW you can realistically commit to… like 2 posts per week per channel. Silence that inner voice that’s telling you that that isn’t enough. The intent here is making a NEW habit stick and then building on that habit for progressive growth over time, so be patient with yourself.
Once you find yourself consistently meeting your original goal after a couple weeks to a month, you can then increase your posting frequency goal. Posting more content is obviously better, but it’ll never be better if you’re inconsistent in your posting frequency and if each post you share isn’t high quality content that provides informational and/or entertainment value.

STEP 2 — ORGANIZE (02:15)

Now that we’ve talked through the mindset and goal setting steps, the next important step is ORGANIZATION. You need to organize your ideas into a content calendar that resides in one universal location. This could be a paper planner/notebook, word doc, Google Sheet, or task management app like Clickup or Asana – the key here is to choose a tool that works best for you – not what anyone else says you should do, but one that YOU know you’ll use and stick to.

🗣 “But I don’t have any content ideas to fill up a calendar.”

If that sounds like you, here’s a list of sources to start with:

Yearly promotions: What seasonal sales, campaigns, or offers do you promote every year? Start plotting them out on a content calendar for the year, even if it won’t be in the near future.
Holidays: This is another great source of content ideas to plot onto your calendar as you’ll naturally begin to start thinking of creative ways to incorporate holidays into your marketing that are relevant to your business and engaging to your target audience.
Themed Hashtags: Over the years, I’ve frequently referred back to HubSpot’s Social Media Holidays Calendar to source content ideas for clients.
Social media trends: People always ask how I find and pick trending sounds to use as Reels or TikTok content. Knowing that I already have a habit of scrolling through my feed on a regular basis (for fun rather than research), I leverage that habit by intentionally looking out for trends that I think I could easily apply to my niche. As I find ideas I like, I save them for later by pasting the video or sound link in my Notes app and briefly writing out my corresponding idea with it.
Frequently Asked Questions: this is a commonly overlooked source that can be repurposed for social media content. you can use what you may already have on your website’s FAQ page, and/or questions you frequently receive in-person (e.g., in-store, trade shows, networking events, pop-up shops), and online (e.g., DMs, comments, emails).
Past content: business owners and marketers so often forget that you can repurpose past social media posts, long-form videos (think webinar recordings, video tutorials, vlogs, etc.), and blog posts into bite-sized social media posts that can then be leveraged to encourage a favorable call to action for your business.

STEP 3 — CREATE (04:58)

Now that you have a content calendar with a list of content ideas to get started, it’s time to CREATE.

You’ll hear what you’ve probably heard all over the internet when it comes to content creation: BATCH BATCH BATCH… and you’ll find me preaching the same thing. However, you’re probably still wondering what that even looks like for you. What does the process really look like to batch create content? How do you optimize that process for max content output?

These answers highly depend on a multitude of factors.

What type of content are you creating? Social graphics? Photography? Short iPhone videos?
What realistically does your availability look like to sit down and create content? Could you honestly dedicate a whole day every week, every two weeks, or every month to just content creation?
How frequently are you aiming to post each week?
How many channels/ content types are you creating content for?

Obviously, this will vary greatly depending on how much time you can realistically allocate in your schedule on a regular basis as well as WHEN and HOW you’re most productive. My productivity wanes after 3-4 hours of content creation, which is why I tend to schedule a half day every week to batch create content.

STEP 4 — OPTIMIZE (06:13)

You could choose to edit and polish your content in the same session that you create (assuming you’re doing photography or video recording), but I find that I don’t have enough time to finalize all the content I’ve created within that session. It also depends on how much content you’re trying to create – are you trying to create a week or month’s worth of content? That’ll determine whether you need a separate session just for this step.

One way to give your posts the best chance to perform well on social media is to optimize each post’s specs according to the platform they’ll be published to. If you’re marketing on multiple social media platforms, that can quickly become time consuming. Here’s a great cheat sheet of social media sizes for every network by Hootsuite.

One easy way I’ve streamlined that process is by templatizing my most common post dimensions in any software I’m using. Popular software include Photoshop, Premiere Pro, or Canva.

**I streamline the content creation process by using Canva’s folder feature**. I have a “Social Media” folder that holds projects according to size as well as campaigns. Here’s one that’s named IGTV/Pins since they share the same size, and another named “square posts” since these can easily be used for LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

STEP 5 — SCHEDULE (07:28)

Ah, the fruits of automation. Scheduling is key to posting content consistently and at the most favorable times for your audience. It frees up your workflow so that you don’t have to stop everything you’re doing to post and to think of a caption on the spot.

However, I’ve frequently had business owners pose the same question over and over: “will [insert channel here] penalize my account for using a scheduling software?”After all the years I’ve spent managing accounts for myself and client brands, I haven’t seen any quantitative evidence of that. But if you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you what I always tell clients: do your own testing by posting natively within the app for a set time period and doing the same via a scheduling software during the same time period and see what you come up with.

Back to scheduling – the tools I’ve used and recommend are Later Media and Sprout Social.

I’d recommend Later Media to most business owners because it’s much more affordable than Sprout Social, which has its lowest package starting at $89 per user per month (billed annually).

Later Media provides a free plan which allows you to schedule up to ten posts per social profile, which includes Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok and LinkedIn. Not bad for a free plan if you’re just trying to dip your toe in the water without any upfront cost. However, I’d recommend upgrading to at least their $15/month Starter plan which comes up to 3 months of analytics for Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, which will be key to helping you grow your following.

STEP 6 — ENGAGE (09:19)

It’s so easy to “set it and forget it,” as in create and schedule content and subconsciously expect your dream customers to flock to your channel. So many brands forget about the nature of social media – it’s an online hangout where PEOPLE communicate. We need to stop focusing so heavily on “tricking the algorithm” and focus more on quality content that entertains or solves a problem, and creating genuine, meaningful connections with your ideal target audience there.

The easiest way to regularly and meaningfully engage with your target audience is to schedule 20 minute sessions throughout the week to like and leave genuine comments on your target audience’s posts. Finding your audience online could be through (1) researching hashtags that your audience tends to use, or perhaps (2) via your competitors’ following.

In these regular engagement sessions, I also make sure to check for any new comments on my posts and to respond to each of them, even if it’s with a simple “thanks!” or an emoji at the least to comments that only need an acknowledgement, because it at least reminds those who’ve engaged with you of your account because they obviously receive a notification of your response.

STEP 7 — EVALUATE (10:40)

Last but not least, regular evaluation of your account and post performance is key to healthy account growth and movement towards your greater business goals. I recommend looking at your analytics at least once a month to extract insights such as the best and worst performing:

Social media channels
Posting times
content formats (carousel v. video v. Reel v. image, etc.)
Content topics/themes

As you evaluate using the list above, you can also ask yourself – which receive the most saves? Likes? Comments? Shares? Followers? Clicks? Website traffic? Email signups? Website orders?

Take note of these thoughts and insights as frequently as you look at your analytics. Then form a theory based on these thoughts and test it to see if it’ll have any positive impact on your goals in the next month.

It’s also important to keep an eye on your audience demographic by channel. It’s likely that they’ll be pretty similar across all social channels, but there are some cases where it may skew younger or older on certain channels, so you’ll want to be aware of that to see if that’ll influence the type of content you post depending on those demographics.

✨ That’s the entire process! ✨

Now that we’ve covered the entire workflow, how will you set yourself up for social media success using what we’ve covered today? Share your thoughts in the comments so I can cheer you on and give you feedback to any questions you might have!