- Have you ever spent hours looking at the screen,
trying to figure out,
hm, what should I post on social media?
Well, I can guarantee you
that you can spend as little as 60 minutes
in planning out your social media content
for the entire week,
and it won't be nearly as hard as you imagine.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down
how to plan one week of social media content in 60 minutes,
including tools and hacks.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
According to Statista,
over 3.6 billion people use social media,
and is projected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025.
Today, we're going to be focused on how to plan your content.
Creating content like video and long form written posts
can take longer.
But just knowing that,
and knowing when you should post each of your content pieces
should give you a huge advantage
and just improve your efficiency overall.
Before we get into planning this process itself,
here are some things that I do that helps me
get to the beginning of my week
without necessarily creating any form of content,
apart from writing captions,
and even scheduling things up.
For video content, every month,
you should come up with a list of video concepts
that you're going to record videos about.
Literally that's it.
Because I post videos roughly three times a week,
I typically create a list of 16 video concepts,
not three, 16,
which roughly covers five weeks worth of content.
Then you need to spend time outlining as a list,
let's say, bullet points for each video.
That way, you know, that you can just rip off
and just start discussing those bullet points in the video.
It's important to include any database things like stats
or research, because that shows that you're an authority,
which helps you with overall followers,
credibility, and best of all,
it helps you with Google Rankings in the long run.
Then I'll spend part of the day, let's say my morning,
sometimes entire afternoon, just recording videos.
There's a team that helps me finalize these videos
and gets them ready for YouTube and optimize them
so I don't even have to worry about that.
But look, I know not everyone can do that.
If I were you, bust out your phone,
record, upload to YouTube, not that hard.
And here's the cool thing,
when you're uploading videos to these social platforms,
you can schedule them in advance.
Now for image content,
I do something similar that I mentioned above,
and I come up with a list of concepts
that are worth going over in social media
over the next week or two.
I'll plan the content from my image carousels, quotes,
even family pictures.
Literally, I'll be like, mm-hm,
this week, I need to create a family picture,
more so, take one.
Now, when you do this, and you're creating all this content,
you don't have to hire a designer.
You don't spend a lot of money.
You can just use tools like Canva, Adobe Spark,
or PicMonkey to create those images,
modifying the quotes, get them up.
And if you want to move really fast,
you should have a few templates with your brands,
your colors, the fonts that you use in advance
so that you can just whip in the text
for let's say things like quotes.
That way, you can focus on content itself
instead of having to figure out the basics
like design each and every single time.
Now out of curiosity,
leave a comment below and let me know what tool you use
for your images for social media.
Now, I don't always use one tool.
Sometimes I use Adobe, Photoshop, or I use let's say Canva,
but I'm curious to see what you use.
The bottom line is, you should keep a database of ideas
and pre-conceptualized topics.
That way, whether you're sick, or you're procrastinating,
you just don't feel like you want to execute, boom.
You can go into your vault, pull one out, post it,
and you're off and to the races.
Now let's dive into the planning process.
Step one, list out all the content types
that you can commit to publishing that week.
Share a blog post, create some content,
maybe a live video, story, shorts,
podcast promotion, maybe database information posts,
or industry research.
Heck you can just do an ask me anything, right, an AMA.
Or you can just bust out your phone
and record a video or do an image carousel.
Maybe even use a third party quote,
make sure you cite the third party in that quote,
don't say it was yours when it wasn't.
You can do video testimonials, client success story,
podcasts announcement, maybe a quiz, poll,
contests, meme, collabs.
As you can see, the list really does go on and on.
Heck, you can even just do things like a Q&A session,
or an interview, or a day in the life of yourself.
Step two, match the content type
with the social media channels
that you're willing to post on.
You can use a spreadsheet to do this part,
or even just a pen and a paper.
Heck, I write a lot of things down just on my iPad, right?
Bust out the iPad Pencil, and write it down in Notes.
Now, if you're not sure what social network is good for you
with all this content type,
Instagram is good for you if you have visual
and image-based content like carousels,
picture of your day to day, quotes, shorter videos,
stories, personal podcasts cuts,
and you're just doing a voiceover.
Facebook works similar to Instagram,
but you can also share blog content
and other forms of content
that may be hosted somewhere else like that.
Maybe it's direct links to your podcast episode,
or even direct links to your blog posts.
But that's what works well on Facebook.
They usually don't necessarily like links as much,
but similar to Instagram, that's what they like.
LinkedIn is a little bit different.
You can do a lot better if you post a mix
of the following content types,
long-form written posts,
image carousels breaking down complex concepts,
into really simple bite-sized information,
that's really digestible.
Shorter videos, they love.
They have a cap 10 minutes on a video.
Podcast cuts work well,
shorter written posts with impactful quotes,
whether they're created by your third parties.
If you use a third party, what do you got to do?
Cite the source.
Now let's look at Twitter.
Twitter is more conducive to diversity,
and apart from stories,
you can pretty much post anything that isn't long-form.
From images, to video, to external links,
Twitter pretty much allows you to share anything openly.
Step three, assign the days and social platforms
in which you'll be posting each type of content on.
I recommend that you publish blog posts
a minimum of twice a week.
It depends on how important your blog is to your audience,
and the type of knowledge you're sharing,
but people love it, and it gets tons of loyal engagement.
I recommend that you create video content
at least once a week.
I recommend that you go either live or produce video content
like I'm doing here and uploading it,
or interviews, or video collaborations with other creators
that way their followers see your stuff
and your followers see their stuff.
Step four, create a rough outline
of what each post should talk about and look like.
If you don't have a database
of pre conceptualized content pieces,
all you have to do is this step
to create a bullet list of what each post should look like.
Remember that now you're just planning.
So be creative, and don't feel like you need to worry about
how you're going to do with the images, or videos,
or how many likes you're going to get.
Step five, write up your captions.
Now that you know each post and what it'll look like,
you need to start writing your captions.
Keep in mind that you'll never do things perfectly well,
and that's okay.
Be simple, to the point, and add in your personality,
just like I do with my videos.
Don't just be technical, or bland, or boring like this.
Spice it up, be entertaining, be human.
Step six, schedule your content
using any one of the tools that you like
from Hootsuite to Buffer, there's so many tools out there.
This part can cut a lot of time
so that way you don't have to log into social media
each and every single hour of the day.
And if you do that, you'll be good to go.
If you need help with your social media marketing
and boosting your engagement,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
You have any questions, leave a comment below.
If you enjoy this video, like it,
share it, and tell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.