How to create an impactful content system to save you time

We all know what we want our social media to look like. We know we want a pretty Insta grid, well-shot TikTok videos and perfectly written captions. But that all needs one thing, your time! Learn how to create an impactful content system with Effi Mai.

Effi Mai Paul is a content creator who works with businesses to come up with creative, inventive, and sometimes unconventional ideas to help them flourish. With a background in digital strategy and writing, she has worked with a variety of companies to assist with their social media and written content to help them grow. 

Effi Mai shares her tips on how to create an impactful content system to save you time. 

How to determine which platform you should be posting consistently

When you’re busy, finding time to be active on every social media outlet is impossible. 

Narrowing down your choice to a couple of platforms will allow you to focus your efforts and not get overwhelmed trying to create everything in the world.

So ask yourself three questions:

Do I have the bandwidth to create relevant content for a new platform? 

Videos take longer than edited images, which take longer than a 280-character tweet. What do you have time to do?

Does the purpose of this platform fit my brand?

What do you want your business to show on your channel? And in what medium will you be doing it? 

Does my target audience spend time here?

Think about their age, their work, their friends and how they spend their free time

The truth about consistency

How many posts you put out will depend on the time you have to create them. Be consistent; posting one video weekly is much better than posting four pieces of content all at once, leaving your audience with dust bunnies for the rest of the month.

Being consistent doesn’t mean being the same across all channels. Repurpose your content to get more out of it, but change it slightly for each channel.

There is no set rule, post what works for you, and always think quality over quantity. 

The top four mistakes I see clients making when it comes to content planning:

• Not planning: you miss awareness days and don’t post enough because you always say ‘I’ll do it later,’ and you never will. 
• Panicking and changing things last minute: if it was a well-planned post before, it’s a well-planned post now. 
• Rushing: that’s where mistakes happen. 
• Jumping onto every trend: your audience gets nothing out of that, pick one that works for you and do it well. 

Eight ways to come up with fresh ideas for our content

Here is where I head when I need inspiration, which is all the time. 

• Use title-generator.com; type in a keyword, and you’ll get content ideas.
• On YouTube, put in a keyword and use the video titles as ideas.
• answerthepublic.com is an excellent site that shows you the top questions googled; you can then answer them with your ideas.
• Pinterest is a personal favourite of mine, put in your keywords and scroll endlessly.
• Google your keyword and see what comes up in images or news.
• Use the explore page of Instagram or TikTok (don’t copy directly).
• Have a look through podcast titles on Spotify, and see if anything inspires you.
• To find blogs, type in “[keyword] blog” on Google.

How to determine the best posting frequency

Think about how much information you want to get out to your audience, which channel you use, and how fast you want to grow. The best thing you can do with your content is test it. That is, look at your analytics. 

Does your TikTok video get more views on a Saturday? If you post every day on Instagram, does your engagement rate drop? 

Do you have well-thought-out long articles that would work well to be shared on LinkedIn? 

Also, try and note when your audience is online. We find Sunday night our best time to post, as most of our target audience are home scrolling on their phones. 

When you are scheduling content, there are four things to remember:

• Do it all a month in advance: work month by month, and it feels much less overwhelming. 
• Batch video captions: much easier to film everything in one go and write captions while you are in the zone.
• Save trends and trending audios whenever you see a good one so you can add those into your videos when you batch them.
• Set an alarm if you’re scrolling through TikTok: otherwise, you’ll start, and the next time you look up, it will be February. 

DEEP – a system to help you plan content system with ease

We came up with DEEP to plan out a content calendar. It’s not as dirty as it sounds. 

Use a calendar app like Asana or Google or Outlook Calendar, and work monthly.

• D: Days of the week. First, we fill in all the ‘Awareness Days’ of the month, i.e. chocolate day, world photography day, international cat day etc. 
• E: Education. Then we fill in our educational content – helpful information for our target audience. For us, that’s small businesses, i.e. how to use hashtags, the best way to get sales up on Etsy etc.
• E: Entertainment. Next comes the fun stuff that entertains people, i.e. funny videos, memes, gifs and more. 
• P: Personal. Finally, we add any updates from our business or anything we want to sell/point to that month. 

Job done. 

My favourite content planning toolkit

• Metricool: we schedule all our content on this and generate personalised reports for all our clients.
• Asana: for our content calendar of ideas. We also have the phone app so we can add to the to-do list and content ideas when inspiration strikes.
• Clockify: time yourself and see how long you are actually spending on content creation; the hours stack up.
• Slack: connects to Asana and reminds us when tasks are due. And a great way to chat about work things that you can find easily—no more scrolling through one billion WhatsApp messages.

The future of content marketing

We are seeing a rise in influencers bringing back long written content and images rather than putting it into a video. People still want to read captions, scroll through carousels and view pretty images.

You see loads more puzzle boards on Instagram, too, with people taking time over their grid. We will see more long-form videos; not every video needs to explain what it’s about in six seconds. 

Lastly, TikTok will only get bigger and better, and I see that overtaking its competitors soon. 

Effi Mai Paul is the co-founder of Six20Two, an agency focusing on experimental hands-on marketing that was set up in the depths of lockdown. She creates content for 20+ clients a month, she can help you create an impactful content system to save you time.

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