Key Takeaways
- Consistency on social media is one of the most important things a brand can do to grow an audience.
- Building a schedule for social media posting doesn’t have to be time-consuming, but it must be consistent.
- Find a schedule that works for you, and dedicate at least one day a week to creating content.
- There are tools, like ChatGPT, Later, and Unsplash, that can help you up your social media posting game.
There’s no question that social media is now, and will continue to be, a critical part of marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a B2C or B2B operation, there’s a social media platform that has the attention of your target market, and you need to be active on it.
However, many of us may not recognize the importance of social media or why being consistent on social is important. Or, you may be a small business owner that doesn’t have the time or resources to maintain a consistent social media schedule.
If you are either one of the types we just mentioned, then look no further than this article. We’ll touch on social media consistency, why it’s important, and how you can maintain a consistent schedule while doing what you do best!
What does it mean to be consistent on social media?
Many think being consistent on social media means posting every single day and spending a full 8-hour shift on creating content. While you should strive for this, many small business owners cannot afford to have an employee that’s dedicated to just social. There is too much on their daily list of tasks are 10x more important to the livelihood of their business. But, we’re here to tell you that being consistent doesn’t require that much effort.
Being consistent on social media simply means committing to a frequency and sticking with it! When you commit to daily or weekly frequency, you’ll extract much more value from social than those who randomly post when something comes to mind.
Why should you stay consistent on social media?
Now that we have a better understanding of what being consistent ACTUALLY means, let’s talk about why it’s important. Hopefully, before reading this section, you already know why consistency on social is key, but if not, we’ll dive in!
More opportunities to grow your audience
It’s that simple, the more you post, the more opportunities you have to grow your audience. This is primarily because you’re posting on a more frequent basis and creating more opportunities for your audience to engage with your content. As more of your followers engage with your content, the more (in theory), your content will get shared or served to other social media users.
Similarly, the more frequently you post, the more chances you’ll get to learn about what types of content your audience enjoys and what times your audience is most active. This type of insight is critical to sharpening your social media strategy and extracting the most value out of social media.
Allows you to build quality relationships
As we mentioned in the previous section, the more you post, the more opportunities you create for your audience to engage with your content. If you stick to a consistent schedule, then this can pave the way for building high-quality relationships with your followers. Whether it’s through followers commenting on your funny posts or your customers sending you a quick message about how they love your product/service.
By sharing more content, consistently, you’re able to build a deeper relationship with your followers. So, once you get to that point, be sure to place the utmost importance on each interaction you have, as building more trust among customers and, ultimately, more sales.
Consistency keeps your brand top of mind
Finally, consistency can help keep your brand, and its products, top of mind for consumers. When you develop a consistent cadence, then you can expect your brand to stay on followers’ feeds for X number of times per week. That is, if you aren’t shadow-banned, of course!
The great thing about this is that once you are able to scale your frequency up while maintaining consistency, then social media platforms will typically reward you with more reach!
How do you stay consistent on social media?
Find a frequency that works for you
When you are running a small business, you have nearly a million things on your to-do list on a weekly basis. And, to be honest, producing content for social media is likely last on your list.
So, when you are trying to be consistent, the best thing you can do is find a frequency that works well for you. Even if it’s just 1-2 posts per week. If you’re tight on time, it’s okay to start with a low publishing frequency. The point is, you are doing something on social media and not losing out on valuable attention by not posting at all.
Pro tip: Before you get to posting, you will want to be sure you have some clear goals defined. By having clear goals, you’ll be able to grow your social and even scale your business to afford an employee whose time is dedicated to social media management.
Dedicate 1 day out of your week to content creation
While you may not be at the point just yet to afford a full-time social media manager, the easiest way to manage the time and effort required for content creation is to dedicate one day of the week to producing content. Let’s be clear here; this isn’t one day while running around doing other errands that your business is calling for. This is 8 straight hours of content creation.
If you can get to the point where you’re dedicating 8 hours to content creation, then you’ll make the entire process exponentially more manageable than someone who creates content on a whim. So, lock yourself in a room, turn your notifications on snooze, and get to creating!
Use tools to help
Social media management doesn’t have to be that hard. With the right tools and software, you can make the entire process, from content creation to scheduling a breeze! In this next section, we’ll cover a handful of tools that’ll make social media easy for you!
Later.com
One way to streamline the entire social media management process is to schedule your content. If you’re not scheduling out your content, you’re wasting a lot of valuable time and peace of mind. The social media experts here at Redefine, recommend Later Social. Later Social is Redefine’s official social media management tool that we trust with scheduling our posts for our clients and for our own social media platform.
In addition, to making the social content publishing process a breeze, Later also makes it incredibly easy to gather social insights, respond to comments, and manage all of your content.
ChatGPT
Now in 2023, we have all this ground-breaking technology at our disposal, so we may as well use it. ChatGPT is all the rage right now because of how well it works to pretty much answer any question or write any piece of content you ask it to write. If our word doesn’t do it for you, just read about how ChatGPT can get a passing grade on a bar exam.
Luckily, ChatGPT is 100% free to use (for now), and it can make your social media management a hell of a lot easier. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me 3 separate social media posts on why search engine optimization is important. Here’s what it returned.
From here, we can simply copy-and-paste this in Later, edit it a bit to fit our brand tone, then boom! Schedule and post.
Having access to this technology can help you streamline your content creation so much.
Unsplash
If you’re a small business owner, not only are you tight on time, but you’re likely also tight on budget to afford a professional photographer. So, if you want high-quality photos for your social media then look no further than Unsplash!
In 2023, smartphone-quality images are really all you need for a modern social media strategy. However, sprinkling in a bit of professional-grade imagery never hurt anyone. Unsplash allows you to download an unlimited number of stock-free images from photographers across the world. At Redefine, we use Unsplash frequently to source images for clients that may not have the resources for professional photography or to find something quick to convey a marketing message.
Social media, managed
Social media is not going to be going away any time soon, but growing a presence there can feel like an uphill battle. While consistency is key, there’s no harm in letting someone else step in to take over the more tedious parts of social media content management. If you want expert management for your brand’s social presence, get in contact with us here. We’re ready to help you hit your social media goals and then some this year.
