Why You Should Create A Social Media Content Bank (And How To Do It)

13 Dec Why You Should Create A Social Media Content Bank (And How To Do It)

Gathering a ton of social media content at once may sound like a headache, but the amount of the amount of time and effort you’ll save in the end can be priceless! In this post you’ll learn about the benefits of gathering and creating a social media content bank and some steps you can take to get it done.

Getting content organized is key to your social media marketing success. This is especially helpful when your dynamic duo: your handy content schedule (or calendar) + content bank are in play. Hand in hand, your schedule and bank will eliminate the day to day content haggle – saving you time and giving you more room to flex a little creative muscle.

HOW TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT BANK

Itemize all aspects of your brand

Step one to getting a social media content bank together is to know what aspects of your brand you’d like to show your audience. This includes lifestyle content, user generated content, brand attributes, upcoming product launches or special dates, social media goals or benchmarks and giveaways. So yes, basically everything you’ve got going on with your brand. At this point if you haven’t created a content calendar, it’s time (learn how you can do it by reading: How To Create A Social Media Content Calendar). Remember that none of these items have to be developed past knowing that you’d like to highlight them or that they’re coming up. This is all about being prepared.

If you already have a social media content schedule or calendar worked out, this step may be a little redundant so you can go on to the next step.

Gather all existing content old and new

Now that you know what you want to talk about (or you have your social media content calendar worked out) it’s time to look at all your social media content, or lack thereof. Gather all content you’ve created and anything you have but haven’t posted yet. Pro tip- some of those older photos can be re-purposed for throwback posts, backgrounds and more. For a few more ideas on how to re-purpose content read: 9 Easy Ways to Repurpose Old Content for New Social Media Posts.

Create a system

You’ll need to create a place to put all this social media content you’ve just gathered. Creating a system will help you streamline efforts especially if you work with a team. I keep it relatively simple and like to create one folder for every month plus one labeled “For Posting” and one labeled “Used”, but you can figure out what system works for you. If you’re on a team Dropbox, Google Drive are great basic options for keeping everything organized and everyone on the same page.

Now that you have content organized you’ll be able to see what gaps you need to fill. You’ll realize if you need more videos, maybe lifestyle content and you can get cracking on filling in those social media content gaps.

Bank messaging and captions too

Part of your social media content bank should include messaging and captions. The messaging that goes along with your images, videos is just as important as the content itself.  Banking messaging is a great way to save time on recurring campaigns (like cross promo tweets), when you have an image but no caption or to inspire visuals. Banked messaging can also help when live tweeting at fast paced events.

I don’t want you to read “content bank” and think “Aahh! I have to create content for a year!”. You can create banks for a few weeks at a time based on your schedule, or in smaller batches for individual campaigns or events.

When creating content banks for shorter campaigns:

• Consider the duration of the campaign or event and how frequently you will post about it.
• Consider using images that can be used more than once in the campaign.
• Again, bank the messaging that will be used to promote the campaign.

The initial time investment into creating content banks can be big, but will make the posting process a much smoother one for you, and your team. Since the images and messaging are done, all you have to do is plug them into your social media automation system, or copy and paste them in when it’s time. Think of all the things you can do with that time! Analytics, sourcing more content, learning to news in network tools or time to get a little creative with giveaways.

Get to banking!

<3 DhariLo

P.S. For more social media content help read:

Why You Should Be Curating Content for Your Social Media Channels (And How To Do It)

How To Create and Use Snackable Content For Social Media Growth