Social media content is a great way to promote your FBA products and business. But it’s not something you can do once and then walk away. You have to keep doing it.
And that’s something a lot of people find difficult. Let’s face it, you have suppliers to deal with, inventory to manage, customers waiting for product, and new products to create. Social media is not top of your to-do list. So let’s look at some tools to help you turn out fresh social media content that people will love.
• The Blogger scheduling tool. If you use Blogger, you can decide to schedule a post instead of publishing it straight away. So for instance you can write your Thanksgiving blog while you’re on the beach in July, and just schedule it to go out the week before Thanksgiving.
• Buffer (buffer.com) helps you schedule postings across different platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. You can manage up to three channels for free, or pay $5 a month to manage more. This takes a lot of the hassle out of, for instance, putting your new product photos on all four platforms – you can do all the work on Buffer instead of having to log into them all separately. The free version also lets you schedule up to ten posts in advance, so you can spend a day writing all your content for the next few weeks, using your time more efficiently.
• An old-fashioned spiral bound notebook! (Okay, you could also use Apple Notes…) How many great ideas do you have when you’re chatting with friends, watching TV, looking at an ad on the metro, queuing for your Starbucks? And then you end up forgetting them. Make sure that whenever you have an idea for a blog post or a fun video, you write it down. It really is that simple – then you’re unlikely ever to run out of ideas.
• If you have Apple, A Beautiful Mess is a great app for photo editing and doodling, particularly if you’re into pets, decor, beauty or food.
• Adding text to pictures and videos, or animating your own videos, is easy with apps like Canva, Crello or Adobe’s Spark Video. Or you can use GoPro’s Quik on your smartphone – and on Windows or Mac desktops – to pull together photos, video and text.
• Use Later if your social media is primarily visual – it’s a great way to organize your posts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. And it’s free.
Many of us feel we have to be ‘inspired’ to make a social media post, or we fit it in between other pieces of work. But actually, planning your social media posts – even if it’s just on a single piece of paper – is one of the best ways to make sure your content is refreshed regularly. Just put columns for each of the media you use (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest for instance) and then use the rows across for time. You can add a third dimension by putting each product, campaign or theme in a different color.
If you organize like this it’s easy to check off content when it’s done, and to ensure that you re-purpose it across the different platforms.
Did we mention re-purposing? That’s absolutely crucial. If you have five good photos of users of your new product, you can make it into:
• a blog post all about the product (add words),
• a video about the new product (animate and add sound or subtitles),
• a Facebook post on each of the photos, with text,
• five separate Instagram / Pinterest photos,
and you can also start an ‘owners of Le Creuset cookware’ or ‘me and my dog’ Pinterest board, why not? Don’t tackle each of these tasks as a completely separate one. They should all share a common content base, and that helps you amortize your work across more different social media, more users, more views, and, hopefully, more sales!