3 Ways to Make Your Content Planning More Efficient

Don’t Post Everywhere

Keep the number of platforms that you post to a minimum. 

While it’s tempting to choose a handful of platforms to post to, you risk overcomplicating your strategy. Posting to multiple platforms requires more time, and effort. And it’s not always worth it. You’re more likely to see diminishing returns if you take a ‘shotgun’ approach to social media. 

Post on fewer platforms, interact frequently on those platforms, and measure your progress. 

This will lead to less burnout and better results. 

Simplify Your Posting Plan

Unless you’re a social media agency, you don’t need to have a highly complicated content planning system.

Use the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid).

For my content planning, I’m using Google sheets. A freely available web based software that functions like Excel. You’re probably already aware of both of them, but you may not have considered it for content planning.

I use sheets by putting the title on the left, and have a column for each month of the year. It’s a fairly straightforward way to give yourself an overview for the entire year.

I use color-coded cells to indicate the month in which I’m either planning to, or have, posted the content. I use letters to indicate which channels I’ve posted to — V (for video), S (for social), and B (for Blog).

If you’d like to set up a system like that, you can see what it looks like in the image below:

Always Be Ready for Inspiration

Keep a notebook handy, and always be prepared when new ideas strike. This is an easy way to build a library of ideas to pull from. 

When noting your ideas, you don’t need to have a fully fleshed out concept or outline. Capture the headline, so that you’ll have something to come back to later. 

As long as you recall the general idea, you can spend time researching and fleshing out the content over time. 

It’s much better to have an idea to work from, rather than have to sit down to an empty page every time. It takes much more effort to have to come up with a new idea every time you site down to write.