Here's Everything You Need to Know About Batch Content Creation on Instagram
As a busy entrepreneur, it’s so important to maximize your online presence and social media approach. In particular, you need your social media to be doing most of the heavy-lifting while you’re off generating money.
The goal of batch creation with Instagram is to create content that captivates your audience, generates conversation, and fits your brand’s identity. In the ideal scenario, you’ll be able to batch create your content in advance so that when the time comes to login, all you have to do is sit down with your coffee, and engage with your audience via comments and direct messages.
Batch creation actually opens up the door to further creativity, better time management, and a more enjoyable time online, cultivating genuine relationships.
Why you should batch create
While creating content in real-time can have its benefits (like immediately utilizing the newest social media trends), batch creation allows you to have the peace of mind of knowing that your content is created and scheduled to post. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we’ll stay on top of posting day by day, but the reality is that the moment something comes up within our business, Instagram posts are the first thing we let slip.
Instagram is the handshake to your business, and because of that, it’s vital that you utilize it regularly. Posting more will lead to more traffic, which in turn will lead to more website clicks and conversions to sales. Batch creating content is a foolproof strategy to ensure that you never fall off the content creation wagon.
How far out you should batch create
Now, we mentioned above that the benefit to creating in real-time lies in having access to immediately utilizing the newest social media trends. Remember when people started using gifs and memes on their business pages this year? That happened overnight.
However, you can still take on this trend-following approach while batch creating.
We recommend that you batch create no more than 2 - 3 weeks in advance. Any more, and you enter the territory of stale content. Any less, and you run the risk of not batch creating enough in case of emergency.
The beauty of batch creation is that you can STILL login and implement those trends that come and go. You can reschedule those pre-scheduled posts, and insert new graphics, hashtags, photos or content that match whatever trend you’re following.
Things to keep in mind
Another benefit to batch creation? The ability to balance your grid and pre-plan your posts. Instagram is such a visual tool, and half of the battle is creating a balanced, beautiful and on-brand grid!
There are two things to remember when batch creating your content:
Make sure that your content is balanced, and not redundant.
We live by a 5 content bucket rule: we create 5 buckets of content that we’ll cycle through weekly. Every time we batch create, we refer to those buckets, and then plug content in accordingly. This makes creating content in advance a breeze!
When batch creating and pulling from your content buckets, make sure your graphics, photos and color story on your grid flow correctly.
As you pull from your content buckets, you have the ability to mix up when you post things! We love to use Later for our batch creation. Once the content is in, we mix the grid up to make sure the color story is appealing to the eye.
Lastly, if you aren’t using a content planning app, you need to start! We love Later, but other options are Planoly and Plann. All offer the ability to batch your content ahead, review it as a preview on your grid, and drag/drop.
