This is something that I hear from my clients almost every day:
I just don’t know what to post, Giana!
I have so many different ideas – it’s overwhelming!
How am I supposed to know what to say and when to post it
And for some of us (yes, this has happened to me too!) we just end up getting stuck in a creative rut – we don’t have ideas just easily flowing to us and we.
Either way – let’s get into what to do when you don’t know what to post.
The Power of Batching
If you haven’t gotten to the point where you’re batching your content (which is something that I highly recommend) then you inevitably are going to run into a moment of brain freeze when you don’t know what to post.
Typically what happens is then you just don’t post or you throw up a halfway put together situation and it’s not great.
Let’s help you avoid this by first talking about batching.
What is batching content?
Batching is when you pre-plan and pre-create your content so that on the day of, you’re just copying, pasting, and posting.
Batching saves time, keeps you in your zone of genius, allows you to have content even when life gets in the way and one of the most important things is that it allows you to be more strategic in the type of content you’re posting.
I know that one of the biggest frustrations for online business owners is navigating social media.
My goal is always to make it a lot simpler for you and to streamline the process, batching does that. One of the things that Jenna Kutcher says, which I love so much and have really tried to adopt, is that you should spend 10 % of your time creating and 90 % of your time marketing.
So one piece of content can go a lot farther than just the post on Instagram that’s going to live and die in 24 hours.
When you batch your content – you’re able to be much more intentional about how you’re using it. You’re also able to plan breaks, time off and really avoid burnout.
Back up to Batching
When you get into a day or a week, when you don’t know what to post, or even if you normally batch your content, but you’re sick, or it’s a holiday weekend and you just are behind, which hello is normal, it’s totally okay, here’s what I want you to do.
I’m going to give you three options. You can use them all. You can use one of them, whatever resonates the most with you, grab it, hold on to it, and use it. Don’t feel like you have to do it all.
Anytime I give you any tips or hacks, don’t feel like you have to do the whole dang thing. Just take what works for you and run with it. That’s how I’ve developed the majority of my business strategies. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve absorbed a lot, and then I’ve taken my own expertise and experience and mushed it into a strategy that works for me. THAT is how you make the most of your investments and have longevity in your business.
- Repost a Top Performing Piece of Content
The first thing that you can do when you don’t know what to post is to repost a top performing piece of content.
On Instagram, go to the little hamburger menu, which is the three lines on the right-hand top side on your profile, click Insights, and then you can filter it by posts in the last year, in the last three years, etc.
You want to look at overall engagement or reach. Likes don’t matter, comments don’t matter.
Overall engagement: reach, saves, shares, those are the things you want to look at as far as a top performing post. Instagram will literally line them up to show you these are your top performing posts from best to least performing.
Choose a top performing post and repost it.
By repost, I mean literally use the same graphics or same video with the exact same caption and repost it. You can use different hashtags or maybe edit the caption a little bit if there’s a different CTA that would make more sense now in your business.
Edit it as needed, but repost the same thing. Now, in order to repost, I’m not talking about resharing it to your stories. I’m talking about posting it as if it’s a brand new post, just reusing the copy and the graphic or the video.
That’s the first thing that you can do. Now you’re going to say, well, Giana, but isn’t my audience going to know? They’ve already seen this. They know this content already.
I promise you, they won’t know, they won’t care. I’ll address this a little bit more toward the end of this blog.
- Repurpose Your Content
Your second option is to repurpose a top performing post.
How is that different from reposting?
We have a couple different options with repurposing. For the most part, you’re going to use the exact same caption. What’s going to change is the graphic or the reel.
You can take a reel that performed really well and turn it into a carousel.
You could take a carousel or a graphic post that performed really well and turn it into a reel.
You could take a reel that performed really well and just reshoot it or even use some B-roll, use the same text and just repurpose it in that way, with a newer audio.
Repurposing is using the exact same piece of content, exactly how it is and changing up the visual and maybe changing a few things around. It gives some new life to the copy you’ve used before.
The other thing with repurposing that I love to do is, I’ll take a post that I really enjoyed creating or that I felt had a lot of value, but maybe for whatever reason it didn’t perform as well.
I will take that same story, hack, content theme and turn it into a different format. Sometimes just changing the hook or just changing the wording around a little bit will make the post more impactful than initially.
- Craft an Introductory Post
This is something that you can incorporate on a monthly basis into your content plan, is to do an intro post and tell people what you do.
Now, there’s all different ways that you can do an intro post.
- You can do 10 facts about me
- Three things I hate
- Secrets nobody knows
- Unpopular opinions
Anything that you can do that’s a little bit of fun, shows your personality, shows the value that you bring to the online space is a great post to do on a regular basis.
You do want to make sure when you create a post like that that you’re including an engaging CTA. (CTA is a call to action)
Typically that’s at the end of your post. It can be something as simple as
“Comment below if we have any of these things in common.”
“Comment below and tell me your unpopular opinion.”
“Comment below and tell me your favorite thing about X, Y, and Z”
Your goal is to get a conversation started.
Now, the next thing people will say to me,
“Giana, I put those engaging CTAs and nobody responds.”
You have to train your audience to respond. You need to have regular engaging CTAs.
When they do respond, you need to reply to their comments and at least continue the conversation, send them a DM.
Sometimes that takes time, but you still got to do it.
And remember, even if they aren’t directly engaging, it doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention!
Your Message – on Repeat
I want to rewind for a second and talk about repurposing and reposting because in my content membership, The Powerful Presence Collective, questions that I get asked all the time around this are:
People have already seen that content. I’ve already said that. Aren’t people going to get sick of hearing the same thing?
The short answer is absolutely not.
I have some ride-or-die followers, the followers that are in my DMs every single day, that vote on all my polls. There are times where I will slide into their DMs and leave them a voice note and say things like, Hey, so and so, did you see I just launched X, Y, and Z? I think it’d be a really good fit for you, and they’ll say, Giana, I didn’t even see that. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.
These are my followers that pay attention and they are still missing out on my offers!
So your people do not always see your content, especially your feed posts. We all are at the mercy of the algorithm and what Instagram deems valuable to show.
That includes our stories, because if you think about it, when you go into your Instagram and look at your story bubbles, it’s not always the same lineup, the same order. Sometimes I’ll go in there and be like, I don’t even know who this is that is showing up in my top five stories!
Who is this person? Then I have to deep dive and be like, oh, yes, wow, I haven’t seen her content in ages!
So that is one of the negative sides of Instagram is that really, I don’t know what the number is, but at one point, it was like only 7% of your audience sees your posts on any given day.
This is why repurposing and having your core stories is so important. People need to hear things multiple times before it gets through their brains, all of us do. If you think about it, if you work with the general population, they’re not consuming content the same way we are as business owners. They’re jumping on, they’re casually looking, maybe they’re on for five minutes, and then they’re off.
Even if you work business to business, business owners are getting on Instagram and not necessarily always looking for tips or hacks. A lot of times they’re popping on to post their own content, engage with their own people, and then they swipe off. So if they’re not seeing your post in their first couple scrolls through the feed, they’re not seeing them. Unless they’re going to your page for a reason, they’re not seeing them.
We truly end up making more work for ourselves sometimes!
Sometimes when I’m planning my content out, I even catch myself doing it like, gosh, you do not need to create all new 30 days of content, but we’re creative and we get excited and we have all these ideas. So I get it, I’ve been there.
But we don’t need to do that! We don’t need to create brand new content. We can take those core hacks, tips, stories, opinions and reuse them, repurpose them, repost them over and over again so that our audience really, truly gets the message. Don’t forget, you have new people coming into your space. You have people that maybe weren’t ready to hear what you had to say the first time you said it. It is okay to repost.
I do want to mention that if you just, in general, need help with really understanding your core stories and understanding your brand and those topics that you want to be consistently talking about.
If you want a framework to batch your content to plan it out in a way that’s more organized and systematic, then please go grab my free workshop. It’s called Create Better Content. There’s three training videos, they’re all under 20 minutes and a workbook that goes along that walks through with lots of prompts and ideas and brainstorming suggestions. This workshop will help you so much to set your foundation for what your content needs to look like moving forward.
Helpful links:
Follow me on Instagram HERE
Listen to this podcast episode HERE
Join my membership, The Powerful Presence Collective HERE
Grab my free workshop, Create Better Content HERE
