The Secret to Making Social Media Content for Your Doula Business
Are you sick of being on the dreaded content-creation-hamster-wheel? Turns out, there’s a way to make your life a whole lot easier…
If you’ve been wondering how to sustainably run your doula business’s social media, then get out a pen and paper, this episode is for you.
Things you’ll learn in this episode:
How to take back control and stop letting Instagram overwhelm you…
The five steps to pain-free content creation…
How to decide if your current strategy is effective or not…
…and a whole lot more!
When I first started on social media, I was making three posts per day…from scratch, start to finish.
If you’re cringing right now, that’s the right response. If you’re saying “Uh…What’s wrong with that? I do something similar…” Then hang tight, I have a life-changing strategy that will help you get out of the “I have no clue what to post” cycle. (Because let’s face it…you’re probably experiencing that a lot.)
After a while of working this way, I started asking myself, “Hold on. How can I make this easier for myself?” (Welcome to the theme of the rest of 2022. No more hustling, no more grinding. Constantly be asking, How do I make this easier for myself?)
Introducing: Batching. The holy grail of social media strategy.
Batching is grouping smaller tasks together so you can be more productive with your time. You can batch honestly anything in your life. Laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning, whatever, but today I’ll just be talking about social media.
Batching in regards to social media includes writing a month’s worth of captions, (or 60 days, or 90, whatever floats your boat) creating your graphics on Canva, and scheduling all of your posts in an order that makes sense. And when you're done scheduling, you do it again.
Over and over and over and over. Get the idea?
The key here is that you're not doing one post at a time, all the way through, from start to finish. (That's the quick route to overwhelming yourself and despising your social media work...) You're doing all of your captions at once, then all of your Canva pictures at once, and then scheduling all at once.
The biggest takeaway from this episode is that you need to set aside time on your calendar on a regular basis for social media batching. Maybe for you, that looks like one full work day per month, or maybe that looks like three half days per month. So maybe on the first first day you’ll write your captions, on the second day you’ll make your Canva pictures, and on the third day, you’ll schedule all of the posts. Or you just knock out the entire month’s content in one full day. Whatever is best for your work process, do that.
Now, before I actually reveal my five steps to batching, I want to play devil's advocate here… Should we really be batching content? Should we be making tons of content ahead of time and then pre-scheduling it? What if we just post in the moment? What’s wrong with that?
Here's what I think.
I think that social media batching is a necessary part of taking your business to a higher level of efficiency.
100%. Without a doubt, it's necessary.
But here's the thing… I also know that randomly posting on social media in the moment, when you think of a random awesome idea—that can work great too. I personally think that you should be doing a mixture of both.
…Now, what if you only batch, what's the problem with that?
The problem is that you miss out on the really hot topics that are super relevant right now, in the heat of the moment. (Think of trending sounds on reels, or a controversial story in the news.)
…What if you only post live? What if you never batch?
Well, then if something comes up in your life, you might miss a couple of days, and a couple of days might turn into a couple of weeks… And before you know it, you’ll be super behind and become totally overwhelmed. And then eventually, you're not even posting on social media anymore.
See the issue? You can’t have one without the other.
For me, I've actually gone back and forth between batching everything and then only posting in the heat of the moment when I get an idea. I've gone back and forth for a really long time, and I absolutely see the need for both.
My dream for you is that you can always batch at least one month ahead.
So here's what I want you to do: Set aside one entire work day (or three half days, whatever works best for you), and you're going to commit to spending that time creating your next 30 days of content.
OR how about this… What if you only batch 15 posts per month? You have them ready to go completely, and you’re able to just forget about them. You’ll know that no matter what, 15 posts are gonna go out next month. Awesome. And for the other 15-ish days that you don't have any posts scheduled, how about you just come up with your ideas in real-time? Right?
Even if during that month, you can’t seem to come up with any cool ideas in the moment, it’s totally okay because you know for a fact that 15 posts are going out. No matter what. If even if you don't log on to Instagram once, you'll still have 15 posts go out.
That would be almost the bare minimum I want for you, batching 15 posts per month. At maximum, you could do 60 days in advance. I love doing one post a day for 60 days. I love to do batching as big as I can. If I could do 100 posts and get them out of the way, you bet I will.
With content batching, you are gonna save so much brain power by not having to constantly be on that content-creation-hamster-wheel.
And I know that sometimes when we're just starting out, it can be hard to understand just how game-changing this process is…but trust me, this will save you big time. Like, I’m talking BIG TIME.
This technique is something that most entrepreneurs don't learn until wayyy later when they hire out a content team, 2, 3, even 4 years into their business. This framework, if you start it now, from day one, it's going to ensure you don't ever even have to hire a content team. You are going to streamline it. It is so easy for you to do.
Okay, okay. Let me get off my soapbox and finally get into my five steps for batching content. (I'm gonna also throw in a little *bonus idea* at the end that I always teach my students Inside the Birth Worker Academy and now the Birthworker Membership.)
Step #1: Brainstorming. all. month. long.
You need to make sure that you are brainstorming and idea-dumping all month long, but in a very organized way.
Here's what I want you to do: As you go through life, as you scroll Instagram or Tiktok, if you're at the store, listening to a podcast, reading a birth book, whatever it is, and you get inspiration for a post, you need to write that down in the moment, immediately. That could look like using a pen and paper, the notes section of your phone, it could be in Airtable (y’all know, I absolutely love Airtable. Stick around for the end where I have a special surprise related to Airtable…)
Whatever you do, make it organized, make it consistent, and do it all. of. the. time. Like constantly. Multiple times per day, if you can. Make it a habit.
Brainstorming all month is really the key to keeping batching pain-free. Having a plethora of ideas right on hand when you’re ready to create posts.
Step #2: Select your best ideas.
Once you’re ready to actually sit down and do a batching session, you're going to look over all of the brainstorming that you have done over the month. Hopefully you’ll have 100+ ideas that you can choose from, and you're going to select the ideas that are worthy of living on your Instagram grid.
For each idea, you need to ask yourself: Is this idea share-worthy? Is someone going to see this on their newsfeed and want to share it to their stories? Is this idea scroll stopping?
Not all of the ideas you brainstormed over the month are going to actually be good enough to turn into Instagram posts. I would even go as far as saying up to 40% aren't going to ever be used…
Don’t let that 40% discourage you. We brain-dump all of our ideas, and then pick out the good ones, right? That means some of the ideas won’t make the cut, and that’s okay.
Step #3: Copywriting.
On your writing day, the goal is to have dozens and dozens of ideas from inspiration from the previous month, so when you actually do sit down to write, all you’re actually doing is writing. You don’t have to brainstorm new ideas. Because that is sometimes the most challenging part!
You won’t even need to be inspired, you’ll already have your idea ready to go—you just need to turn it into an Instagram caption.
I know one of you is thinking, “Well, where do I actually write the captions? Where can I put them, so they're easy to find, easy to move around, easy to copy and paste over into Instagram, easy to schedule?”
Don't worry. I have the most amazing software for you. It is called Airtable. It is by far my favorite software, and it is totally free. I like to explain it as Google Sheets on steroids. It’s a spreadsheet, but you can do so many different things with it.
Since I am a proud affiliate of Airtable, you can create an account totally for free. You never have to upgrade, and you never have to pay. Go to (link)birthworker.com/airtable, and that will get you in for free, *forever*
You’re welcome!
Step #4: Design graphics.
My favorite place to make graphics is in Canva, however, before you actually start designing, you need to spend a good chunk of time creating your own branded Canva templates for your social media. It seems a little funny, but it's gonna save you so much time in the long run.
So instead of just going to Canva and finding a random template with random fonts and random colors, you need to actually put together a Canva document full of 15-30 branded graphic combinations for you to use on your social media. You’ll use your brand colors, fonts, backgrounds, symbols and shapes, whatever it is you want to include in your brand.
It might take a hot minute to create a solid 15-30 templates, but once you have them done, it’ll be so worth it. You’ll be able to duplicate your branded graphic template, edit it to fit your caption, and be done with it within 15 seconds. No problem. You won't need to take 15-20 minutes creating perfect posts from scratch anymore.
Step #5: Schedule posts.
Now it's time to schedule all of your posts. I love using a platform called PLANOLY. 100% if I were you, I’d immediately go get myself a PLANOLY account. It's by far my favorite scheduling software. I have tried just about every single social media scheduling software out there. I've paid lots of money for some and I've done all the free trials, and I just keep coming back to PLANOLY.
Maybe you want to schedule a post for every other day, or maybe one post every day. But whatever frequency you decide, just schedule the posts, set them up, and forget about it. (Imagine that?!)
Now you're done batching!
Now you can sleep sound at night, knowing that essentially no matter what, you are going to have X amount of posts go out to social media this month, and you don't even have to pick up your phone.
Of course, I wanted to add on one bonus step because this is something that's going to change your life and keep you from overwhelm in the future.
Bonus step #6: Repurpose your content.
So here's how this works. After around six months or so, you can start repurposing every single one of your posts and turning them into new, refreshed posts.
What I want you to do during the batching process is in a spreadsheet, always keep track of the dates you end up posting each piece of content. You guessed it, I do this in Airtable. (If you can’t tell, it’s literally my favorite. I talk about it all the time.) In there, I make sure to keep track of all my captions and the dates that I'm posting. This way, you can easily see which posts have aged to six months.
After six months, you can actually take those posts, give your caption a little refresh, change up the graphic to match your current feed (your branding has probably evolved to some degree over the last six months), and bam! You’ve got an easy, low-maintenance social media post ready to go.
I hope you understand how life-changing that is. After six months, you don’t need to create original content from scratch anymore. Let me say it louder for the people in the back…
YOU WON’T NEED TO CREATE ANYTHING FROM SCRATCH!
If you don’t want to. You can keep grinding if you have learned to love it. But if you don’t enjoy creating content, put in the work for six months, batch create as much as you can, and set up those systems to alert you every time a post is six months old. Then you can go in, repurpose it, update it if you want to, and post it again. So freaking life changing.
Now, if I were to pick one step that is the most important out of all of this, it would be step one, to always be on the lookout for content ideas. Keep your eyes peeled! And always, always, ALWAYS stay on top of writing your ideas somewhere in Airtable, or the notes on your phone. The worst thing that can happen when creating social media content is sitting down on your batching day, and you have zero ideas to choose from.
I don't want that to happen to you.
And of course, yeah, all of this is great. Batching is great…but batching social media content is not worth crap unless you actually have a social media strategy. So yes, you need to work on social media strategy as a part of your overall business strategy. This is something I often talk about: How are you getting your followers off of social media? You can batch create content all day long, but if you're not actually getting them onto your email list, or into your programs, what's the point of it?
How are you nurturing your followers, so they know you, like you, and trust you? You can batch content all you want, but if you're not showing up in stories with your face, if you're not presenting yourself as a normal, authentic human, you're probably not nurturing your audience very well.
Another question I like asking is…
Is your time that you spend on social media bringing you a direct return financially?
Are you literally making money from what you're doing on social media?
And if not, what are you doing right now to fix that? What are you doing right now to create a way to funnel those people either into your in person doula services, or into your ebooks, or digital courses, or mother's circle, or whatever it is?
You need to figure out your BIG PICTURE strategy, because without it, none of this social media stuff matters.
thank you for listening
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.