Whitewed Advise: How to make your social media life a bit easier!

Here at Whitewed, I work with engaged couples, wedding venues and suppliers alike, and 13 years in the industry and many thousands of contacts means I have a true and realistic view into how both sides of the industry react, perform, cope, and what their processes, challenges and wins are.

Just now, it can be really hard to find the enthusiasm for social media posting, especially if you feel like you’ve said it all before or you don’t have any new content.

One of the reasons why social media can become a bit of a drag is because you may not have a process in place to manage it – and so here are my top 5 tips on how to make social media more manageable, quicker and easier.

Have a content plan

Take time at a set point in the month to plan your social media posts for the following month and decide on the frequency of posts across the week.

By no means do you have to do daily posts, even just 2 or 3 posts each the week will keep your following engaged. To decide on when the best days and times to post are, simply review your insights to see when your audience are online, for example, Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays at 7pm.

Now that you know which days of the month you will be posting I recommend you have a content framework that you work to in order to make it easier each month to decide, you could include some of the following, for example:

A ‘behind the scenes’ post

A post about you, the business owner

A testimonial

A Real Wedding

A Styled Shoot

A set-up image

An introduction to a new product or service 

A feature or series – perhaps a weekly top tip or inspirational quote

Once you have a bank of content ideas, you can then look at your month’s plan and ‘book them in’.

Scheduling

Posting ‘as and when’ is more time-consuming than scheduling a month’s worth of posts in advance, so I recommend setting time aside each month and scheduling all posts for the month’s period in one sitting…it will be a great tick off the list! By doing it this way, it won’t feel so onerous, and it will enable you to post ad-hoc with bits of news that you want to share as and when without it feeling like a drag.

For Facebook and Instagram, I recommend Creator Studio – it’s a great app that’s free to use on Facebook and connects both platforms. It allows you to add a number of images and tag businesses in, something that some scheduling apps don’t allow. You can schedule, publish immediately…or indeed make changes too.

BUT, if you do schedule in advance, don’t disappear from social media altogether! In order to appear on people’s feeds, you need to be social. Go on daily, like and comment on posts, share stories and Instagram and Facebook will like you and keep you ‘up there’!

Have a document of hash tags ready

Whilst I don’t recommend you use the same hash tags over and over again, you will have a series of hash tags that you use regularly (company name, location , and a series of hash tags that relate to each of your products and services – so why not have them in a Word document for example, ready to copy and paste

Don’t be afraid to re-use / re-visit old content but use in a new way

This year has been difficult for social media post inspiration, as many of us have had very little new content to share, but don’t despair!

You will have a whole series of wonderful images, posts, reviews, blogs – and remember that your following will be changing all the time. Don’t assume that you can’t re-use or freshen up old post content or imagery – of course you can, just make sure there is a period of at least 6 months between the use of it and refresh the content when posting.

Have fun with it

Social media doesn’t have to be boring – and there are always soooo many ways to liven up your feed and freshen up your skills.

Instagram particularly is always advancing, check out the Reels and see how you can get your message across in this brilliantly interactive way!

That's it from me, good luck with your social media plans and most importantly - keep visible.

Kindest, 

Natalie Lovett, Director of The Whitewed Directory