Be honest: Are you posting content on social media as often or as consistently as you would like? Or do you wish there was a way how to make a consistent posting schedule easier to achieve?
If you answered yes, keep reading!
Consistent posting is one of the top issues we keep hearing from interior designers and it’s not surprising – producing content and posting consistently can get tricky when you have all the other things to do in your daily life.
You need to grow your business, constantly work on getting in new clients and, of course, work on client projects, dealing with contractors, and everything else. No wonder you have limited time to spend on social media!
Now, before you start to think that you need to employ a full-time marketer to get your socials in order, read on to learn how we plan our content for a month or more ahead.
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The secret to posting consistently on Instagram
So, what’s the secret to always posting consistently and avoiding long times of inactivity?
It’s quite simple, actually, and all about sitting down and scheduling your planning session on your agenda so you actually do it, instead of trying to find the time in between other tasks.
Once you sit down, it’s helpful to have a system that you can just follow, no matter whether you feel like creating content or not at the moment.
Here at Straight Ahead Social, we are big fans of systems, workflows and generally making work easier for yourself. Otherwise, it might be easy to slip into the routine of creating content whenever you feel like it, which is exactly the opposite of achieving consistency.
Why is it important to post consistently?
On Instagram, how often your posts are shown to your followers depends on several factors that the algorithm evaluates to figure out how valuable or relevant your profile might be to its users.
Posting consistently is one of the major factors that Instagram looks at. And that’s not the case just for Instagram, but other social media platforms too! Facebook, TikTok, YouTube – basically any social media platform that you might want to use for your interior design business.
So, if you want a bigger reach on social media and build a following that is engaged and open to becoming your clients, you need to be posting consistently, that is at least a couple of times per week.
Having said that, it’s understandable if you don’t have time to post every day. It’s fine to do what you can, whether it’s posting once per day or three times per week. Posting some content regularly beats not posting at all and whatever number you choose, doing it consistently will help you rank higher on Instagram. So, whatever posting frequency you choose, try to do it consistently.
Also, if a new potential client lands on your profile for the first time, they will get a much better impression if they see that you post new content regularly, as opposed to seeing that the last time you posted something was several months ago.
Scheduling social media content in advance VS posting on the fly
Now, you might say that to post consistently, you don’t need to pre-schedule your content, you can just post on the go as long as you do it consistently.
That’s 100% true, but sometimes you might be too busy to post something, or life gets in the way, or you feel down or uninspired, or… a million other reasons.
Achieving consistency is much easier by planning content in advance. Otherwise, the risk of falling off the wagon is just too high, and then once you stop posting, it gets harder to get back on track.
Our content planning process
In our content planning process, we use three primary tools:
- Asana;
- A (Google) spreadsheet planner;
- A social media scheduler.
Asana
Asana is a project management tool that allows you to create and manage projects, share files, and collaborate on tasks with other team members.
Our Instagram project in Asana includes everything about our Straight Ahead Social Instagram account, including individual cards for actual posts.
The whole board is Kanban-inspired, meaning it contains lanes for different stages that the content is in, such as the caption writing stage, content that needs to be approved, or backlog of posts.
Each type of post has its own card that can be replicated. Each card contains its own sub-tasks that are related to this type of content. By creating a copy of the card you can have a good overview of the content you are creating or that needs to be created.
A (Google) spreadsheet planner
Our planning spreadsheet contains all the posts that are planned for the upcoming days or weeks, including all the relevant info about the posts: date of publishing, post title, content type, the caption field, an Asana link field, and other fields if needed.
The first step in our planning session is looking at the spreadsheet to get an overview of the amount of time that new content needs to be planned for, including any special dates such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Fourth of July, or Black Friday.
It’s helpful to have a set posting schedule with specific content pillars or post categories for each posting day, e.g. Monday design tip, Thursday transformation, Friday flat lay, and so on. This way you always know how much of each type of content you need for the month ahead and you can just slot in the content that fits your schedule into your content planner.
Once the special and seasonal content is filled in, it’s time to go back to Asana and look at our content backlog to see what can be used in the content calendar for the upcoming period.
You can also just note down your post ideas directly in your content calendar and then create them in Asana to keep the content cards with relevant subtasks. It’s also possible to plan your content directly in Asana – just switch to the calendar view.
Once all your content is laid out, whether in a spreadsheet or in your Asana calendar, the next step is to schedule it using a social media scheduler.
Social media scheduler
There are many schedulers on the market, such as Later, Planoly, Tailwind, or the Content Creator Studio from Facebook.
While the core functions are usually the same, various schedulers will have different additional functions, like using hashtag groups, the ability to schedule Reels, or reposting on other platforms – so choose the scheduler based on what suits your needs.
Whichever scheduler you choose, your content should be tailored to the platform on which you are posting. For instance, while it’s not possible to post clickable links in Instagram captions, you can do so in Facebook posts.
So, always make sure to adapt your captions to each platform. For example, if are posting about a new blog post that you’ve just published on your website, include the link in your Facebook post, but refer to the link in the bio in the Instagram caption.
And once everything is scheduled, you’re done!
Final thoughts on planning social media content
So, this is how you can plan your social media content in advance. The great thing about this planning process is that you can use it in whatever way suits you – whether it’s to plan just one month ahead, or three.
Just remember: always allocate time to plan your content, use the tools that you are comfortable with, and the process will become easier as you get used to creating consistent, great interior design content.
