So you’ve created a kick-ass content plan, but now you need to actually create the content. The worst part.

Never fear, here are three easy ways to begin creating social media content and more importantly re-use what you already have. Once you’re 6-12 months into your strategy you should have enough content to begin creating content like a social media pro!

1. Determine what social media content is working for you

Let’s start with the positives! As part of your strategy, you should determine what you have already, that is working for you.

If you’re aiming to generate more leads via your website, then focus on pages that already drive leads OR identify key products/offerings/landing pages and ensure your content plan includes sharing and re-sharing what you already have in the arsenal.

If building engagement is your goal, you focus on what content has historically driven engagement and re-purpose that engagement or create more like it.

Remember most content has a 90-day life span on social media, so re-use & recycle baby

If you are finding it hard to pull together a winning list of content to re-purpose or you’re lacking direction then…

2. Easily create more social media content from your gaps

Ideally, you will have a customer persona or two and you can assess your current & planned content against those personas. But basically you MUST be speaking to your key market/s…. and not to yourself.

Here are some quick win social media gap-fillers:

Turning your FAQ page into social content because if they are FAQs for your web visitors, they will be for your audience on social media as well - plus this gives you the opportunity to really expand on any points you’re passionate about making the content informative for your audience but easy for you to pull together!
Mining your DMs for common requests and turning that into social content or blogs
Checking out your Google Search Console results for common searches that led users to your website
Testimonials - turn any reviews into visual content, case studies to ensure your audience hears from someone who isn’t you about how great your brand is
Review your old blog posts: ensure your CTA is up to date (or add one if it’s missing) and see if you’re able to expand a single paragraph or point into its own blog or pull that paragraph into a social media post

Ideally, you would double down & analyse what type of content has historically converted well with your audience and create new content in that format - blogs, downloads, e-books, infographic

3. Pick the right social media channels for your business

Most small businesses are only ever going to have the resource & capability to manage TWO social media channels. So start with picking the two that make the most sense for your customer persona.

If I was to make a huge generalisation:

The majority of small businesses should be on Facebook
Many small businesses could benefit from Instagram, especially if your target market includes women or people under 40 and you enjoy a good chat via Instagram Stories
LinkedIn is best used as you as an individual. By all means, set up your company page to claim it but you should share and create content as yourself… which takes fronting up to your network and owning your business which can be a bit scary for those new to business ownership
Unless you already enjoy using Twitter, you can probably flag it for your business
SnapChat… if you’re after under 25-year-olds who typically don’t have a lot of money to spend, sure

Website traffic by source/medium available in tools like Google Analytics should help you refine your biggest bang for buck social media channels as well as any collaboration partners and contribution websites to focus submitting your content to… perhaps an old article featured in a specialist industry publication continues to drive traffic to your site long after the publish date…which would make them an ideal publication to partner with again or somewhere to submit your blog posts.

Once you know where your traffic is coming from the easiest thing to do is to focus on the channels that are already working for you…. but if you have the time or budget dipping your toes into a new channel or diving back into previous collaboration can be an excellent way to achieve your social media goals.

4. Don’t worry about looking silly

I used to be an online grammar nazi until I realised I was alienating people who didn’t speak English as their first language as well as people who didn’t have the same education opportunities as I did. Wow, I was a dick.

Loads of people tell me that written language isn’t their strong suit, and that is totally ok. If pressing publish makes you nervous and you’re concerned your spelling or grammar may reflect poorly on your professionalism, download a tool like Grammarly

I’m a keen Grammarly user with the plugin on my browser and as a keyboard on my phone…which not only picks up errors but also suggests synonyms (because I do tend to favour the same descriptions!).