Social Media Batching for Busy Entrepreneurs

Social media is a great place to meet potential clients, find a supportive community, and showcase your amazing services! But let’s be honest… it can suck up way too much time if you don’t have a solid strategy. That’s why we use a batching strategy to churn out consistent content. 

Batching is a strategy of creating content in batches to cover a certain period of time. You can create two weeks worth of content or two months or even an entire year! Batching is essentially a productivity strategy that helps busy entrepreneurs build brand awareness and stay engaged on social media. 

How to Start Batching

Batching is a skill that takes time and practice to master. The best way to start is by scheduling the time on your calendar and sticking to it! We like to create content for two weeks at a time and that requires one full work day. Other entrepreneurs like to create content for an entire quarter which may take a full work week. The important part is to make it a priority by scheduling the time on your calendar. 

Now you may be asking what is the optimal amount of content to create in a single batch - and the answer depends on several factors. It depends on your niche, time constraints, and what your data says is working. Just stick with it (and look at your data!) and you’ll find what works best for you! 

Tips for Batching

There are several tips that make batching easier (and fun!). We love batching and once we got into the full swing of it, it actually became a work day that we look forward to. So here are the tips we use to create content in batches.  

• Content Buckets. Content buckets are great for organizing your ideas and building consistency. They are essentially lists of topics and themes that help guide your content creation. Content buckets ensure that you're sharing branded content that’s relevant to your business and goals. They also help with inspiration by keeping your ideas organized so that you don’t have to go searching.  

• Repurpose. Repurposing is the best! It makes content creation so much more efficient and helps you build trust with your audience. Repurposing content that resonates with your audience helps you build brand recognition and stop the scroll. You can repurpose blogs into posts, videos into blogs, website content into marketing content… Repurposing content is a good strategy even if you’re not ready for batching.  

• Wiggle Room. Leaving wiggle room on your social media content calendar is key for successful batching. You will have days where you just can’t wait to get out something new and exciting, and you’ll need wiggle room to share it. Of course you can post any content at any time you want, but it’s really important to be consistent on social media. Not only for the algorithm but also so that you are sharing content at the optimal times to reach your target audience. 

Resources for Batching

Tips are great but the right resources are what’s really going to make batching social media content work for you! There are several resources and tools that you can use (for FREE) to make batching a much more effective strategy.  

• Scheduling Tool. There are a lot of great scheduling options! Canva Pro, SocialPilot, Hootsuite, SproutSocial, Later… These tools are built to help you plan and schedule social media content so that you can skip the monotonous aspects of posting. A good scheduler will give you the ability to integrate with your design platform. For example, we use Canva Pro to design our graphics and schedule our social media content. Just make sure you do your homework and find the right fit for you! 

• Content Calendar. Having a content calendar separate from our scheduling tool makes batching so much easier. It seems like an extra step but it keeps us on track and gives us backup just in case our scheduler goes down (it happens). You can make a really simple content calendar for free in Google Sheets or buy a template on Etsy (here’s one we created!). The purpose of your content calendar is to have a master copy of your content schedule - an easily accessible visual overview.  

• Templates. Templates make batching super simple because you don’t have to worry about graphic design - just write your captions and drop it into a done-for-you template! Canva is a design platform that has a free version with free social media templates or you can purchase professionally designed templates. We recommend professionally designed templates because they are strategically built to help you with consistency and brand awareness. Check out our shop if you’re interested! 

There are several benefits to batching your social media content. You’ll save time, build consistency, and stay engaged. Once you get into the swing of batching, you’ll never want to go back to the old days of spending way too much time on research, design work, and copywriting. It takes time and practice, but it’s a really good strategy for any busy entrepreneur!