Batching Content Step 1: Find 3-5 Topics

The first step in batching Instagram content is to develop your “Content Pillars.” Content pillars are a subset of three to five topics or themes that make up your content strategy. They should reflect your brand while conveying themes to attract your audience. Once you nail out these pillars, you’ll know exactly what kind of content to make every batch. Some content pillar ideas include:

• Education: create content that teaches your audience something
• Inspiration: create content that inspires your audience
• Promotion: create content that sells a product or service
• Motivation: create content that motivates your audience
• Entertainment: create content that’s entertaining, relatable, funny, etc.

Batching Content Step 2: Analyze Your Best-Performing Posts

…and your worst-performers too! Reference your analytics on each social platform to gauge what creative your followers liked, engaged with, and, most importantly, shared. Keep these winners in mind when creating new content, and leave behind concepts that failed to hit the mark. Rinse and repeat, and don’t reinvent the wheel. 

One way to analyze your content is to find what brings you the best return on your investment. If you’re creating social content yourself, your time is your investment. Don’t just look at “vanity metrics”–likes and comments–but identify what posts drove substantial engagement like website visits, DMs, or shares.

Batching Content Step 3: Brainstorm New Ideas

Once you’ve defined your content pillars and determined what performs well with your audience, it’s time to brainstorm and gather new ideas. Don’t forget you can gather inspiration from other social accounts, Pinterest, and websites. 

Here are Some Quick Ideas to Get You Started:

• Holidays
• Promotions
• Launches (products and services)
• FAQs
• News
• Announcements
• Content Marketing (blog posts)
• Popular Services
• Trending Reels
• Event Recaps
• User-Generated Content (UGC)–someone else creates content with or about your product or service. For example, they might tag you in a post, and you can repost their picture on your page.

Batching Content Step 4: Create or Gather Your Content

Once you know what you’re going to create, it’s time to start gathering assets and putting the content together. You can use free social media resources to make this process fast and easy. Some of my favorite types of content include:

• User-Generated Content 
• Reviews and Testimonials
• High-Quality Stock Photos
• Instagram Story Filters

Batching Content Step 5: Write Captions

This step is interchangeable with step 4, depending on what works best for you. Either way, here’s a quick formula for writing engaging captions for your posts.

• Hook: Draw your audience’s attention with an engaging first line
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  The Message: Get to the point, and tell your audience what you want them to know. 

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• Call to Action: Invite your audience to take action. Ask them to comment, send you a DM, click your bio link, save the post, send it to a friend, etc. 
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• Hashtags: Write your hashtags at the bottom of your caption

Batching Content Step 6: Research Hashtags

The last step in batching social media content is researching hashtags. In general, hashtags are less about a mass amount of viewers seeing your content and more about your content reaching your target audience. When determining the best hashtags for your posts:

1. Use Insights and Analytics to determine your best-performing hashtags, just like you can with content. 
2. Don’t Over-Do It and choose between 5-20 hashtags per post instead.

Researching hashtags doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. You can use this Hashtag Cheat Sheet to identify the types of hashtags to include with each post:

Hashtag Category and Examples:

• Your Brand: #yourbusinessname #yourbrandedhashtag
• Your Industry: #webdesigner
• Target Audience: #dallassmallbusiness
• Community: #womenintech
• Content-Specific: #vlog #freelance #creativelifehacks
• Location: #dallastexas #dallasentrepreneurs