Using social media to build your online presence is super smart, but also super time-consuming. Here are our hacks for making batch content, saving you time and stress!

If you’re a growing business or aspiring content creator, taking advantage of social media is a must. Not using a free platform like Instagram as a marketing tool, and passing up on that sweet organic growth makes no sense at all.

The hottest thing in the social media game right now is short form video. The rise of TikTok has seen creators sharing content from their humble bedrooms sign record deals and launch fully fledged film careers. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram has admitted that the platform is heavily pushing Reels currently – particularly original content.

And, that’s the thing that is going to get you far – original content.

The tricky part about that is that it takes precious time to create content from scratch. How do you put together high quality, engaging videos that entertain your audience whilst adding value? FROM SCRATCH?

The simple answer is: you don’t.

Running a business, brand, marketing department, or just life, whilst making videos from nothing all the time just isn’t feasible. Not without headaches and stress, anyway. Fortunately, there are some tips and tricks you can follow that’ll make your content creation smoother and quicker.

What is Batch Content?

You’ve heard of batch cooking, right? Well, the same concept applies to batch content.

To save time in the week, you might cook up a giant pot of stew that’ll last you a few extra days. You do all the chopping, peeling, simmering, and stirring in one hit, so you don’t need to do it every time you want to serve yourself up a bowl.

When batch creating content, you simply get your setup, lighting, props, outfits, whatever you need, all lined up, so you can shoot your content ideas for the week or month.

Doing this lets you schedule content to go out over a period of time, so you can relax or focus on other things during that time.

This doesn’t mean you can get away with sharing identical looking videos that all follow a very similar idea, though. In order to keep your audience happy, you still need to keep things interesting. How do you do all this without things taking too long again?

Here are our top hacks for creating time-saving batch content!

Use Analytics & Insights

For free platforms, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok all offer amazing analytics data. You can see who your audience is, where they live, and when they best like to view your content.

You can also select the metrics with which you sort your analytics, enabling you to make various inferences. For example, you can see what content people liked the most, or how far a video reached, and how many plays it got.

Use your analytics to refer to your most popular content. This will show you what type performs best, and what you need to make more of. This is really beneficial when brainstorming your next load of batch content.

Separate Tasks

You may feel like you’re batching by doing everything in one go, but for each video. This is actually not the ideal way to batch create, and will still slow you down. What do we mean?

Well, if you sit down and come up with the idea for a video, write the script, shoot it, edit it, then schedule it all in one go, then do the same for another video, you’re making your life more difficult than it needs to be.

By separating the task of brainstorming, writing, shooting, and editing, you’re letting yourself get in the right frame of mind for each activity. This lets you get into a good flow and rhythm, ultimately saving you time.

On top of this, if you take a whole day just to brainstorm and come up with content ideas, you’ll have loads to pull from whenever you’re feeling a little less inspired.

Keep the Quantity Realistic

When you start batch creating you might think you’ve found the holy grail of content creation, and you’re now able to shoot a whole month’s worth of content in an afternoon.

What happens when you sit down to shoot and don’t even make it through half your planned content, then?

You need to consider your level of experience and skills before setting yourself a target. If you’re new to setting up lighting and cameras, getting ready to shoot might take up more time than you anticipated. If a month’s worth of content is 2 videos, then you might manage it – but you also might need to up your content output too!

Be realistic at first, and aim to create a week’s worth of content. The more you do this, the faster you will get, and the more you’ll be able to get through when you sit down to batch create.

Schedule Content

Lots of platforms let you post content at scheduled times from within the app or site. However, it might be easier to use a third party platform like Planoly or Later. These enable you to manage and schedule all your content in one place, across a variety of social channels.

Once you’ve figured out a content schedule that works for you (takes into account when your audience is most interactive and present, as well as considering upcoming holidays and events), you can set content to be posted at those times. This frees up so much time for working on other things, like creating your next batch of content!

Don’t overlook the music when batch creating your videos. For high quality royalty free music that you can use in any kind of video content, check out Synchedin.

For unlimited downloads of the entire library, subscribe for just $49.99 per year!