There’s nothing worse than deciding you’re going to get a social media account up and running whether that’s for your own personal brand, service or product and you come face first with ‘The Void’.

What do I write?

How do I come up with posts?

Day in day out…

Month in month out…

Where do you even start?

One of the cool things I have found when dealing with a diverse set of clients over the years is that you can always lean on 3 core pillars as a starting point for almost anything!

But first let’s talk Brand!

The 3 Pillars of a Profitable Brand

Brands are intangible, meaning you can’t actually touch or see them.

As such the point of a brand is to shape the people’s perceptions of a company, product, or individual.

Your brand is built on 3 core pillars

1) Who you are - Your story and experiences

2) What you say - Your purpose and value proposition

3) How you say it - Your presentation of who you are and what you say

When we combine these together in your content, it creates a synergistic effect.

So where do you go from here?

Obviously I can’t give you the direct answers you need specifically for your work, I am not you.

But what I can do is show you the 3 Pillars that reoccur across different industries. You can use these as a guide to get started in your content creation process.

If you’re a Personal Brand

When it comes to building your personal brand it’s important to keep one thing in mind - People want to follow real people.

If you have spent any amount of time on twitter following your favourite personal brand have you noticed any patterns that come up in their work?

I’ve noticed almost all personal brands come down to 3 core pillars:

1) MIND - Your Mental Health - Self improvement & Productivity

2) MOVEMENT - Your Physical Health - Training & lifestyle

3) MEDIA - Your Offer - Business & Skillset

Now that we have 3 broad markets we can move within, breaking them down further into topics and sub-topics so we can get closer to developing individual posts.

Grab a notebook and pen for this, I want you to fill these in from the top down with your interests.

Over the next 6-12 months your job will be to use this framework to form the base for unlimited content ideas around your personal brand

An immediate sale with every post is not the goal in the first stages of building online. You want to take a step back, zoom out and realise that your content, as time goes by will introduce people to what you have to offer.

(I am going to run down Services and Products next - so scroll down to Post-By-Post heading where I outline a posting strategy)

If you run a Service Business

Restaurants

Gyms

Physiotherapy clinics

Hairdressers

Coffee shops… etc.

If you run a Service based business your approach will be slightly different.

In this category the 3 core pillars you can lean on are:

1) BRAND - Your Values & Expertise

2) EDUCATION - Services Offered & Facility Features

3) COMMUNITY - Client Testimonials & Transformations

You can do this same exercise with a notebook and pen breaking down the 3 core pillars and getting more specific with your sub topics so it represents your business.

Your job is to note down all the aspects of the business that you want to show online in order to build your profile and gain new clients.

People need to learn how your services can solve their problems.

Show them!

If you have a Product

Now breaking this one down looks kinda same same but different.

The 3 Core Pillars you can lean on are identical from above but with nuances:

1) BRAND - Expertise & Product USP’s - Unique Selling Points

2) EDUCATION - Product Announcements & Tutorials

3) COMMUNITY - Client Testimonials & Client Curated Content

Ideally with a service or product business you will be able to build up an element of ‘Client Curated Content’ that you can share.

This is when someone tags your account in a post that you can re-share onto your timeline.

This is one of the biggest forms of sales converting content when done right, because glowing recommendations from other people is a superior sales tool.

Post - By - Post

For some of you that will be enough to get you started, for those who have been toying with these ideas for a while but have yet to get into a consistent posting habit this is for you.

Whenever I start mapping out my posts the first thing I do is to put numbers to it otherwise it’s easy to get overwhelmed!

There seems to be general rules on each platform as to what the ‘minimum’ posting rates are to keep your account relevant, these are broken down below:

Twitter - 3 to 5 tweets per day 1 to 3 thread per week (on thread days you only need the thread - not the other tweets)

LinkedIN - 5 to 10 posts per week

Instagram - 3 to 7 posts per week

Start with one platform, if you can handle multiple great! But remember consistency will ultimately be the key to growing your digital identity.

Once you have built up a catalog of content on one platform it will be easier to repurpose the ‘good content’ onto other platforms down the line. At that point you will have tried and tested ideas.

This is usually why twitter is recommended first as a platform as there is really no barrier to entry.

You don’t need design skills

You don’t need camera skills

You don’t need editing skills

You only need to be able to type.

Twitter

Taking Twitter as our example with the minimum to get you started, a month worths of content will look as follows

1 Thread per week = 4 threads per month

3 Tweets per day → 18 per week = 72 tweets per month

This sounds less daunting when you break the tweets up into the pillar topics, I also want to note I started with 1 tweet per day for the first 4 months just to get the hang of it.

Something is better than nothing when starting out.

3 Tweets per day:

Pillar 1 - Mind / Brand = 24 tweets

Pillar 2 - Movement / Education = 24 tweets

Pillar 3 - Media / Community = 24 tweets

Then you have something that looks like this.

If you are looking to start out on Instagram - your posting schedule might look a bit different, with video taking more time in production a 3 post schedule would look something like this for the month.

Break it down to what what fits you and your business at the moment.

Block out research and content creation time

The biggest accounts online are not sat there every day filming, writing, editing and putting up content (some do which is impressive) but unless you have full time production capabilities I can only assume you want to be batch creating so you can get back to your clients and life!

Once you have the number of posts you need to create and your initial topic tree filled out its time to get writing!

Coming up!

Next week I’ll be covering the content creation loop and the 3 core pillars of social leverage to actually grow your account.

This will illustrate what batch creation looks like so you can make sure your loop is big enough not to run out of scheduled content before the next set has to go up.

No matter which category you fall into above learning how to build content creation systems into your business will be the key to not letting it take over your entire life, you still have your work to do!

How can I help?

Back to the point that I am not you, I don’t know where you are in this journey of content creation, but breaking this stuff down is what I geek out on!

I’m looking for a few people to go through this process as a case study - We will chat about your business and brainstorm your ‘topic tree’. That way I can give you feedback specific to your industry and needs so you can feel comfortable in the direction you are heading.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in hit reply on this letter or shoot me a message on twitter.

Happy Creating!

Maja Howar