What Goes Into Social Media Content Creation

While seamlessly swiping through glossy social feeds hardly feels labor-intensive, immense unseen efforts crystallize behind the curtain. Understanding the grueling workflows powering the content we mindlessly consume reveals a complex orchestration where minutes become hours and brainstorms transform into posts.

Key Points

• Strategizing themes and engagement goals
• Writing and rewriting succinct, impactful copy
• Art directing and producing eye-catching visual assets
• Scheduling grid construction across platforms
• Analyzing performance to perpetually optimize

Scrolling through stylish brand posts on Instagram or clever tweets, it’s easy to overlook the considerable time and orchestration underlying great social content. Even with the help of Ai tools, developing an effective social media presence that consistently engages audiences requires meticulous planning, strategic writing, visual assets creation, and attentive scheduling.

A Week of Content

Let’s break down everything going into a typical week of content across major platforms:

Brainstorming and Strategizing – 2 hours Kicking things off by reviewing past performance data and sketches out overarching themes and engagement goals for the upcoming month. Auditing what content styles garner most reactions guides strategic planning.

Writing and Editing – 3 hours Crafting initial post copy across platforms that aligns with brand voice while speaking to target demographics. Most posts require multiple drafts spanning an average 30-45 minutes each to perfect tone, messaging and calls-to-action.

Sourcing and Creating Visual Assets – 5 hours Ensuring posts pop in feeds via striking graphics, videos, animations etc. is vital. Designers spend 2-3 hours building visual assets from scratch matching desired themes. Additional time gets allocated for image research, editing, securing licensing rights and branding assets.

Scheduling and Posting – 1 hour Inputting finalized post text and graphics into social media management platforms to queue delivery scheduling for the upcoming weeks and months. This enables spacing content out strategically across networks.

Analyzing Performance – 1 hour Examining likes, click-throughs, conversions and other analytics to gauge engagement and optimize future posting strategies. Regular checks also enable responding to comments or emerging opportunities.

Add up the efforts across essential aspects like strategizing, writing, visual asset creation, scheduling and analytics, and creating a solid week of quality social content requires around 12 labor hours on average. The workload expands accordingly with more platforms, post types, and frequency. But the payoff in brand visibility makes perfecting content workflows utterly vital.

Next time you breeze through a brand’s series of clever Instagram stories or pause on a thoughtful LinkedIn post, recognize countless subtle decisions enable those moments. There are no shortcuts to ingenious social content that consistently converts and compels. The sweat behind the scroll remains real.