24 | Stop Reinventing The (Engagement Post) Wheel

Ever felt overwhelmed by the relentless demand for fresh, engaging content? Take a breather and join us as I chart a course towards a more manageable social media strategy that doesn't skimp on audience connection. This episode peels back the curtain on the power of recurring posts, those trusty templates that can become your content calendar's best friends. I'm talking about crowd-pleasers like 'Wear it Wednesday' or 'Fast Finger Friday'—simple yet potent tactics for boosting engagement and potentially ringing up sales. And because we're all about practical steps here, I'll set you up with some homework to help you track which types of posts truly hit home with your followers. Plus, get the scoop on tools that streamline your scheduling, freeing you up to focus on your passion.

Navigating the tightrope between personal and professional life is no small feat, especially when social media demands a slice of your time. But what if I told you that connecting with your audience could be as simple as sticking to what works? That's right—no need to reinvent the wheel every week. In this chat, we break down how to balance life's roles with a thriving online presence, leaning on winning strategies and reliable post formats. Tune in for a blend of encouragement and actionable advice that could reshape your approach to online engagement, and when you're ready for more tools to fine-tune your strategy, check out my website. Here's to keeping the hustle at bay and making social media work for you.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Maximizing Engagement Through Content Creation
• 15:17 Simplify Social Media Engagement Strategy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Content creation sometimes can just feel like the hamster wheel we can never quite get off. I'm hoping to give you that out through today's episode when we talk about no longer reinventing the wheel when it comes to the engagement post wheel. Every time you post on your business page story or Facebook group, you should not feel like you always have to reinvent the wheel. Content creation now can be initially exciting, but sometimes it just becomes a chore over time. If you know, you know. But why recreate or figure something else out if what you're already doing is gaining the reaction or response or action from your audience that you were hoping for? Let's turn down the hustle by taking advantage of reoccurring weekly or maybe even monthly staple posts and let's not fight the algorithm. Appreciate the algorithm for what it is, but give your audience a sense of predictability so they know when to look for specific posts from you. Today we are going to talk about three different types of posts. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2: 1:16

You're listening to Turd Down the Hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online t-shirt business by working smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic tee and turn up the heat press because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host digital marketer. Cold brew lover t-shirt maker. Freckled hype girl and owner of Sunkist Virtual Assistant Amy. Old hype girl and owner of Sunkist Virtual Assistant, amy.

Speaker 1: 1:47

The first type of post type is template post. Template post nearly any business could use. You could really tweak it, no matter what you sell, and it's not necessarily directly tied to the person or the company per se. So queen bee graphics and designs she is the one that creates all of the graphics used in my content, calendars and tea party planners. She generally includes roughly 14 of these type posts in her engagement collections. If you're curious to see what they look like, maybe you haven't owned a collection before just head over to sunkissvacom, forward slash 24.

Speaker 1: 2:27

And I have put out an example of a few of these posts in my show notes. These posts can range from mental health Monday. Traditional Tuesday. Wishlist Wednesday. Throwback Thursday. Flash sale Friday, spotlight Saturday. Show it off Sunday. You start to get the point. So I recommend you schedule these posts in your group and observe it for one month, or maybe even two, and figure out which of these posts Templated posts elicit the most response from your audience.

Speaker 1: 3:05

Once you have identified the maybe one to two best performing template posts, then I want you to move these to occur every week. And if you want a super simple way to make these occur every week, I want you to check out episode 20, where we talked about admin assist in your Facebook group, and it's all about different tools that you can use. I break down what admin assist is and how you can use it, and for these type of posts, admin assist would be perfect. So I'll give you two really popular templated posts to start thinking about first. The first one is Wear it Wednesday. When you post this graphic, ask your followers or group members to share a selfie of themselves or someone else wearing an item from your business. Participants are then entered to win a $5 store credit just for participating. But why I also really like these template posts, or this one specifically, is that their submissions could also double as marketing content. It's a win-win. Make sure you ask for permission, though, before resharing their photo on social media or website if you don't have that included in your terms of use on your website.

Speaker 1: 4:25

Another idea for a templated post would be Fast Finger Friday. You could reschedule this one every Friday, and the way I like to do this is just pick one screen print that you currently have in stock and you're trying to destash, and you will set a price for these items. Maybe you only have so many available, like you have three of this print. Then you say the first person gets this print and a mystery color tee for $18. The second one to comment gets it for 19. And then the third one gets it for 20. So they have to be quick. So it's kind of like a fun engagement but then also a way for you to make money as well. I've also done this where maybe I've had multiple prints available of different designs. Maybe I post I would do no more than four designs at a time. So you post all four designs and you tell them how many of each that you have, but the same logic still applies. So first one to comment gets it for 18, 19, 20, even if their design is changing.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Template posts are a great way to start getting off that engagement post hamster wheel without too much effort. If you need help getting started or you're not sure of kind of where you should lean towards with which template posts to use, then I recommend you just grab a content calendar from me on my website. All of those themes are going to include templated posts. So here's your homework. You ready for each post type. I'm giving you some homework. So if you can write it down, great. If not. You can just check out the show notes after this episode ends and I will have it all broken out for you. Head to sunkissvacom forward slash 24 for these show notes.

Speaker 1: 6:15

Okay, the first set of homework. I want you to schedule at least 14 template posts each month for two months and analyze which ones get the best response and adopt that as your weekly staple posts for the next two months. And then which ones get the best response and adopt that as your weekly staple post for the next two months and then switch it up as required. So I like to switch up my template posts in my group every few months or so. So my audience is expecting something consistently each week, but they get to change up the prompts and see something different. For me, moving on to post type, number two would be personalized posts. So if we have templated posts, super can on one end of the spectrum. Personalized posts would be on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. So again, these are not templated, but they do encourage your audience to share more about themselves and it gets you off that hamster wheel of trying to figure out what should I be posting and always trying to think of new things.

Speaker 1: 7:13

This is just a set it and forget it so you could ask them different fun questions, like in September, are you a pumpkin spice fan? Just schedule that. Maybe put a gift with it or a photo of you with pumpkin spice. Or maybe, if it's in June, asking them are you ready for summer break or what are you already doing on summer break? And then maybe pull a photo of you from last year from summer break and show what you were doing this time last year. That way you can put some personalization to it. But what you can do is just schedule these all in advance, and they're really fun questions. People love giving their opinion. If you're asking their opinion, they're ready to give it. So give them an opportunity to share, and personalized posts are great for this. Just very simple questions, maybe a this or that, just something fun to get them chatting. So your homework is to schedule out 12 monthly personalized posts for the entire year. If your scheduling software does not allow this, at least go ahead and draft out what you are going to schedule and go ahead and set a reminder, maybe an Asana Google Calendar. Put it in your product job organizer as a reminder of when you need to come back to schedule the rest. If you need examples or ideas of what to schedule each month or what kind of questions to ask, head to sunkissvacom, forward slash 24 for the show notes and I have a whole list of questions ready for you.

Speaker 1: 8:42

The third type of post type that you can use to get out of that content creation rut is a hybrid post. So it's a mix of a templated post with a personalized post. This post type is typically my go-to. Hybrid posts become a theme post that you repeat weekly and monthly. So it will give you an idea of what to post each week or month. But the ability to batch post hybrid posts well in advance may be limited. So, because it's not a templated post, the information you're putting into this hybrid post is going to need to be accurate, real time information. It's not something you can future predict, so it's going to take some work on the spot to create. But at least you have some sort of guide, versus with the personalized posts, kind of truly creating it from scratch. A hybrid post gives you a guide. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So a birthday post Now. If you're just asking, everyone share your birthday. If you have a birthday this month, that would be a great template post because you could just post that to your group or your page and let people respond. But in my membership group, product Drop Organizer Club, I like to shout out people with certain birthdays, so I have their birthdays and I create a post that is directly tied to those birthdays for that month so I can recognize them and let them know they have a little gift card in their inbox to celebrate.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Another popular hybrid post is top contributor. So while the post itself again is templated selecting your winner every month that's where it becomes a hybrid post. Encourage your audience to engage for their chance to win and maybe, if you want to alleviate the same person winning each month and give more people a chance, you can do a drawing and maybe give entries based on monthly orders. So like first place gets five entries, second place four entries, third place three entries, so forth. If you're looking to set up a top contributor program or you don't know where to start and you want way more ideas than what I just gave, then I've already done an episode on this. Check out episode 17,. Sunkissvacom forward slash 17. It's going to be Facebook group tools top contributor.

Speaker 1: 11:07

I talk all about how to build your own top contributor program, another type of hybrid post. This one was really popular for a while, but then Facebook, of course, as it does, changes the type of posts it allows in groups and on pages when it comes to hyperlinking posts. But it was in case you missed it, i-c-y-m-i. If you search that on my website, you'll get some more ideas for that, even a template. So every Saturday I would do a complete wrap up of the week so those who may have missed what happened in my group or my business maybe product drops or anything like that they can easily reference it. In one place I even highlighted popular posts or questions that people had and connect them with those certain posts. So how Facebook has changed is it is no longer allowing right now, at the time of this recording of this episode hyperlink posts. I taught you how to do that. If you search that on my website, I see why I how to build that into a post. But then now also they're not even including links in a lot of the main posts. So if your group is restricting that, this might not work, or you could still do a full writeup of I, c Y, m, I or, in case you missed it post and give them a full kind of like summary wrap up for the week and then just tell them check the first comment for all the links. And you could still use this strategy and hybrid posts. You just got to get a little bit creative. Based on the tools provided, you could also take some of those templated posts and create them more into hybrid posts, so it's not just set it and forget it.

Speaker 1: 12:51

So for a while I was rotating in what would you do Wednesday? So I would give them a certain instance and ask them what would you do in this situation? You know, kind of like those TV shows where you're like watching the reality shows or they're like getting punked or something and it's like, oh my gosh, what would you do in this situation? Asking those kinds of questions, because we do that a lot in the military. It's called chair flying the mission, so you're kind of walking through step-by-step and making sure everyone knows how they would execute if this were to happen. So if you're likely to see that scenario in the air, you're better prepared to address it because we've already worked through it.

Speaker 1: 13:32

So that was kind of the idea behind what would you do Wednesday? I actually did the similar thing in my retail group. It was would you rather Wednesday? And I would either set up a poll or I could just create a regular post type. But it was like super fun. It's like those middle school questions, like if you just went to the bookstore and bought one of those like fun books where it's like would you rather lick a bottom of a foot or would you rather eat a spider, or something like that and my audience really enjoyed it, so much so that a couple of weeks I'm human where I miss it I would have members or my customers post to the group like hey, where's the question today? Like they really had fun with that post. So that's a good idea for a hybrid post.

Speaker 1: 14:12

So your homework for hybrid posts is choose one weekly hybrid post you want to try. Again, I recommend trying out the, in case you missed it, if you can keep up with it. Or maybe just do it monthly and commit to scheduling it every week or every month. So just try it for one month at a time and see how your audience responds. So let's wrap this episode up. So if you want to get out of that content creation right beyond a content calendar and you're wanting to change up kind of the posts you're providing to your group. I don't want you to stay stuck. If you stay stuck and you do nothing, that's worse than just getting something out there, getting it posted and just try. Or you're not maybe in a position where you can invest in a content calendar, or you're not to that level where you want to start using one, where you're making a post each day. So this episode is a great place to start with either those template posts, personalized posts or hybrid posts. You can get started for free.

Speaker 1: 15:17

I know you're juggling a lot of things within your business, not to mention juggling life as a whole, whether it's wifehood, if that's a word wifehood I'm recently engaged, so I'm still learning the terminology Wifehood, motherhood I'm recently engaged, so I'm still learning the terminology Wifehood, motherhood. You're nine to five or maybe you're trying to remember if you gave your dog's heartworm medicine this month, inflantick or not, or if that was already last month. Maybe that's just me, but there's a lot going on. But engaging with your audience and scheduling posts is not as complicated or as scary as you think it may be. It's quite simple. Just pick something and go with it. If you find something that works too. Don't move on to the next shiny penny. So if you find a templated post that they are responding to like where Wednesday, don't get your wheels all spun up about trying to figure out another template post. You've already seen that this works. Let's keep doing what's working. I can't wait to hear what post type you try and how your audience responds.