5 Simple Tips for Being Consistent on Social Media

First, I am doing a FREE Masterclass this Thursday at 12pm EST called Get Your Social Media Organized and Optimized.  Click here to register.  

I have been out speaking at sport conventions, doing recruiting workshops, and talking to a lot of coaches who bought my 365-day social media recruiting calendar and I’m finding that there is a common theme that emerges: we all want to reach our goals quickly and efficiently.

To reach our goals, we know we need to be consistent.   

We are not great at doing it. 

The intention is there, but we are so busy with other things we often don’t have enough time or energy left over to keep up with the tasks that will help build our programs. 

As you know coach, consistent effort is required to be successful at anything.   

Not just any effort, though. I’m talking strategic effort. Focused effort on those essential, key things that will get you where you want to go. 

In one of my favorite books The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy says “Success is doing a half dozen things really well, repeated five thousand times.”  

As you know, you might have the perfect recruiting strategy, but if you are not taking consistent action it is likely not going to work. You can’t just think about the things you should be doing. You actually need to be doing those things. I think it was Amy Porterfield I heard say “Intention doesn’t cook the rice.” 

Today, I am going to talk about how to stay consistent with your social media posting.  These strategies also 100% apply to keeping up with your emailing, texting and phone calls. 

Because you are allowing yourself to be busy, before you know it, days or even weeks can go by without any social media activity on your part, and that is not a good thing. 

It’s better to tweet once a day and be consistent than to tweet 10 times a day for a week, then skip a few weeks because you get busy.

What you need to do is to create a routine that your audience/recruits can follow. The worst thing you can do is to stop posting.

If you are not posting a consistent flow of relevant content to your recruits on social media, it will be difficult to give recruits the feel of your coaching staff, team, and campus, engage with recruits in a timely manner, and be the coach to guide them along the process leading to a commitment. 

Fortunately, there are simple and cost-effective ways share to content in a consistent manner and stay on to top of your social media tasks.   

1. Schedule Time
   Block out time on your calendar every week or monthly to plan and schedule your social media posts in advance. Spend a couple hours one day a month or an hour a week to plan and schedule your social media. This will keep your pages current and consistent even when unexpected workloads keep you too busy to post on your social media. 

Whether you realize it or not, you have messages you can plan in advance: 

Proactively answer common questions recruits have for you this time of year. 

Show them what they would see and introduce them to who they would meet if they were to come and visit campus. 

#Hashtags: Throwback Thursday, Motivational Monday, quotes, quizzes, #FYI and #DYK and other social media conventions are popular with users and give you content ideas

2. Get Organized 

How often have you lost track of the pictures or videos you want to use making it harder and take longer to do something? Or worse, It prevented you from doing it at all? It’s a drag, isn’t it? 

Create and actually use a system to keep track of ideas and information so that you are not wasting time and energy trying to remember things or find them. 

It is not worth the frustration that comes from losing track of ideas and spinning out as the clock ticks away while you are trying to find something.

There are so many good systems to use to get organized.  My best advice is that the best tool is the one you use. Period. The key is just pick one and use it.  Switching from tool to tool is the delusion of productivity. Busy being busy. Getting ready to get ready.  

3. You don’t need more knowledge. You need a plan of action. 

It’s tempting to jump straight into action, but the importance of planning cannot be stressed enough. 

Success is created by making a plan and then acting on that plan every day. 

Following a plan helps eliminate distractions, provides clear direction and keeps you accountable so you keep moving in the right direction. 

The more complicated you make your plan, the less likely you are to follow it so keep it simple: 

• ·      Define your focus/goal is for the next 90 days (If not 90 days, it must still be time-bound) 
• ·      Plan your vital weekly actions each week 
• ·      Keep track of your execution (not just your outcomes) 

4) Use Content Frameworks/Templates 

If you want to create quality content on a consistent basis there are few things you need to have in place to make things easier and more efficient and another one of these is frameworks. 

Whether you are creating an email, outlining what you want to talk to a recruit about on the phone, a training video, or creating social media posts that tell your recruiting story, using a content framework will help you produce quality content more quickly. 

A framework is like a checklist or an outline of what to include in your content. For a social media caption, a simple framework might look something like this: 

Image: 

What is the hook I can use to get them to stop scrolling?: 

What is the story about the image that will benefit the recruit:  

Call to action to create recruiting movement to next milestone:  

Hashtags relevant to recruits:  

By starting with a framework template instead of a blank page, you can more quickly and easily organize your thoughts and deliver a piece of quality content that provides value to your reader. 

5.  Batch work and Leverage technology to increase productivity 

I also batch my work. I try to group “like tasks” together. This might be producing social media content all at once for the week and then using Co-schedule to queue it up. If I were to instead create social media content and put it into Co-schedule every day, it would be more disruptive to my days and take longer. Once I am in the mode of creating those posts, have my templates open and am in Co-schedule — it is much more efficient to do it all at once. 

I find I am better able to get into the flow of a certain type of work and get more done than when I change gears from one kind of work to the next. 

One thing that has worked amazingly well for me, despite my initial resistance to it, is documenting my workflows. I make checklists in google docs and use them as templates. 

I initially did this so I could delegate the tasks to others, but also have found that by using them for myself, it ensures I follow consistent processes and don’t skip important steps. It also frees my mind from having to remember every little detail.

Coach, if you want to stay consistent with posting or with anything really as a recruiter, you need to develop and use systems to make it easier to create and publish on a regular basis. 

If you want my help, email me at mandy@busy.coach.  I have a 365-day social media content calendar to help you stay consistent with your social media posting.  My goal with this product is to save you a ton of time and effort, never run out of things to say, and to engage and attract the right recruits through telling an amazing recruiting story. 

To your success,

Mandy Green 

FREE Masterclass this Thursday at 12pm EST called Get Your Social Media Organized and Optimized.  Click here to register.