Do You Have a Plan B?

Can we remain present on socials when shit goes sideways?

Jun 11, 2023
Branding and Web Presence, News

Hello, gorgeous creature!

Sorry for the break in newsletters, I had personal shit to deal with. Don’t even look at my socials for the last month, there aren’t any! My last newsletter went out just before (like an hour before) this personal shit happened, even though it was written & scheduled the day before.

So let’s dig into ways we can still deal with personal stuff and take the time we need to process and work through it, and still look effective in our businesses at the same time.

Do You Have a Plan B?

We all know shit happens.

But when you’re an entrepreneur without a team, when shit happens, shit stops. And I mean, everything stops. Nothing gets posted on socials, newsletters don’t go out, blog posts don’t get written, and videos don’t get uploaded.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to have a bank of content for the next six months and always work that far in advance. Of course, you can if you want. But if you have this much scheduled, it doesn’t leave time for you to be able to react to things that are happening in the world or the market you’re in. Maybe an idea of what’s happening for the next couple of weeks, maybe the next week is all scheduled and then you have ideas-ish for the next few weeks, but nothing firm.

Also, your content bank isn’t going to be the same length for every platform. If you upload YouTube videos once a week, it might make sense to have 4 weeks scheduled to post, but on socials like Twitter and IG, it might only make sense to have a week or two done at a time.

Even when shit doesn’t just happen, we don’t want to be on the content creation hamster wheel of creating and posting then creating and posting, which requires us to be chained to our desks or working out daily stories off the cuff. We need some buffer time between creating the content and needing to sit down again and create some more.

Until I went through this, I didn’t realize how important batching content was. I try to batch my content, but it doesn’t work most of the time! I generally batch IG posts when I write a new article because a lot goes into making them, and it’s easier to make them all at once to cover a couple of weeks. But if I’ve not published an article, there’s nothing to batch.

Get a Scheduling Tool

As entrepreneurs, it’s important that we’re top of mind to our followers all the time, we’re keeping them informed of what’s going on and adding value to their feeds with our posts. But it’s exhausting, and let’s be honest, it’s a full-time job in itself (that’s why there are Social Media Managers). Don’t get me wrong, we always want to be present on socials, but we likely don’t have the time to be there how we want.

Animal from Sesame Street pressing a button

The scheduling tool, for the most part, doesn’t really matter. Get what you like, that does all the things you want and works for your budget. Remember, it’s not a one-and-done affair, you can pick one to use right now, and then change to something else in 6 or 12 months, when either you have a larger budget, or have different needs.

My preference is not to schedule too far in advance. We live in a world where horrible shit happens all the time, and I don’t want to post something that’s insensitive to something that’s happened. I don’t think I post things that could be misinterpreted as being pro-or against- something, but for me, it’s more being insensitive to the world at large.

Personally, I use Metricool to schedule all my socials. But I have a legacy deal on my plan, which you can’t get anymore. My other favorite scheduling software is SmarterQueue, but it’s one of the most expensive (of course!)

Here’s an affiliate link for a paid Metricool account, but I’ll be honest, the free version is awesome too! On the free version, you can schedule 50 posts a month.

Create Graphic Templates

Take all the guesswork out of creating content by creating some go-to graphics in Canva (or whatever your graphics program of choice is). Create ones specific for each platform and then add them to your favorites so that you can find them again, or turn them into brand templates if you have Canva Pro.

I suffer from perfection paralysis on Instagram. Everything has to be perfectly curated on IG for me to post it. I never post stories, I probably should, but I don’t!

Twitter is my happy place, and I don’t give a shit about it being perfectly designed. Twitter moves far too fast to worry about whether an image looks right or not, although I do have a “Twitter image template” in my brand colors, so I can use that if I want to take the extra steps to keep it on brand. This is probably why Twitter is my go-to social network, and it doesn’t have to be perfect (at least it doesn’t for me).

Having up-to-date graphics templates will not only make sure that everything is on brand and all matchy-matchy, but it will mean that you might be able to create something even if you’re not 100% feeling it.

Important point: give yourself some grace on this, if you’re not up to it, don’t push it, it’s not worth it. If your personal life or mental health will be detrimentally impacted by “powering through” whatever is happening, don’t do it. There are times when even the best graphic templates won’t mean that you can post on socials. My personal life unexpectedly going sideways meant that I didn’t even open my laptop for a week, I just couldn’t face it. However, if I’d paired templates with batching content with a scheduler, if I had been on top of my game, no one would have noticed that I wasn’t around.