35: Basics of Content Creation
with Andrew Ousley
What are some basics of creating content and sharing it on social media?
So I think again, that first step is to just look at other people's content and build an internal barometer. Then it's-- it comes down to the thought of, What content can I create a-- consistently, and am I comfortable creating consistently? and then learning the best practices of posting. And thinking in terms of... for events that you have, whether it be an album release, a performance, a tour, thinking in terms of pre-, during, and post. So what content can I create before, what content going to create while it's happening, and what can I roll out afterwards to say that it happened, with the idea being to maximize the impact of everything you do.
And so for instance, for pre- content, if, say you-- part of your storytelling is that you like to go on very long walks around the countryside before you, you perform anywhere and so you can take a photo of yourself on a long walk on some beautiful vista and say, Preparing for this concert. You can share a link to, to the tickets or the announcement or a press feature and say, you know, Very excited to talk about this with The Denver Post.
You can share a video of yourself rehearsing if you're comfortable doing that. And again, it can be iPhone video. It should be not shaky and blurry and terrible audio. Learn how to use your iPhone, which you will. And, but you can post that. You can-- So-- and any of those types of content. You want to-- The more that you learn what other people share, the more that you will add to your toolbox of, I'm comfortable doing this. I'm not comfortable doing that. But you want to have a, a repository of types of content that you can share beforehand.
During: Do you like to do a backstage selfie? Your warm up routine? Your, you know, intermission with a colleague of yours backstage? You know, having, having a coffee?
Post-show: Having a drink or something? or taking bows, if somebody can take photos of your bows? Things that, that put you in the moment for the people who are not, they're sharing it with you, they are there vicariously with you. And then afterwards, the success: Are there-- Is there a great review quote that you can pull out? Is there, are there beautiful professional photos, video content you can share? Etc. So thinking in terms of what can you do consistently and are you comfortable creating that, that tells the story of what you do professionally. And then how to post it: Learning how tagging works. Learning how like hashtags work.
There's a lot of people who think if they post something on Instagram and they just stick, okay, send that to my Facebook page too. They're done not realizing that, you know, the @ tags don't translate to Facebook most of the time. So you have to post content natively on different platforms or edit the posts. So learning the best practices of technical posting as well. You know, how to do your stories on Instagram, on Facebook as well. How to cross-post a video.
If you are sharing it and you have other stakeholders or colleagues who can share it to their accounts, cross-posting will massively increase the spread of it versus having everybody upload the video individually or one post and everybody shares. So those are technical best practices that, it's important to understand at a base level how to do them. But they
also change all the time as platforms grow and adapt. So you're never going to be at the absolute cutting, bleeding edge of it, most people. But it's, I think it's really just understanding how to share a link, like, how to share in the best way. And so for instance, posting a link to Facebook, make sure it previews well. If it doesn't preview well then you've got to share something else with the link in the copy description. Like a photo of yourself or something, and learning how to design graphics using something like Canva that's free and easy to use. So I think those tools and those best practices, just understanding those, and again, a lot of that comes of looking at your colleagues' content and saying, Something looks weird with that post. I shouldn't do that when I'm going.