The Busy/Lonely/Overworked B2B Marketers Guide to Posting High-Quality, Daily, Company Social Posts

Social Media is a powerhouse for marketers. I don’t need to sell that statement.

However, pushing out daily company posts on LinkedIn and alike can be challenging and time-consuming, especially if you’re a lone marketer or work in a small marketing team (if you work in a big marketing team, this post may not be for you!).

Why is it challenging?

First, you need to come up with the content to post.

Then you need to decide on the images (because we all know not using images is going to seriously hamper the performance of your posts)

Then you need to post the updates (yes, we could use Buffer, Sprout or another automation tool, but the reality is without a great process, this doesn’t actually save you much time).

Trust me, I’ve been there, trying to develop ideas on what to post as a company and scratching my head and looking into the abyss.

And with all that going on, you know that there are many more valuable tasks that you should be doing to increase demand and generate opportunities.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could spend just a couple of hours a month managing daily company social updates that elevate your brand to a whole new level, drive leads and give you more time to focus on being a great marketer?

Read on.

I’m going to be honest, I only discovered this process a few years back when I managed social media accounts for several companies simultaneously. That task alone took up more time than any other marketing service my agency provided, even though it paid the least.

We had to find a way to reduce the time spent posting updates for each brand to a couple of hours a month while continuing to absolutely delight customers with totally on-brand high-quality social posts.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Daily Themes

You need to start by choosing a theme for each day. This does depend on what content you possess as a brand, but I tend to find that most B2B companies have more than enough content to run for at least a few months.

At my present company cube19, we follow this Daily Theme pattern:

Monday — Learning Zone (Best practice guides for cube19 customers)

Tuesday — Marketplace (Promoting our partner integrations)

Wednesday — Testimonials (Generally taken from G2 Crowd)

Thursday — Content (Either from our own website or a post we’ve done on a partner website)

Friday — Inspiration (Something positive for the staffing industry)

It’s really up to you what theme you choose for each day. In the past, I’ve done ‘weekly questions’ to engage the community. I’ve seen other companies feature a staff member with a comment each week. If you do regular webinars, you could post the live event links and on-demand links on a specific themed day.

The main thing to think about is what’s really going to connect with your audience. Make sure there is something for prospects and customers (and potentially channel partners if relevant).

2. The Spreadsheet

Next, you need to fill in a spreadsheet. The first time you do this may take more than two hours, but it will get easier. Here’s a real-life example

Hack Number One

Once you have your first month filled in, create a sheet for each of the next 4 months. Now take 5 posts from each week of your first month and scatter them in each of your future months (making sure they are put in the correct themed days). When you do month 2, you’ll need to come up with 15 posts, not 20. For each following month, the number of posts you need to create will diminish!

Top Tip: Once you have copied posts from one month to another, I’d highly recommend changing the social post copy (which isn’t shown in above screenshot but is in the next column along from the URL). You simply need to rephrase the post in a different way, so you’re not 100% duplicating the content.

3. The Design

Your brand is everything. Popping onto google and grabbing the first image that seems to fit your social post will not establish brand trust. It’s imperative to create consistency over time and across channels so your customers and prospects know exactly who they’re dealing with.

This is why you need to OUTSOURCE the design (unless you have a good designer in-house).

In the first instance, you need to find a designer and develop the design templates for your daily themes. Here are some examples from cube19.

Monday — Best practice guides for cube19 customers

Tuesday — Marketplace (Promoting our partner integrations)

Wednesday — Testimonials (Generally taken from G2 Crowd)

Thursday — Content

Friday — Inspiration

FYI — Our freelance designer is Taz Kernaine

Hack Number 2

Once you have a template for each theme in something like Photoshop or Indesign, your design costs moving forward should be next to nothing because you’re simply changing text and replacing images.

Top Tip. I’d recommend organising your social images in folders with clear naming conventions. Once you’ve been doing this for 6 months, you’ll thank me for that!

4. The Process

This is very simple but important all the same.

Have all your LinkedIn/Social posts written for the following month by the 15th of the current month.

Go through whatever approval process is needed.

Share the google sheet with your designer and give them a week to get you back the images.

By the 25th of the month, log into your automated social posting tool (we use Buffer) and schedule your posts for the following month (I’d recommend posting on Twitter, Linked In and Facebook if you use them).

5. Produce Evergreen Content

I don’t want to go too heavy in telling you what you should be posting on your company updates, but I want to revisit the brand conversation. The fundamental reason for doing any B2B social media is to increase brand awareness, develop trust and convert leads.

For that reason, I believe that the vast majority of your social posts should be sending traffic back to your own website (so you can employ funnel conversion tactics and build custom audiences for remarketing).

We’ve already talked about the idea of recycling content over time, so you want to make sure that your content is ‘Evergreen’.

The Digital Marketers Association says “Evergreen content is search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time”

The point being is your social posts linking to this content don’t become irrelevant over time, making them unavailable for recycling.

Evergreen content is also critical for marketing automation campaigns.

Final Thoughts

The first month will take quite a bit of work (more than two hours) but by month 3 or 4, you’ll wonder how you ever managed social media without this kind of process.

Naturally, over time you will create more content. Use whatever data you have available to you to determine the best content to post.

You will, of course, want to do real-time posts sometimes. The beauty of this process is that your company feed should always contain more branded social posts than non-branded.

Make use of the “Notify Employees” functionality in LinkedIn to push up likes. At cube19 we also promote all our social posts on Slack to engage the team.

And lastly, install the LinkedIn mobile app so you can get real-time updates of when people engage with your posts. Engage with the engagement, of course!

This process drastically reduced the time we spent managing social media at my agency but importantly, the brands we were working with continued to stand out from the crowd!

View cube19’s LinkedIn page to see it in action

I hope you can achieve the same results.