To make preparing for the summer break as stress-free as possible, I'm sharing my top tips for creating plenty of social media content ahead of time, ensuring your audience stays engaged when the sun is shining.
Why is it important to stay active on social media over the summer?
- Your audience is still active: Even though many people are on vacation or taking breaks from work, they are often more active on social media, using their free time to scroll through feeds, share experiences, and engage with content. This activity presents a valuable opportunity to capture their attention and keep your brand top of mind.
- Summer is a great time to experiment with new content types and strategies: With potentially less competition and a different audience dynamic, you can test out creative ideas and refine your approach. This can provide valuable insights that will benefit your social media strategy in the fall and beyond.
- Staying active on social media helps you build and sustain momentum: Instead of having to regain lost ground in the fall, a continuous presence ensures that you keep working the algorithm, growing your audience, and driving engagement year-round. This consistent activity can lead to higher engagement rates, increased follower growth, and stronger brand loyalty.
How can you efficiently create a lot of content in advance for summer?
Planning in advance does take effort, but it pays off. Here is how I fill an entire content calendar before summer begins.
1. Repost content from the past two months
Not everyone sees everything you post, and if they do, then seeing it multiple times is still beneficial. In addition, recycling past posts keeps your feed active without extra effort.
Here is how to do it efficiently:
- Choose some of your best-performing posts from the past two months and even some under-performers to give them a second chance and just share the exact same content again.
2. Repurpose your written content into videos
Last year, I created a majority of my summer content by taking articles written in the past six months, putting them into Storykit AI, and transforming them into short videos.
This approach not only ensures all your new content gets properly distributed, but it's also a highly effective way to create engaging, on-brand content at scale.
Here is how to do it efficiently:
- Take 10 articles or other content pieces you published in the past six months.
- Use Storykit AI to create 5 videos from each piece, giving you 50 snackable content pieces.
- Spend just 20 minutes per article (that's 20 x 10 = 200 minutes, or about 3 hours for 50 videos).
Further reading: 22 ways to repurpose your existing content for social media with video
3. Use formats to produce
One of the most effective ways to create content is to work with formats. And this applies to all content, including video. It’s a simple, classic, editorial trick to create a base of content that is quickly produced.
Here are 5 formats you can use to add variation to your summer content plan:
- Testimonials: Share a quote from one of your users or customers every now and then. Ask the customer for a photo and a short description of why they love your brand.
- Present a colleague: Snap some photos of some of your colleagues and ask them a few questions. Create a template and easily add the assets and text. Voila!
- Share some interesting facts about your company: Share your company’s story, how it started and how it’s going.
- Themed days and holidays: The summer season is packed with themed days and special events. These are perfect to make a series of “Did you know…” videos. We can guarantee you’ll find a few days that align with your business!
- Go behind the scenes: Stay authentic and transparent and let your audience know what happens behind the scenes.
Bonus tip: Make your videos in portrait format since many of your customers and users will be scrolling on the beach, in the hammock, or from the couch. :) Also, make sure to optimize your content for mobile devices.
Further reading: Turn smartphone videos into employer branding content in 3 steps
Final thoughts...
Even though social media activity dips during the summer, staying consistent and working with the algorithms will not only ensure you stay visible but will also help you gather insights you can use in the fall. Use my tips to batch out a bunch of content, test different strategies, and give your audience something to enjoy even when you're not actively online.
