It is now the fourth week of production for the Breaking Down PR social media campaign and all I can say is WOO-HOO! The excitement I have been feeling over the last two weeks is immense. If you have been keeping up with my progress, you’ll know that the first and second weeks of production were a tad hectic with production task overload and on going research. During my last post, I was reporting in with disappointment for falling behind on some of my project deadlines I had set for myself. According to Anthony Iannarino, on How to Catch Up When You Fall Behind, “Not all tasks and projects are equal in value to you, to your clients, or your business. Some of that you need to do is much more valuable, especially the ones required for the future results you need”. I found this to be reassuring and true while painstakingly looking at all of my tasks I made for myself and fell short of. Almost two weeks ago, I bunkered down and reviewed everything I had to get done. I knew there were bigger tasks that carried more value than others. With the help of my Asana check-list, I was able to clearly pin-point exactly what needed to be done. While reviewing my tasks I was reminded about the bigger picture of the project at hand. I reworked and reprioritized my tasks and I am now happy to report that I am in a much better place than I was a few weeks ago!
How List Making Saved Me
A major part of moving forward with this campaign was creating a social media content calendar. Before doing this, I had to complete a list of trusted sources to quote and inspire the content created for the Breaking Down PR Instagram page. According to Hoi Wan, from Life Hacks, “If you don’t organize your information, it can be scattered everywhere even a regular pin-board can look messy, but if you separate it out into different topics or categories it’s a lot less messier”. I couldn’t agree more! Asana has been fantastic at helping me keep on track with the entire campaign. What I realized was that much of my tasks were lists. They were smaller lists within my larger list on Asana. When I was creating the schedule for this campaign I didn’t reflect on the notion of how important list building is. In this scenario, creating a list of sources for the campaign would help in the future production of creating posts as well.
What I have absolutely enjoyed is that the sources list I have created compliments the social media calendar incredibly well! Through creating the sources list, I have been able to identify key themes I would like to cover each week. I plan to post 3-4 times a week concerning certain topics or themes of public relations. For example, the first week is focused around general public relations definitions, terms, and misconceptions. The weeks moving forward will cover particular types of public relations, best practices, misconceptions and more. I plan to continue each week focused around the information curated to help engage with the audience on Instagram. I spent close to seven hours vetting these sources, finding particular articles for each week, and to be able to see this list now in its final version, is a genuine triumph! Check out the source list, here.
Lists are a Content Calendars Best Friend
Through realizing my love for lists, it helped me in better understanding my content calendar as well. The idea of creating content should always be purposeful and the notion of just creating content, just because isn’t always the best idea. Before diving into my content calendar, I originally set the goal to post at least 3-4 times a week on the Instagram page. But what exactly would I be posting? Was there any strategy to what would be posted? There had to be! Sarah Aboulhosn from Sprout Social says, “the content you post on social media has the power to turn your brand into a household name and turn your followers into fans. This kind of impact only comes from having a solid social media content strategy. It’s not enough to show up on every platform and sporadically update your audience when you have the time.” It was this advice that inspired me to take a minute to pause and reflect again and look back into my earlier notes to help remind myself of the true intentions and goals for this campaign. With all of the excitement, mixed in with a variety of tasks and self-induced anxiety of deadlines and expectations, it can be easy to lose track of the main goals and priorities of a social media campaign such as this. It was this well needed reminder which helped me in creating a more detailed content Calendar (click here to check it out).
No matter how chaotic things can get, it is always a helpful reminder to remain strategic when accomplishing a project. To not lose focus is key and I can’t help but express how amazing this journey has been so far. Even through a few rough patches, I am finding such solace in taking time to reflect and remind myself of the goals I set out for in the beginning of this amazing campaign. Through creating a source list and a detail content calendar, I have now been able to complete a full content creation factory. I call is a factory because it is one solid document kept on my Canva account with images ready to be launched out for each week. So far I have gotten up to 12 photos completed, which is the first three weeks of content for the page! Now I don’t want to give everything away just yet, so I have created a screenshot here of the current content creation deck so that you can get an idea of what it is that I am talking about. These last few weeks have been an amazing leap into production and I am so excited to finally be able to launch with solid content planned ahead. Be sure to also check out my production journal here.
Thanks for reading!
-Austin
The Media Relations Nomad 