The Experiment: Do you kind of hate Facebook a little bit? So you end up just ignoring it like that weird cousin you see once a year at Christmas and you have no idea how to talk to them?

Unfortunately, Facebook is an essential tool and you can’t afford to ignore it. So if you’re one of those people who sit there with the empty content box open on Facebook with a frozen look of horror on your face trying to figure out what to write, this challenge is for you.

The Who: Yourself or an assistant or VA who knows your brand really well. You can also create the content and have your VA post it.

The What: You’re going to create a ‘days of the week’ style Facebook strategy so you’re never stuck for content.

The When: This could take about a day and that will set you up for weeks of valuable content.

The Where: Facebook! Der. The Why: So you’re not left sitting there like a shag on a rock when you go to post something on Facebook and you’re like ‘Ummmm…. I literally don’t have anything to day.’

The How:

1. Go 50/50. A good rule of thumb is to share 50% of your own work and 50% the work of others. That way you aren’t constantly bombarding your audience going ‘Look at me! Look at me!’. Show them other things of value that aren’t your own work and you’ll seem much more palatable.

2. Start with posting once a day for 7 days. A good basic construct would be 3x your own posts. So a blog post, and 2x promotional posts. Then you have 4 left. Allocate days of the week for different posts like this.

Monday - Blog post
Tuesday - Text only conversation starter
Wednesday - Promotional post
Thursday - Facebook Live day
Friday - Promotional post
Saturday - Interesting article from your industry
Sunday - Funny meme or quote

That way you’ll always know what content you’re doing each day.

3. Batch your content. Create a big list of blog posts you want to share and have them all ready to go for Blog Post Mondays. Decide on what you’re pushing people to buy and have that collateral reading for Promotional Post days. Start collecting funny memes or quotes for meme day. Start a document and copy and paste URLs for interesting articles into it. Write a list of possible Facebook live topics and have them sitting there ready to go.

4. Schedule. You can schedule straight into Facebook or use a scheduling app like Hootsuite or Coschedule. If you batch all the content and have it ready to go, you can easily give this task to a VA.

5. For Facebook Lives, pop an event in your diary so you don’t forget. Have your lists of topics and notes all ready to go and just jump right into Facebook and go for it. Don’t be shy!

6. Keep all your content in separate folders so you can re-use them. Once you’ve cycled through about 6 months to a year of content you can start re-using it again. Sneaky right?

7. Check your analytics and see what's working. You might find that text only posts are getting a lot of engagement and that industry articles aren't performing as well as you thought they might be. Pick the content that performs well and do more of that and less of the stuff that doesn’t work well.

Review:

Check in with yourself to see how that process felt. Did it feel hard because you didn’t like doing it? Did you not like scheduling that far in advance? Which parts did you enjoy? What would you do differently?

On a scale of 1 - 10, how aligned did this feel with you as a person?

On a scale of 1 - 10, how aligned did this feel with you as a brand/business?