Social media is a lot for small business owners. It’s very hard to have a business that doesn’t have a social media presence because your clients and customers expect to be able to look you up, learn about your company, and follow you if they feel like your content has something to add to your life. From a benefits perspective, it’s also an exciting opportunity because it’s a free or nearly-free way to instantly market yourself to a global audience and that’s something that businesses have never been able to do before.
Of course, actually putting content together and knowing what to post every day can be a huge time-suck and leaves a lot of business owners burnt out about their social media. Including me.
One of the things that I’ve found to help myself stay motivated and feel creative when I’m putting together social media posts is to pick a specific recognizable mood for my social media and stick to it. I do this by branding posts with the same colors, fonts, and general style so people in my audience instantly recognize that this is a post from one of my brands when they come across it on their feeds.
For Family Tree Notebooks, I decided early on to brand my social media with flat lay photography on a marble background focused around a family history theme. At the time (5 years ago), I didn’t see a lot of flat lay photography in the genealogy community so I hoped it would stand out. As time went on, I’ve gotten a little more lax about my branding for that channel but I still try to stick with muted and natural colors and I put those marble-background-flat-lays in every now and again just to remind people that it’s me.
Side note - I didn’t take these photos every day right before I posted them. I set aside a day every few months in the beginning and took tons of photos so I could store them in a cloud-based album that was just for these flat lay pictures. That meant I had access to the content when I needed it and it’s also given me a good place to grab images for presentations, newsletters, and even my books. I definitely recommend batch shooting if your social media is going to be branded by your photography style.
A different but somewhat simpler approach is to use social media templates to make your content recognizable. I’ve done that with Genealogy is Boring. Instead of relying on my photography, I created a set of 5 brand colors, picked a couple of fonts, and came up with a series of templates (frames) that I use on Canva, a free design website. Basically, you open the template up in Canva and then drag in a photo or video and edit the text to create a post. By using templates that go together, you end up with a social media feed that looks like you put a lot of effort into branding, even though you’re just reusing the same templates.
If you’re curious about using social media templates on Canva, I’ve put together a set of 50 that I think would work nicely for the genealogy world. I went ahead and branded them with specific colors, but it’s very easy to change the colors and fonts on a template to make it your own.
Here are two of the templates I created:
Here are posts made with those templates:
And here they are with some changes to the colors and fonts:
Hope they help!