Making one good social post is a design job. Making them every week, for several brands at once, is an operations job. I run recurring content for three brands that couldn’t be more different: an education brand, a pet-care brand and a supplier of industrial equipment and parts.
Each one has its own subject, audience, look and formats, and the challenge is the same for all three: stay consistent without becoming repetitive.
Planning in two-week cycles.
For the education and pet-care brands, I work in two-week content plans. Each cycle starts with weekly themes, then the mix of formats, then the visuals and captions, then a round of feedback and changes before anything goes out.
The formats each have a job:
- Static posts carry the informative and educational content.
- Stories are for building the relationship with people who already follow the brand.
- Reels are for reaching people who don’t yet.
A Canva system that doesn’t look like one.
I keep each brand’s Canva projects and templates organised so content can be produced in repeatable batches. The catch with templates is that a feed starts to look the same, so I deliberately rotate them and avoid using the same one too often. The aim is for every post to be recognisably the brand without looking like last week’s post.
Turning long video into short clips.
For the pet-care brand, a lot of the best material lives in longer expert-led and interview-style videos. I find the parts that make sense on their own, cut them into short clips and add captions. One project was choosing moments from a longer video about the bond between a person and their guide dog, where the work was mostly editorial: finding the part that carries the message without the rest of the video around it.
Researching unfamiliar subjects.
The industrial supplier is the opposite of the other two. Its content covers equipment, parts, maintenance, tools and industrial products, which means researching the products properly before writing about them, for an audience that would notice straight away if something was wrong.
Reporting on what works.
Each month I report on performance across the brands, looking at impressions and how individual posts did, so the next plan is built on what people actually engaged with.
What it adds up to.
The interesting part isn’t that I make social media posts. It’s running a recurring production process that covers research, planning, copywriting, design, video, review rounds and reporting, for three brands at once.
