For many small businesses, creating regular social media content can be a very expensive exercise. Not to mention that creating it yourself can often be either too time consuming or simply beyond your skill set.
In cases like these, what do you do? After all, each and every social media platform rewards consistency, so ideally you want to put out content on a daily basis, or – in the case of video – at least three times a week.
Here’s how to create social media content without breaking the bank:
(or without spending hours doing it yourself)
1. For text posts on Facebook, Twitter/X and Linkedin, have a chat – with ChatGPT.
Yes, it might sound obvious, but it seems that very few people actually comprehend the value of this tool. If you are able to invest $20 per month in the Plus version of ChatGPT, you have a tool that can connect to the internet – and collect the best, most current information on any topic.
Keep in mind, however, that the responses you get from any AI are just as good as your inputs. Be sure to tell the AI exactly what you want.
For instance, if you are a plumber in say, Lincoln, Nebraska, you could use a prompt set like this:
Step 1: Generate 100 topics about common plumbing problems, and what can go wrong if you try to fix them yourself.
Once you have the topics, move on to step 2:
For each of the topics on your list, generate a 150-word helpful social media post, and end it off with the following call to action: Got plumbing problems in Lincoln, Nebraska? Give us a call on 123 4567 7890
Note: If you have the Plus version of ChatGPT, you can also add an instruction to generate a suitable picture along with each post. Social media posts with pictures have a much higher engagement rate.
2. Create simple videos on your phone.
Fair enough, this one depends on your industry – and your phone. But most phones nowadays are perfectly capable of recording a pretty decent video – considering the fact that it will mostly be viewed on phones (so you don’t need a studio quality camera).
Here are a few options:
a. You can create talking head selfie videos, giving tips, short explainers, or answering common questions on the go.
b. Create product videos, where you show the product from all angles while you describe some of the uses and benefits.
c. while you are doing a job, pause to take a picture now and then, and then just string them together to make a short video clip. People love seeing transformations – whether it is a dirty driveway being cleaned up or something being created from raw materials.
3. Create carousel posts for free using Canva.
By now, most people know what Canva is – a simple yet versatile tool for creating good looking graphics, videos, presentations and more.
Carousel posts can be used on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram, they have been found to have a slightly lower reach than videos, but a slightly higher engagement rate.
Again, these can be a series of graphics to showcase products, jobs done, or helpful information. Canva has a boatload of templates you can choose from to make your graphics seem highly professional – even if you are not.
4. Use AI to generate video content:
There are a number of options to choose from, depending on how much you can afford to spend every month. Some of these start off under $30 per month, while some can run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
Probably the cheapest option is to simply use – again – ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo). Simply connect the Capcut plugin, and tell it to generate videos according to your requirements.
Note, however, that when creating reels or shorts, Capcut doesn’t stretch the background image to cover the whole screen – it keeps the image ration the same as it would have been for a landscape video layout, and shrinks it to fit the width of the screen.
You can change it manually though.
On the plus side, you can use ChatGPT to generate multiple videos in one go. You can instruct it to generate ten or more videos in one go. All you have to do afterwards is to simply go to each video’s editing screen, export (render) it and download it.
The best option though, in our opinion…
…is Invideo.
Invideo comes in at one of the lowest price points, and creates videos of a reasonable quality.
(there are others at the same price point, but none of them allows you to generate as many videos for the monthly fee)
You can use it to:
a. Convert any existing script to video, adding picture and a voice-over on the fly.
b. Create talking-head videos from scripts, while allowing you to choose between a number of avatars.
Note: In both cases, you can use ChatGPT (or whatever other AI language tool you prefer) to generate the scripts.
c. Generate videos from prompts. You can specify what the video has to be about, how long it should be, and what the call to action at the end must be. Then just sit back and relax as Invideo generates your video as if out of thin air.
Click Here to explore its capabilities for yourself – it does have a free version for trying it out.
In conclusion:
When it comes to social media, consistency is everything. Not only does all algorithms on all of the platforms reward consistency, but if your followers know when to expect content from you, they will be more likely to engage with it.
Not to mention that, when it comes to branding, consistency breeds trust.
And trust is what brands are built on.
So, whether you want to post once a week, or twice a day, these are your options for creating social media videos and -content.
Yes, it will still require a small amount of time input from you or whoever you delegate it to. But considering the rewards, it’s worth it.