Introduction
Is your social media strategy feeling like a bumpy road?
You know, all those ‘rocks’—ideation, production, approval, and distribution—getting in the way of your content flow?
In today’s episode, Miguel Swan, founder of Montanus, is here to help!
He’s sharing his on-the-ground insights to tackle those hurdles blocking consistent social media output.
From sparking inspiration for high-tech brands to creating a buzzing content ecosystem, Miguel offers a winning strategy to streamline your process.
Want to transform chaos into clarity? Discover how to think in themes, sharpen your production skills, and boost your distribution game—all without burning out your resources!
Join Miguel on this revealing journey. He’s unpacking actionable steps that’ll move those metaphorical rocks off your path and kick your social media game up a notch.
Ready to take your marketing efforts to the next level? Tune in now!
What You’ll Learn
• Streamline your content creation with thematic ideation.
• Use templates to maintain consistency and efficiency.
• Enhance productivity by minimizing repetitive tasks.
• Optimize approval processes for faster content delivery.
• Leverage social media software to simplify distribution.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
today we wanted to I want to talk about removing rocks removing rocks from your social media production and today I’m also sitting in my car trying to drive up or trying I’m actually doing it so driving up to one of my clients so I am sorry for the little bit of hissing and rumbling in the background I hope it’s okay and if it’s really really shitty I might not even publish this episode at all now what I really want to talk to you about today is something that I find very very important in creating a consistent and what I would call a high frequency content universe because this is something that really I think a lot of people are struggling quite a lot with and that is keeping up with your social media presence what does that mean that means posting consistently frequently I would say every day every couple of days something like that but with a but with a consistent so your audience exposed to your content on a very regular basis and also if you are so lucky that you’re actually able to produce some some content that is really good that your audience can kind of rely on the content coming out me myself I am Miguel Swan and I have the content agency the content production agency Montana’s where we help mainly knowledge driven companies that could be engineering companies it could be science companies it could be also advisors so so engineering advisors something like that all those kinds of companies we help them produce a lot of content and spread all the knowledge so they can position to themselves as thought leaders in the industry enough about me back to the topic building a social media presence or basically building a process of producing enough social media posts in order to have a high frequency and what are the rocks that are in the way what are the rocks in the shoe that we need to remove to have a smooth process that we can that we can kind of maintain and retain a very high output I think there are different phases to the production so first we have the ideation second we have the production itself then we have approval and then lastly we have distribution and those are the four phases of creating a social media post now I want to go through them all of them in in turn and try and give you my perspective on how you can optimize your your way of working in order to kind of remove some of the slack and remove some of the you know weariness and remove of some of the time that’s just spend not adding value at all so ok let’s begin we’ll begin by looking at the ideation phase for me ideation is often something that people find kind of sacred it’s something that is is pushed upon a pedestal where it somehow turns into being this kind of I don’t even know it like artistic endeavor and to me really think if you want a high-output you need to pull it down from that pedestal and then look at ideation from a less you know the idea needs to fall down from the sky kind of way and more from a we have a methodology to create good ideas or to create a lot of ideas that is and then we have another methodology to choose which ideas are good the many okay so what I would do is basically or sit down every I would say every half year or every year something like that I sit down with with with the group with the with the team sit down and say okay what ideas would we have for content the scenes obvious but actually we’re not really talking ideas we more talking in themes so what seems we have for content and buy themes I would it what types of content so that could be okay we could have blog post that is one theme that we can push out on social media okay fair enough we have one thing that’s called blog post then we may have another theme for my company that will be how to build thought leadership like for leadership 101 alright that’s another thing it’s good thing perfect because with that ideation later on becomes a lot easier so if you were a technology company some producing some kind of high-tech equipment you could have a theme that could be like cool tech that we discovered this week they’ll be a pretty good theme well cool tech you could just be cool tech because they discover this week bit of it makes things hard to do in bulk so we want to avoid thatwhat could be another go-to theme so that could be the latest updates on our technology that will be a pretty good theme as well you know so you’d have to think in themes and the cool thing about ideating in themes is that you actually only need five seven themes at all because when you have seven themes you literally have a theme that can be posted every day the only thing you need to do is now sit down with one theme at a time and then come up with different ideas or build a structure around getting those ideas so that could be talking to customers that could be subscribing to Wired magazine that will bring you in new cool tech or like a couple of different tech magazines subscribe to those and then curate the ones that you think are the most I think that is a really powerful way of doing it and then once you’ve done that well the ideation phase is basically over right so you’d ideate on themes and what is really cool is that later on when you have themes that your ideate on you can also evaluate the themes rather than evaluate the posts because evaluating one post is actually really hard it’s really hard to know whether one post performed really well because of you know some whatever comment from some dude who has a lot of followers that you are basically in no control of or whether you know another post that is really well-written it’s actually a really good post it may perform really poorly because it’s just posted at an unfortunate time of the day and that doesn’t necessarily mean it it’s posted you know in the middle of the night it could also just be posted alongside with another post from another really powerful content creator out there and you have no control over whether they post at the same time as you and that might kind of over swamp your posts so it falls back so those kind of things you don’t have any control of but what you can do is you can say okay we will now produce 30 post of this theme because then we have you know for 30 weeks with this with this theme and then that insecurity measuring and the analytics it will kind of it will kind of go a little bit away just like with the stock market if you if you invest in long term the insecurities kind of disappear a little bit so that is my recommendation ideating themes and then have one theme per day that you want to post about all right next up is production production is always the hard one because it’s what it’s the one where people are like staring at that white paper on the screen and that’s just terrible and I know that we’ve got a lot of AI stuff that can now help you get beyond that you know that white paper empty white paper but you would still have to create the content now creating the content producing the contents itself it’s going to be a lot easier when you’re talking in themes because you can then ideate within 1 theme like I just said what I would suggest is try and minimize the logistics or the the practicalities in creating a social media post one thing you could do you could of course use templates and be really strict on the templates because your audience actually gone it’s they’re gonna be happy about recognizing the templates because they they will recognize the content as something that is coming from you so that’s actually a good thing if your posts kind of look the same that’s a good thing especially because you can then just have seven themes one for seven templates one for each theme and then it will still have a very varied way or you would have a very varied feed, so working really hard templates that’s one thing but the other thing is instead of for instance writing your your posts aside of Word or inside of PowerPoint or Google Docs or whatever some kind of platform that that you usually use instead of doing that what about going directly into your posting software, I know some of you are not using a posting software I really recommend that I use social bee myself social be like a buzzing B, social be myself, and and I know there’s plenty of other you can you know whoot suite buffer any of those i don’t know i don’t even know there’s a lot of them and what I really recommend is why don’t you write your posts right inside of the actual software rather than writing it in words first and then having to transfer it over and I know this seems like a really small deed but if you have to do it every day we have to do it 30 times just to cover one month that copy-pasting suddenly becomes a task that should be on your on your agenda and what we are after here is eliminating tasks right eliminating non-value-adding tasks and this is a non-value-adding task so instead write it directly inside of your program oftentimes most often you can set it as pending or you can probably said it if you can’t you can put into a category that is not publishing and then you have your reviews inside of that program instead instead of having them in Word or PowerPoint you have the reviews directly in there and instead of having I want you to change this word that kind of feedback you would have just changed the word so you have a more productive more direct way of pushing your content through alright so with that you’re already inside of your distribution program which is which is really really helpful now next phase as I said is is the approval phase and here I think it’s it’s really important to consider out say maybe to things so first of all really consider whether it needs approval are we dealing with a category of content that needs no approval because it’s just it’s plain it’s really easy you can’t really it doesn’t need to right you can proofread it obviously but you should proofread it yourself instead of having to involve a third party person some other dude you would just proofread it and if a mistake slips you can probably proofread you know proofread the day after something like that if the mistake slips by you know when you have a content flow of one per one per day that’s common mistake that typo that little like my minuscule mistake that tiny error is not going to that tiny error is not gonna matter at all no one is going to care no one’s caring so I would definitely say try and minimize approval see if you can avoid it altogether and if you can’t make sure that the approval is just some you know you can go directly into the into the software and just approve it right away so instead of the approval person so that could be your boss or it could be your copywriter or it could be you know your fellow copywriter it could be someone instead of them having to send back the feedback or the you know I need you to change this in that word I think this sentence is bad have them just do the stuff themselves instead and then press approved instead of having to send it back to you I know that’s a very common way of dealing with with approvals and dealing with content and also kind of feels like the the approver is kind of overpowering the content creator but I really don’t see it in that way I see it in a way that you are together a team that needs to push out a lot of content in a very short period of time okay so try it minimize it might minimize approval by that last thing is the distribution and and here we’ve I’ve actually already touched upon it so I’m going to do it quite quite quickly distribution should be if you can distribute every day Try and distribute every day set it up in your in your distribution software so you don’t have to think about it another thing another little trick that I use and that’s because I use the software that’s actually the reason I use social distribution software is that instead of having to set a specific date and time for a specific post I would just categorize the post I would you know add attack at a category tag to my portion say this post belongs this and that category and if it does that means that next time there’s an open there’s an open slot on the day that I’m that I’ve said that I need to push out posts you should just push it out so what that means is that I’m actually not in control of what day and time my the specific post is coming out however I am in control of what day and time the category comes out and then what happens is that it’s just going to be the newest post in that category that is pushed out and then if I have a streak that off of production that means means that there’s a lot of post that is going you know that are moving down the queue moving down the line in in that category and will only be posted you know in four weeks from now but it also then means that if I produce a new post today it will then be pushed out next week for instance so that means it is the most recent post that is out first which is which I think is a pretty brilliant because it kind of keeps some sort of actuality to the post or at least in the best way that we can and it takes a lot of time away from having to sit down and and you know minutely schedule every single post and again when we’re talking about the analytical part of it it’s also a benefit because then you can say okay we can see that this category coming out on Tuesday 1015 we can see that this is just not performing really well because we can see that in general 1015 that time of the day is just really bad because we’ve got a lot of posts coming out of 1010 15 we’ve got one maybe every other day so then try and just the timing that’s a really nice thing whereas if you’ve scheduled every single post at different times well that’s going to be really hard isn’t it to to draw those kind of conclusions. Alright so those were the ideation face the production face the approval face the distribution face so simplify ideation by by ideating in themes first and then afterwards. Single posts production, use templates really really important use templates. Use categories so you know what is what to write you know what fashion you want to write them in and then approval try and minimize approval just kind of ignore the fact that you would probably have a few but I mean if you’re a good copywriter those typos are going to be very few because its in your DNA to kind of just either don’t do them or either don’t make them or edit them out. And then of course lastly use a distribution program. I use social B BuzzBuzz and you could also use buffer hoodsweet yes any of those there’s a lot of them there’s a lot of them and Falcon.IO.’re you look them up all right that is it for today’s content universe, in my car. I hope it has been worthwhile listening to although there’s been a bit of humming in the background and yes I just want to say if you enjoyed this episode share it with your friends and well family if you want but but your colleagues of course they’ll really appreciate I will really appreciate that and it really helps me spread the words and well it kind of makes me want to do more if I can see that people are actually listening to them so now I appreciate that very much if you want hit me up on podcast at montanus.co if you send an email to that address that will land right in my own inbox and I will reply to you as soon as I can thank you thank you so much for listening and see you back inside the content universe