Creating an Image And Video Bank

Gathering a ton of social media content at once may sound like a headache, but the amount of the amount of time and effort you’ll save in the end can be priceless. 

What is a content bank?

A social media content bank is a collection of fully built-out content ready to be scheduled at a moments’ notice. Your content bank should work seamlessly alongside your brand’s social media calendar, and allow you to slot in non-timing-specific content to fill the gaps.

Getting your content organised is key to your social media marketing success. This is especially helpful when your dynamic duo: your handy content scheduler and content bank are ready to go. Now that you have your Planner and Canva sorted saving your Content Bank is the next step. Hand-in-hand, your schedule and bank will eliminate the day-to-day content haggle – saving you time and giving you more room to flex a little creative muscle.

Here’s how to do it.

Itemise all aspects of your brand – Step one to getting a social media content bank together is to know what aspects of your brand you’d like to show your audience. This includes all your build content, user generated content, brand attributes, upcoming builds or special dates, photos videos – so basically, everything you’ve got going on with your brand.

At this point if you haven’t created a content planner, it’s time. Remember that none of these items have to be developed past knowing that you’d like to highlight them or that they’re coming up. This is all about being prepared.

Gather all existing content old and new

Now that you know what you want to talk about (or you have your social media content calendar worked out) it’s time to look at all your social media content – or lack thereof. Gather all the content you’ve created, and anything you have but haven’t posted yet.

Pro tip: Some of those older photos can be re-purposed for throwback posts, backgrounds and more.

Create a system – You then need to create a place to put all this social media content you’ve just gathered. Creating a system will help you streamline your efforts, especially if you work with a team. I keep it relatively simple and like to create one folder for every month, plus one labelled “For Posting” and one labelled “Used”, but you can figure out what system works for you. If you’re on a team, both Dropbox and Google Drive are great basic options for keeping everything organised, and everyone on the same page.

Now that you have your content organised, you’ll be able to see what gaps you need to fill. You’ll realize if you need more videos, for example, or certain types of content, and you can get cracking on filling in those gaps.

Bank messaging and captions too – Part of your social media content bank should include messaging and captions. The messaging that goes along with your images and videos is just as important as the content itself – banking messaging is a great way to save time on recurring campaigns, when you have an image but no caption or to inspire visuals. We will be covering what to write next.

I don’t want you to read “content bank” and think “Aahh! I have to create content for a year!”. You can create banks for a few weeks at a time, based on your schedule, or in smaller batches for individual campaigns or events.

The initial time investment into creating content banks can be big, but will make the posting process a much smoother one for you, and your team.

Next Lesson: What Do I Write?