Content Gathering for Social Media Made Easy

Social media requires a constant stream of content including visuals, links, text. I know what you're thinking...but that's a lot of work. Why yes, it is. Here are four tips for making that content gathering process a bit less tedious.1. Plan ahead. Map out you content weekly or in a perfect world monthly. You can always add to it as things arise.

2. Create structure. Think of a content bucket or theme for each day. You don't have to necessarily call it out as such on social, but it will help you create content more quickly. Wednesdays are deals, Thursdays are trivia, etc.

3. Clip as you go. Use a program like Evernote to save interesting articles you see on the fly, or "favorite" interesting tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook. Some of your content will be more evergreen while other will be more time sensitive. It's always good to have a stockpile of interesting articles that you can plug in to your content calendar as needed.

4. Build an archive of images. You can take 30 interesting photos in one day of your product, service or organization and sprinkle them throughout the year. No one but you has to know they were taken in one day.

What tips do you have for making the content creation process run smoothly?