Unlock the Secret to Effortless Social Media Posts with This Unexpected Content Bank Hack

Ever feel like you’re constantly trying to keep up with content… and falling behind?

You’ve got deadlines. Posts to publish. Ideas to come up with.

And some days, you just don’t have anything ready.

Here’s the problem:

You’re creating content on demand instead of building a system. That’s a surefire way to squander what little time you have.

The solution? Create a content bank.

Instead of scrambling for ideas or rushing to meet deadlines and literally ripping your hair out, you have a collection of ready-to-use content you can publish at any time.

In this post, you’ll learn how to build a content bank so you can stay consistent, save time, and take the pressure off your content workflow.

Let’s get into it.

1. Repurpose evergreen content

There’s a very good chance you already have a content bank you didn’t know you were building. It’s all of the evergreen content you’ve uploaded to your social channels.

Evergreen content is content that is and will always be relevant in your niche. It’s not based on a trend nor does it include elements that date it, such as topical references or mentions of dates.

Here are a few ways you can repurpose evergreen content:

• Post your short-form videos to platforms you haven’t reached, yet. For example, if you only publish videos to Instagram Reels, upload them to TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels as well.
• Post your tweets to Threads.
• Share a Threads post in an Instagram story.
• Turn popular videos into carousel posts.
• Turn popular carousel posts into threads on Twitter (X), Bluesky and Threads.

When you have a slot in your social media calendar to fill but have no content ready to go, use one of these methods to fill that slot with repurposed content.

2. Choose a primary platform

Do you have a primary platform that most of your content is optimized for?

For example, a lot of YouTube creators see YouTube as their primary platform and view additional platforms as marketing channels for their primary platform as opposed to being marketing channels for their brand as a whole.

Determine what platform you primarily create content for before you move onto the next step.

3. Capture secondary content and ideas while you create primary content

Now that you know which platform you consider to be your primary content channel, you should have a better understanding of your brand’s overall strategy when it comes to content marketing.

This includes a better understanding of how you create content for that primary content.

There are a lot of opportunities to capture secondary content while you create primary content.

For instance, exciting moments might happen while you’re capturing footage for primary content.

If you’re collaborating with another creator, film a few videos of the two of you doing popular trends.

You can also simply keep cameras rolling in between takes.

Not every photo or video you capture like this needs to be included in your social media calendar, but they’re definitely worth saving just in case.

4. Choose a project management tool

It’s time to get organized, so if you haven’t already, choose a project management tool.

This can be a dedicated project management app like Trello or Asana or something as simple as a spreadsheet.

You can even use a note-taking app like Notion. It’s really up to you and how you prefer to organize your ideas.

A social media management app can even be useful for organization, especially if it has content categories and an asset library.

For example, SocialBee is a fantastic social media management tool that includes several features for content management.

5. Organize your content into content pillars

This guide is a part-mini guide on how to create a social media marketing strategy. With that in mind, let’s talk about content pillars.

Content pillars are the categories you use to organize your content. They represent the core topics you create content for on social media as well as the core content styles you use.

For example, a chef who creates TikTok content might create the following content pillars based on topics:

• Cooking
• Baking
• Meal prep
• Pasta
• Chicken
• Beef
• Seafood
• Cooking techniques

They might also create pillars for content styles, such as “recipes,” “how-tos,” “reviews,” “interviews” and “restaurant spotlights.”

You can create color-coded labels for these pillars in a project management app like Trello.

For instance, you can create green labels for the first set of content pillars and blue labels for the second set.

This is an important part of content organization.

6. Organize your content pillars by content format

Content formats are the different types of content you create on social media: photos, carousel posts, short-form videos, long-form videos, tweets, stories, etc.

As you organize your content pillars, organize the content within those pillars by the formats you’re going to create them for them.

Again, if you’re using a project management app, you can create more labels for content format, such as “Photo,” “Short-form Video,” etc.

If you’re using Trello, in particular, consider creating different boards in your workspace. They could be for different social media platforms or different content pillars. It’s really up to whichever content organization method works best for your brain.

7. Choose a posting schedule

All of this organization has a purpose. It allows you to build a solid posting schedule that helps you stay consistent on social media.

Consistency is the key to a winning social media marketing strategy. Social media algorithms and users both like that they’re able to find more content from you, and in the same style as well.

So, find a way to set up a calendar, and organize your content into it.

Project management apps have the ability for you to assign due dates to individual tasks. They may even have calendar features that allow you to view all of your due dates for a given calendar month.

Social media management tools have this feature as well.

A social media calendar is essential for organizing your content. Being able to view all of the posts you’ve scheduled is a useful tool to have.

And because you labeled your content, you’ll be able to see how many posts you have scheduled for a particular category or content format.

Not only does this allow you to pinpoint holes in your posting schedule, it also helps you spot trends in your schedule.

Note: A free project management app should be able to get the job done. But when it comes to actually scheduling the content to social media platforms, you’ll need a scheduling tool. SocialBee, Pallyy, and Viraly are all great options & better priced than other tools on the market.

8. Batch create content based on your posting schedule

Your posting schedule should reveal a few things:

• The content formats you publish
• How often you publish those content formats
• The content categories you publish content for
• How often you publish to each category

This tells you the total number of posts you plan and publish in a month. Therefore, you know exactly how many posts you should have in your content bank and what types of posts should be in there.

Take some time to brainstorm content ideas for each one of your content pillars. They should be simple and evergreen. The simpler each idea is, the easier it’ll be to create posts for it.

Add each idea to your project management app.

Then, batch create these ideas one by one and bring them to life. Spend a few hours creating content, and see how many ideas you get through.

This will give you a ratio consisting of the number of hours you worked and the number of posts you created during that time, such as three hours and 12 posts, or 3:12.

There are no set rules on the number of posts your content bank should have, so choose a figure, such as two weeks, and use a ratio calculator to determine how long it might take you to complete enough posts for that figure.

9. Develop content processes

Batch creating content for specific content formats and content categories is a great way to discover and develop processes for creating content.

For example, your process for creating a short-form how-to video might look like this:

• List steps in tutorial
• Film short clips depicting each step
• Film short intro showing the completed project
• Film outro showing the completed project again
• Edit it all together

Your process might even include specific camera settings you should use and a small set to record clips on.

Develop a content process for each content format and pillar in your calendar to streamline the creation of each one.

10. Incorporate your project management app

Your project management app can help you manage tasks more efficiently by letting you keep track of what you have and haven’t completed for a particular post.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of project management app you use. They all allow you to keep track of your tasks. They just have different ways of doing things.

In Trello, Asana and apps like it, you can create boards filled with lists that are arranged into columns. The lists can be named things like “Idea”, “Planning”, “Shooting/Creating”, “Editing”, “Scheduled” and “Published”.

You create cards for each task, then drag and drop those cards between lists.

Most project management apps like this allow you to add different elements to cards, such as descriptions, checklists, files and comments. These elements help you keep track of your progress.

Other solutions might not be as efficient as this, but they still help you keep track of posts you need to batch create for your content bank.

11. Create an asset library

An asset library is a collection of elements you use to create content.

Here are examples of elements you might find in a brand’s asset library for social media:

• PNG image of their logo
• Product images in different formats
• Short clips that can be reused, such as an intro or outro
• Templates for images
• Templates for Instagram stories
• Templates for carousel posts
• User-generated content from followers and customers
• Collection of hashtags to use posts
• Document containing your brand’s colors in HTML/RGB/HSV format
• Memes to include in content

Some of these elements will need to be created on their own, independently from the rest of your content. But some can be saved as you create them for content.

For instance, if you like the design you created for a carousel post in Canva, you can save it to your asset library and reuse it as a template for other carousel posts.

Your asset library can be a folder you keep on your hard drive or a cloud storage solution, a folder in Canva, or even the asset library offered by some social media scheduling apps.

12. Create local and cloud-based content banks

Create proper content banks in your computer’s file system as well as in cloud storage solutions, such as Google Drive (Google Workspace) and Dropbox.

You won’t be uploading this content to a social media platform as soon as you create it, so it’s best to safeguard it as much as possible.

Your social media scheduling tool might work as well. Most allow you to save posts as drafts, and you can even organize them into different categories.

Speaking of which, the key to an optimized content bank is organization. Try organizing your content in the following way:

1. Create a main folder, and name it “Content Bank,” or something similar
2. Create a subfolder for each content pillar you created
3. Create subfolders within each content pillar folder for each content format you use for that pillar

This way, when you have an empty timeslot in your social media calendar and know exactly what type of post is supposed to be published there, you can open your content bank and find exactly what you’re looking for.

Examples of content banks

Here’s an example of a content bank. These apply to all industries:

• 4 carousel posts
• 10 images
• 5 videos
• 4 scripts for videos

Let’s use the food industry as an example again:

• Pillar: Cooking
  • Carousel posts
    • Easy ramen recipe
    • Air fryer buffalo chicken wings recipe
    • 30-minute recipes
  • Images
    • Ramen
    • Air fryer buffalo chicken wings
    • Poached chicken in a pot
  • Videos
    • How to poach chicken for salads
  • Scripts
    • Storytime: the time I prevented a major food poisoning incident
    • Storytime: how I landed my first cooking job
• Pillar: Baking
  • Images
    • Mint chocolate cupcake
    • Cilantro lime cookie
    • Chocolate chip cookie
    • Compilation image featuring all of my baking tools
  • Videos
    • Mint chocolate cupcake recipe
    • Cilantro lime cookie recipe
    • Chocolate chip cookie recipe
  • Scripts
    • Every tool I use for baking
• Pillar: Appetizers
  • Carousel posts
    • 5 items every charcuterie board must have
  • Images
    • Charcuterie board
    • Deviled eggs
  • Videos
    • Deviled egg recipe
  • Scripts
    • Why appetizers are the most important dish at your get together

Each one of these represents a piece of content you’ve created or nearly created and have stored in your content bank.

Final thoughts

If you want to stay consistent and stop wasting time running around in circles trying to keep your socials updated, you’re going to need a content bank to help you.

So, work through the steps we’ve discussed above and use them as your starting point.

But don’t be afraid to change things up and adapt the process to work for your business.

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