Last week we talked about the benefits of planning social media content a month at a time for your home improvement business. This week, we’re providing the steps you can follow to do so.

1. Choose Five Content Categories
Categories help keep your content within scope while ensuring variety. It’s generally not effective to post constantly about your business and products. Most experts tout the 80/20 rule: 20 percent of the content should be about your goods and services and 80 percent should be something else.

You can have more or less categories, but five is often realistic for a business to keep track of. For example, a window installation or decor company might choose categories such as:

• Posts about your goods and services
• Tips and how-to
• General local interest
• Motivational or fun
• Pretty windows

2. Brainstorm Post Ideas for Those Categories
Gather your team and any other resources, including content writers or your marketing agency, and brainstorm as many ideas as you can for each category. Don’t worry about whether they’re great ideas at first; just get them down.

Decide how often you want to post. If you post every weekday on Twitter, that’s roughly 22 posts a month on average. If you post biweekly on Instagram, that’s around eight to 10 posts a month.

Go through the brainstorm list and pick some ideas from each category to fill up the required number of posts.

3. Gather Images, Links, and Videos for Content
Source images, video content, memes, or links to go with your content ideas. Some people find it helpful to do this step before number 4, and some people reverse these steps. There’s no one right way, so do what works for you.

4. Write Captions
Create captions for each post. You can’t always create one caption across multiple social media types—Twitter’s rules and best practices are different from Instagram’s, so keep that in mind.

5. Research Hashtags
If you’re posting on Instagram or Twitter, take time to research which relevant hashtags are performing and use those in your caption. You can and should include up to 30 hashtags for maximum exposure on Instagram. Include one or two hashtags on Twitter.

6. Schedule Content in Your Autoposter
Use a content scheduler and autoposter to format all your posts and schedule them on a calendar. Then you can attend to other work throughout the month as social media posts automatically show up for your audience.