Welcome to Mo’s Letter, a weekly publication by Dr Mo about social media, business strategy and career development.

Content creation

When it comes to social media, the key is to automate everything. Instead of sitting down multiple times a week to come up with content, generate 12 topics for the whole year and build helpful, relevant content around them.

Have a formula for how you will flesh out each topic. Break them down into a series of posts you can publish over each month.

Feed posts, Stories, threads, videos, memes — switch it up and see what works for your brand. Click the pic below to get some ideas.

Design

For content design, grab some sweet templates from creativemarket.com — or use good ol’ Canva to design your posts for free.

Sit down and design everything in one go. The first time you do it, it’ll take you the whole day. The fourth time you do it, it’ll take you two hours tops. It gets faster each time.

Publishing

Instead of posting everything manually (who has the time?), sign up for Buffer, Hootsuite, Lately, Later, or any of the numerous social media management tools out there.

Yes, it will cost you. Invest in the one you can afford. Contrary to popular belief, the best things in life are not free. Even breathing costs energy, which requires food, which requires money.

Link up all your platforms and set your posts to auto-publish on specific dates. Nothing hectic—two to three times a week is good.

Depending on how much content you prepared beforehand, this has just freed you up for the next 3-6 months.

Messages

Have a script for how you’ll respond to the most common questions — a sort of FAQ:

• “What products do you sell?”
• Where are you based?”
• “How does payment work?”
• “What are your bank details?”

Having a script handy will shorten your lead time. Write these answers in your note-taking app and copy-paste them as needed.

If you use Facebook, this is dead easy to set up. You can have them answer automatically-served questions and simply collect their contact details at the end.

I use this on one of my pages:

https://facebook.com/grammarandflow

DM the page to see how it works. Again—it’s all about shaving precious time off repetitive tasks.

Invoicing

Stop messing around with manual quotations and invoices—we’re in 2020. Register an account on Waveapps.com and never worry about calculating tax again. It’s free, and I’ve been using it for years now.

You can generate quotations and invoices, save your customer’s details, pull customer statements, get a balance sheet report—it’s really one of the most useful tools on the web.

Automate your backend business processes—how fast you work, how you prepare the delivery, how long it takes you to send it, what tools you use, etc.

Sending files

Stop sending files over email—use Google Docs or Google Sheets for documents and spreadsheets, respectively. Both are free.

For digital freelancers, use WeTransfer or Dropbox to transfer files or designs.

Contracts

Get electronic PDF signatures. You can email your client a template (available freely online) and when they e-sign it, it’ll update on your end in real-time.

Always think like a lazy person—it’ll save you time, energy and fuel.

Outsource it

If you do all of this consistently, you’ll be spending more time doing business and less time on admin.

Automate, automate, automate. Nail the formula and replicate.

And if you can’t automate or delegate, outsource it to someone who can do it better than you—at lightning speed.

Someone like me.

In my last post, I covered why the old ways of social media marketing are no longer effective. Here’s why:

The New Normal

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Mohammed Shehu

Mohammed Shehu, Ph.D. writes on content and marketing for creators and brands. You can find him online @shehuphd everywhere.