Dominate your social media in an hour a week

What if I told you that you can spend less than an hour a week and have content for all your social media platforms by using a simple process I can teach you right now? This process has really helped me get more content pushed out across many more social media platforms while not having to reinvent the wheel every single time I post. The automated process also makes sure things are posted at the exact time my audience is most likely to see them. The first thing is to start with one main piece of content, which will be repurposed across all your social media platforms. To begin, I recommend creating a video or audio recording. The video does not need to be more than two or three minutes — a maximum of five minutes — because most people will not watch beyond three minutes, according to YouTube analytics. Offer three to five tips on a given subject. Once you record this video, upload it to YouTube and also Facebook, independently (don't just share your YouTube link to Facebook. You'll get much more reach uploading the video directly to each). Next, you're going to take your video on YouTube and use it on a site called rev.com. (There's an app as well.) Rev.com will transcribe any video or audio for $1 a minute. In this step, upload the video from YouTube to Rev for them to transcribe. Getting the transcription back usually only takes an hour or two, but it can take up to 24 hours. While you're doing that, take the audio file from this YouTube video by copying the URL after upload and use an MP3 converter like listentoyoutube.com, which will give you an MP3 audio file that is easy to upload. Post that as a podcast using SoundCloud, or if you are an Apple user and have Garage Band, both of those make it very easy to post the audio-only version. After you get the transcription back from your video, look it over and clean it up so it's more readable for your blog. Once that blog post is perfected, look through it to find something quotable. Take each quote and link them to either your video, audio or written blog post. Give your reader the choice of how they want to consume your content by posting different versions with tags like "audio, podcast or video" if you're using Twitter, because Twitter does not offer a preview like the other sites. (Put all the links into a URL-shortener like bit.ly first, so you can describe your content and make the most of Twitter's 140 characters.) Go to a site called Recurpost, which allows you to add quotes, links or articles to your different social networks. It's free to start, up to 100 posts per month. I like it better than Hootsuite and Buffer because of the recurring posting feature. Recurpost is going to run on autopilot and will post to your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social platforms that you use, and will constantly put those posts out at a schedule that you set. Be respectful of the context of each platform and remember people love visuals, so include pictures if possible. An app I use to make pictures with text overlay is Word Swag. Canva is good as well. Recurpost eventually "learns" the habits of your social networks and will post the content at a time when it's most likely to be seen. Just by using this one piece of content, you can hit all your social platforms. Tools like Rev and Recurpost will do all the heavy lifting for you once you do the initial setup. In fact, I used the process described here to write and publish this post! Jason Hamilton is chief executive of KIS Financial Planning. Reach him on Twitter at @kisplanning.