Butter Scraped Over Too much… Social Media?

Advice From Bilbo Baggins

I’m sure everyone reading this has either seen the Lord of the Rings movies, read the books, or at least heard of them. At the beginning of “The Fellowship of The Ring” Bilbo tells Gandalf that he feels like “butter scraped over too much bread”; a line that a lot of businesses can resonate with (especially if you’re a one-person operation) when it comes to the upkeep of their social media. 

Let’s say you’ve got a smaller setup:

• Facebook

• LinkedIn

• Your website’s blog

That means you need to make a daily post for your Facebook and then a different post and article for LinkedIn, and then you have to write a blog post at least once a week; because everyone knows that’s what you gotta do to build up business… Right?

Wrong!

You're scraping your butter by doing that and draining your energy in the process (or your bank account if you're hiring someone else to do it). There’s a simple secret that can ease the load of social media upkeep, and that secret is called the copy-and-paste method. Now that might sound a bit vague so let me explain…

The Copy and Paste Method 

There are two parts to the copy and paste method, but we’ll start off with the most obvious one.

Part 1: Copy and paste what someone else said

Now let me be clear when I say you should copy what other people say I’m NOT saying to plagiarize; I’m talking about quotes, citations, and references. 

I wrote about this in an earlier post called Linking to Sucess, but I’ll say it again; when you quote another article, study, or a random person from history and properly credit them it makes you look smarter. If you look smarter that will help build trust between you and your customers.

This is especially useful when creating posts for your social media. All you need is a relevant quote, and a graphic design platform like Canva (no I don’t get paid to endorse them, it’s just the platform I like to use, there are plenty of others out there) to make it look good, and you’re all set to go! 

Part 2: Copy and paste yourself

It is a total falsehood that you need to have different posts for all your social media accounts, in fact, it’s not uncommon to see a business post the same thing across multiple social media platforms. People usually spend about two or three seconds on your post, so they won’t be heartbroken if you copy and paste your Facebook post to Instagram or LinkedIn.

Copy and pasting yourself is even more useful when it comes to blog posts and articles. Let’s go back to that bare minimum I mentioned earlier; you need to publish a LinkedIn article and a blog post, so instead of writing two different pieces of copy, go ahead and use the copy and paste method.

Again, this will not break your readers’ hearts, lots of businesses do it all the time.

Quality Over Quantity

Now, you might say to me:

“Rachel this is all well and good, and maybe I can use it, but I still really need to focus on drumming up all the business I can and that means more posts and more articles.”

I can understand that sentiment, in fact, I had the same feeling when I first started Written With Design, but I realized I couldn’t be posting and blogging all the time and still get my work done without decreasing the quality of my content. That’s true for anything you decide to do, if you burn the candle at both ends you're eventually going to have to reap the consequences.

It reminds me of something I heard while completing my copywriting training. In the courses the instructors would often talk about staying with a company for years but then leaving because they needed a change, they just couldn’t keep writing about the same thing for the same company and still have it be quality work. 

If you try writing multiple blog posts and articles a week along with many different posts for each of your social media accounts every day, you’re gonna burn yourself out and then you won’t have quality or quantity. Just like Bilbo’s bread wouldn’t taste very good without enough butter, your content won’t “taste” good to your followers or readers either.

Now I know I’ve already said a lot, but just in case you’re still not convinced there’s one more thing I want to address, and it’s probably the most important reason of them all…

People Don’t Want Tons of Your Content

That’s right, they don’t want it.

This isn’t to say your content is bad, it’s just that people don’t want to go through all of it. Remember, the people that receive your content are usually receiving the same kind of stuff from other businesses too. Think about your own inbox for a second and how annoying it can be for someone to send you several emails in rapid succession when you don’t have the time to look at any of them. It’s the same principle here.

One blog post and article every week or every other week like I do for Written With Design, and one post per day (maybe a couple more here and there if you really want to) for your social media accounts is the mix I have found to work the best, and by using the copy and paste method you’ll lighten your load significantly.