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In the past three years, we’ve seen the creator economy grow exponentially. Musicians, writers, dancers, cooks, and all manner of creatives have turned pandemic-era hobbies into national brands, generating passive income from brand partnerships and individual monetary contributions from their audiences.
Creating and publishing new content is vital to online relevance, and social media algorithms favor the frequent creation of niche content on their platforms. As this demand for new content increases, many content creators balance competing tasks and priorities. Content creation tools such as Squarespace’s Unfold app help creators maximize efficiency, scale content production, and combat burnout without sacrificing their unique style, brand, and voice.
In this article, we go over how creators can use Unfold to make their creation process more streamlined and efficient.
What makes someone a content creator?
A content creator is anyone who creates content online across industry verticals and social media channels. Most content creators have a specialty—or niche—type of content they create, such as blogs, cooking videos, sewing tutorials, career advice, or book reviews. Many are considered micro-influencers, an emerging subset of influencer marketers with extremely specific target audiences and reach.
Many, but not all, content creators earn income from their content either through affiliate marketing programs with third-party brands or creating content exclusively for paying customers. A content creator’s measures of success will look different depending on their goals for reach and monetization.
Most content creators use social media platforms to create and distribute their content, and limit their channel usage to where their audience spends the most time. Social media has historically made it easy for people to create and share content, but many social platforms lack the customization capabilities that creators need to solidify a brand identity. Squarespace’s Unfold app helps creators craft and publish high-quality, branded content in less time, freeing them up to invest time and energy into building an audience, brand, or community around their content.
Top skills content creators need
Creators are as diverse as they come and each bring their own unique skill set to the creator economy. Still, there are a few skills content creators have in common across industry verticals.
Audience development and community building
Social media platforms use algorithms to match content to audiences and accounts with high potential for engagement. Savvy content creators know how to use social media algorithms to their advantage. By identifying trends from engagement with their own content and content from similar creators in their niche, creators can find opportunities to create audience-specific content that’s more likely to be algorithm-friendly.
Social media marketing best practices include building an authentic connection with a specific audience. For example, it’s important to reply to comments on social media posts to engage your audience directly. A streamlined suite of content creation tools, like the Unfold app, makes it easy for creators to balance the demands of creating new content and building community.
Content marketing and SEO
Social media platforms and search engines have more and more in common. Creators should factor search engine optimization (SEO) best practices into their creation and distribution strategies on social media, as well as on their personal blogs or websites. Basic copywriting can also help social media creators come up with captions and video titles for their posts.
What types of content do creators make?
Creators make and distribute many different types of content. The type of content a creator chooses to make depends on the creator’s industry, niche, and audience. Creating just one high-quality piece of content, however, can take creators hours, or even days.
Here are five common content formats among emerging and established content creators:
Static images and infographics
Podcasts and audio
Blog posts and long-form writing
Downloadable guides and resources
4 Content Creation Tips for Creators
As social media algorithms change and the creator economy continues to grow, it’s important that content creators are working smarter, not harder, when it comes to their content.
Here are four tips creators can use to boost efficiency and free up time to get back to doing what they do best: creating.
1. Have a content calendar
Creators can’t anticipate every trend coming, but having a content calendar will make it easier when they need to hop on the next viral trend.
A content calendar is an advance plan or roadmap of content a creator wants to publish within a certain amount of time. Creators can use calendars to plan posts by month, the week, or even by the day. Calendars don’t replace a content strategy, but they make crafting a strategy easier on busy content creators.
Creating this type of plan helps creators make sure all of their great content ideas are accounted for in one place, and makes it easy for creators to work ahead on that content to account for surprise trends, world events, or even the need for personal time off.
The Unfold app also makes it easy for creators to maximize their content calendars by scheduling Instagram posts in advance. In one tool, creators can drop their images into a template and then schedule that post for another time, making more time for community engagement or much-needed rest.
2. Save time and repurpose content with templates
Keeping up with the pace of content creation can feel like an impossible task. Some social media marketing best practices say creators should post something new at least once a day.
One way content creators can avoid constantly reinventing the wheel is by creating or leveraging a set of templates. A TikTok or Instagram creator, for example, can use Unfold’s Reels templates to create trendy video content in minutes. This tool allows creators to choose a trending Reels template, easily import photos and videos into the editor, trim and replace clips, and sync to the beat of a piece of music.
Having social content templates like these ready to go reduces production time and allows creators to use images and videos they already have to create something entirely new.
3. Invest in the right creative tools
The right creative tools can make or break a creator’s marketing strategy. Social media design and marketing technology often exist separately, meaning creators lose time to toggling between tools to generate a high-quality piece of content. Creators should prioritize tools and platforms that help them reach their target audience with content that’s easy to create and true to their brand.
Unfold has over 400 story, post, and animated templates, plus exclusive Reels templates, that provide creators with an all-in-one content creation experience. Editing tools like filters, effects, stickers, fonts, and an animated drawing tool give creators control over their content and digital brand identity.
Unfold’s newest Reels templates make it easy for creators to engage with their audience with timely content authentic to their brand. With templates reflecting social media trends like film, fashion, and everyday lifestyle, creators can transform their clips into on-trend and engaging social media content, especially for TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Investing in the right tools up front helps creators build a seamless way to create and publish content. Creators should look for tools that integrate into popular social media platforms, like the Unfold app. Creators can also use Squarespace to create a beautiful website that reflects their brand while housing their valuable creations.
4. Use social media tools to track metrics and growth
Success will look different for every content creator based on their industry, audience, and channels. Instead of trying to track every key performance indicator (KPI) possible, creators should focus efforts on tracking the success metrics that matter most to their goals.
A lifestyle creator on Instagram, for example, may want to prioritize follower count and clicks on affiliate links as KPIs to see how their reach and opportunity for affiliate partnerships increase. A Squarespace Bio Site allows that creator to generate a unique link in their social media bios to consolidate their original and affiliate content into a single resource for their audience. Bio Site tracking tools make it easy for creators to track performance of their unique and affiliate links.
Creators can save time by identifying their top priority metrics and setting up tools like a Bio Site to make tracking those metrics easy.
Spend less time toggling and more time creating
Content creators are primed to change the way people consume content online. It’s important for new and burgeoning content creators to be able to create and share content without the friction caused by toggling between apps or uploading imagery every time they need to post.
Using Squarespace’s Unfold app, creators can cut down on manual content creation hours while still staying true to their brand and audience. Try Unfold today to see how much easier it can be to create and share your content.