Stop Curating and Start Documenting: This Workflow Shift Will Produce Better Content Every Time

Uh oh! Looks like your business Instagram is in need of some content. Okay, time to sit down and think real hard about what to post. This should be easy! Right?

Right?

Despite the sheer volume of content we consume every day, we as content creators are known for having content paralysis when it comes to promoting a business of our own. At Flourish, clients literally pay us on retainer to create daily content for them, and we do it with ease. But consistently remain active and engaging on our own accounts? Pulling teeth.

As someone who has let their Instagram sit dormant since January 20th (don’t @ me), I can tell you this single biggest hangup is responsible:

Stop trying to curate content and just document.

When you set out to create content, the process typically looks like this:

Choose a topic > Take photos and/or video of that topic > Create digital assets for that topic > post.

What you’re left with is a small grouping of content based around a very specific thing. That is, of course, after you’ve brainstormed and decided on the topic in the first place. Is it good? Will people engage? Only time will tell…

Curation vs. Documentation

Curation means you’re taking work or content you’ve already made and curating it to fit into a platform’s asset standards. Documentation means you’re actively capturing everything that goes into your day-to-day and allowing that determine where and how you post. Here’s an example of both methods at play:

Let’s pretend you’re a creative agency and you’ve got a newsletter to write. Without having documentation content, you write a list of potential ideas based on stuff you have on hand:

1. Recent branding projects we’ve completed.
2. Design advice from the desk of our creative director, Erica.
3. Top mistakes people make when hunting for a creative agency.

The above ideas come from simply curating whatever you have already produced. Notice how all of the above are sending the same message: “Hey, look at this. We know what we’re talking about. Hire us.” It’s not the worst strategy but certainly isn’t sending engaged subscribers in droves.

Now, if you had taken the documentation approach - and had a stockpile of “behind the scenes” content at your disposal - your list of ideas can look more like this:

1. Watch our in-house photographer make this Lucky Savannah vacation rental look like $1m listing.
2. Screen time-lapse of Erica designing Savannah’s newest retail brand, Vesper.
3. Listen in on Caty’s lunch meeting with local stylist, Kelsey Bucci.

Ah, the content now has life! We went from, “Hire us.” to, “We did some cool work and thought we’d share.” Now, your audience gets to not only see the finished product, but they get to know a bit more about you and how you got there. Zing!

Easy Ways to Document

Creating without documentation can slow down the process and leave you dormant on social which is not ideal (trust, I know)! Don’t think, just document. Then, carve out time to see how you can put together what you’ve done in a way that adds value to your target.

1. Hit record.

Your iPhone takes killer photo and video, but did you know it also takes super crisp audio? Take advantage of the conversations you’re already having by hitting “record” during team breakout sessions, client meetings (with permission), and even lunches with peers. You can add tags to the audio file to note certain topics discussed for easy finding later.

2. It takes a village.

If you work on a team, take advantage. With useful apps like Google Calendar, Slack, and Monday.com, it’s easy to setup automatic reminders and have your team members capture video and photos of their work daily.

If you work solo, it’s up to you to keep yourself accountable. Set yourself reminders daily (try twice a day to start) to whip out the phone and capture what you’re doing at that moment. Your future self will thank you for it.

3. Use the sawdust.

What’s the sawdust, you ask? Everything that doesn’t make it to final cut:

Rejected design files.
Process sketches.
Alternate concepts.
Fonts that didn’t work.
Failures.

Content gold! Store all of these in a specific place (maybe each week you ask your team to dump everything they’ve touched into a specific folder) for culling later. Use these to share what doesn’t work; what lessons you learned; and maybe even how failures sparked whole new ideas.

Stop sitting down at your desk and asking, “What should I post?” and instead starting asking, “How can I give value to my audience based on what I’ve been doing?”

The analytics will speak for themselves.

- Erica Kelly, Co-Founder and Creative Director


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