Clicking and Sharing verses creating your own content? Is one better than the other? What are the pro’s and con’s of each?

​If you are like most independent agents, you have a lot to do. You have claims and payments to process, clients to meet with, staff to train or retrain, and of course the marketing. So, with all this who has time to create new content for my online social media pages right? I mean after all why reinvent the wheel?

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that when it comes to your endless list of to-dos’ when you are an agency owner, being creative and coming up with original content is sometimes at the end or not even on your list of things to get accomplished this week. But I am going to break your content down for you into three quick categories as an agency owner and how you can map out a plan with done for you and original content along with the benefits of both.

Whether you are an independent agent or a captive agent, chances are your company or companies offer you online branded contented and solutions you can just plug and play that make it very easy for you to do something daily for your agency.

The good part about that? Consistency. It makes it very simple for you to either copy and paste or directly link your Facebook business page, twitter account or LinkedIn right into their system and have it just run for you. Easy-peasy right?
Now why would this be bad? Well its not that its bad, but many times you are posting their generic or company branded content with links to the company web pages, not your own. It also is just that – generic.

“But wait” you ask. “Can’t I use some of it to just easy my brain and take a little something off my to-do list?” Absolutely.

Here is what I suggest:

1. Company content is good for brand recognition, especially when you are representing the national carriers with a much bigger marketing budget. However, instead of using their auto-posting tools, do it yourself and either provide links back to your own page or your agency phone number in the post. Better yet, link to have them contact you through Messenger in post if you are doing it on Facebook.
2. Fill in the other days with posts about helpful tips about things that have to do with the weather, safe driving, or whatever your niche is. For example, post about frozen pipes with a link to a blog post you did about frozen pipes.
3. Fill in some days with funny posts, motivational Mondays, TGIFs, anything that you think fits your agency’s personality.
4. Client testimonials are a great way to post things that would go viral. If you have the client’s picture, post that with the testimonial or make it into a picture with the words over their picture. Don’t have a photo? Post the text with a color background and border as an image. Images and video get more visibility than just text alone.
   
   

And I know you are busy. As an agency owner myself, I get it that we only have so many hours in the day to be able to get done what needs to be done. And oftentimes the to-do’s end up sucking the creativity out of us until we are left with nothing. So, use your companies where you can and give your brain some breathing room. Fill in the gaps with the fun things that shows what separates your agency from the rest of your competition. By doing this combination, you will be off to a solid start and a strong online content plan for 2019.
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For more content you can use on your own social media pages, we have some free content, not company branded, that you can also take and use as your own.
 

Free Content