Anyone who thinks teenagers spend the most time on social media clearly hasn’t spent 24 hours with a small business owner! It’s constant, to the point of you feel like you may as well have your phone surgically attached to your hand.
But oh the drain of it!
We’ve all experienced it. The pull of your phone and knowing you “need” to post on social media, or check for comments, but feeling just so over it that you almost can’t bear to pick up your phone.
Social media is a critical part of business success these days, but it doesn’t come without it’s challenges. The fast paced nature of Instagram and Facebook means that it’s too easy to get lost in the crowd unless you are posting consistently. Plus there’s FOMO – what if something happens on there and you miss it? What if – and this is the ultimate – a potential customer comments with an enquiry and you DON’T SEE IT UNTIL TOMORROW!?!?
It’s time to take the stress down a little. We’ve got 4 ways for you to avoid and/or recover from social media burnout.
1. Have a content strategy and plan
The main thing we hear from people who are burning out on social media is the stress of knowing what to post. We’ve been there – “Aggghhhh I have to post something tonight but I am completely lacking in inspiration!”. It’s stressful. But there is a great – and easy – way to avoid that feeling. Plan what you are going to post in ADVANCE. Once a week, sit down and curate the images you want to post over the next 7 days. Use an app like PLANN to upload these images and put them in the one place. You can then arrange them to see if they look good together. While you’re on a roll, write your captions as well.
I PROMISE that once you are in the mindset of creating your content and do it all in one hit, your creativity and inspiration will flow and it will be SO much easier.
2. Schedule
By Scheduling your content you are eliminating the need to be on social media at the “right time”. Once you have planned out all your content, jump on to your scheduler and input all your images and captions, set the time you want it to automatically post/send you a reminder to post – and then don’t give it another thought! This frees your mind to focus on other things in your business without missing out on posting consistently. There a lots of apps and websites that you can use for this. I love Plann for Instagram, and also use Grum for auto-scheduling (many people frown upon the use of Grum but I, and many other people, have no problem with it). Hootsuite is also great – especially once they finish testing for auto-posting to Instagram.
3. Have a wide range of content sources
You know the feeling… scrolling through your photos trying to find something good that you haven’t posted yet and getting stressed. You then might end up not posting anything, or worse – posting something not up to standard (yes that is worse than not posting at all!).
So what can you do? Well it depends on your business a little bit. If you have a product based business you should maintain a big selection of product images at any one time. Get creative with your shots – there can be more than one way to photograph a single product. Get your customers to share and tag you in photos of them/their kids using your products – or even better, have brand reps who regularly take great photos for you to use! (see our post on running a brand rep search here: )
If you are a service based business, use stock photos that suit your brand. Oh Tilly and Haute Stock are two of my favourites. Also you can share other people’s images from Instagram too – it’s a goldmine! (Just make sure you give credit where credit is due and ask for permission if you think you should)
4. Outsource or seek help
Sometimes even with all of the above, it’s still too much. It’s ok to let go and let someone else help you out. Outsource to a social media specialist to help you create a strategy, content plan, source images, or even create and post your content for you. Not only will it save you time and stress, having someone who knows social media inside out might even increase the effectiveness of social media for your business. If you want to know more about how we could help you, head to our services page.
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