I chat with a lot of bloggers and business owners in the course of my work and my hobbies. Most (if not all) of them feel overwhelmed when it comes to creating and posting regular social media content. This is magnified by the number of social networks people feel compelled to participate in. Do you lose sleep over this?
I do volunteer social media content on behalf of a few networking and professional organizations. It feels like I am always online, checking, replying, posting, and coming up with ideas. This often comes at the expense of posting content for myself on my personal hobby blogs, or on behalf of my business. It is easy to feel overwhelmed or inadequate. The advice I give small business owners, and try to follow myself, is to enjoy the journey and create content you are proud of, regardless of how many social sites you use or how frequently you post. Make steady progress and don’t get hung up on trying to post everywhere, all the time.
There are several things you can do to make the process of content sharing and creation easier. Write yourself notes when a post or idea comes to your attention that you might want to share with others. Save images you run across that you found interesting or thought provoking. Keep a notebook of doodles. Take screen shots of quotes or posts or tweets you see that inspire you and save them for use later. Then, when you have a lull in your busy schedule, sift through your doodles and notes and write. Inspiration often strikes when we have the least amount of time to write or act on it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t capture the gist of an idea and use it later.
If possible, write several articles during your free time, or take a really long post and divide it into an ongoing series. Save your drafts and use the option to schedule your posts to be published later. Most, if not all, social networks have the option to publish at a specified date and time in the future. This way you can space your content out to go live over a period of several weeks without stealing time away from other daily or weekly tasks.
It also means you can step away from your posts and take a break, but still have time to re-read and edit your thoughts before they go live. Many of the people I talk to don’t feel comfortable writing, don’t want to sound stupid, and aren’t happy with what they wrote the first time. Don’t let your inner editor stop you from getting your ideas written down. You can always polish them later, doing clean up and tweaks before the scheduled publish date arrives.
By using the option to schedule your posts in advance, keeping a notebook of ideas, and combining this with windows of free time when you are inspired to write and not distracted by other tasks, you may find that you are highly active on social media sites without sacrificing sleep.