Rock Your Social Media

Confused from the hundreds of conflicting social media strategies bouncing around the web? If you’re overwhelmed and don’t know when to share, what to share, or how to share on social media to promote your blog, don’t miss these tips to get on the right track!

So many of the questions we get here at EBA are about social media.

Social media can be totally overwhelming.

“How do you find so much content to share on social media? I barely have time to focus on my business, let alone read and share other people’s content!”

“When it comes to sharing my own posts on social media, how much is too much?”

“I have more than one blog and I’m really struggling to manage all the platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ — for both. How do I find the time to manage all of my social media profiles?”

“Which social media platforms are the best bet for bloggers?”

And so on and so forth.

Social media can be totally overwhelming — especially for new bloggers. There’s so many different platforms and choices out there, and it seems like some new, hot social media site is popping up every day. It feels like there’s a million places we need to be at once.

It’s a lot to take in.

But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by social media, take a deep breath and listen up: you don’t need to be in a million places at once.

Let me say that one more time: when it comes to social media, you don’t need to be everywhere. You don’t need to be in a million places at once.

Liberating, isn’t it?

The reality is that most of the time, social media is little more than a huge time suck for bloggers. We can get so caught up in trying to be on every platform, posting every day, promoting our content, promoting other people’s content, finding new things to talk about… that all of a sudden, we’re spending all our time working on our social media profiles and none of our time working on our actual business.

It’s easy to get sucked into social media (and I have definitely been guilty of it myself!), but there’s just better ways to spend our time. We need to have a presence on social media, but it doesn’t need to take over our businesses.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by social media, here are a few tips to get you back on track:

You Don’t Need to Share New Content Every Day

When we’re first starting out, we think we need to share new and fresh content… on every platform… every day.

Talk about exhausting!

Here’s what I have learned: it’s better to write one super high-quality blog post per week and share it three times on different social networks than it is to scramble to write a bunch of new blog posts that aren’t as high quality in an effort to have something new to share OR to spend hours every day reading other blogs and searching for things to share.

We sometimes share other people’s content on the EBA Facebook page, but we also have a team. If you’re a one-person-show or have a small team, it’s a waste of time. If you happen to come across a blog post you want to share, great! But don’t spend a minute of your time looking for content just for the sake of having something to share on social media.

When we create awesome content, we can share it on social media many times over. There’s no need to worry about sharing new content every day!

Put Your Focus in the Right Place

When we’re just getting started blogging, we might think social media is “the place to be” to build our audience and make connections.

And while it CAN be a great way to connect with other people (it’s called “social” media for a reason!), it definitely shouldn’t be the first place where we focus our efforts.

If our blogs are new, social media won’t give us the most bang for our buck. While it’s definitely something we need to be on (who isn’t on social media these days?), there are better ways for us to spend our time and build our blogs.

If you’re just starting out, focus on the things that really matter. Build your email list. Write amazing content. Get to know your audience better. You’ll get a much better return on your time and effort by focusing on these things vs. building out your social media presence.

Again, I have nothing against social media and it can be a helpful way to build relationships, but if you’re just starting out, spend your time on the things that will have a real effect on your business and feel free to put social media towards the bottom of your priority list.

Focus on One Platform at a Time

Social media really gets overwhelming when we try to spread ourselves too thin. Start a Facebook Group! Make 1,000 Pinterest Boards! Livestream on SnapChat! Tweet ALL the things!

Social media can be a solid strategy for driving traffic and engagement. But if we try to be everywhere at once, we’ll spread ourselves too thin. We won’t give each platform the time or attention it needs to be successful, and our social media efforts will fall flat.

Talk about a bummer.

If we really want to find success with social media (and not be completely frazzled and overwhelmed in the process), we need to focus on ONE thing at a time. Want to drive traffic through Pinterest? Great. Focus on driving traffic through Pinterest. Don’t get distracted by Facebook, Twitter, and the other million and one platforms out there. Focus on doing one thing — and doing it well.

Once we’ve tested, measured, and found success focusing on ONE thing, then we can move onto something else. But if we try to do everything on every platform all at the same time, we’ll end up burned out, overwhelmed, and disappointed with the results.

Don’t Spend Too Much Time on Social Media

No matter what we’re doing on social media — whether it’s connecting with other bloggers, building our communities, or promoting a new product — there’s one rule of thumb that always applies. And that is, be careful.

Social media is one of the biggest time sucks on the planet. We plan to spend five minutes checking our Facebook messages, and then all of a sudden it’s two hours later and we’re scrolling through comments from a year ago.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s one that we’ll all fall into at one time or another.

When we’re on social media, we need to super careful of a) how we spend our time, and b) how much time we’re spending. Have a plan of attack and commit to a certain amount of time per day on social media. Set a timer, and once that timer goes off, it’s time to sign off and get back to work.

Well, that just about wraps up this post on all things social media! Do you have any other questions on social media that we didn’t cover? Leave your questions in the comments below!

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