How to Spend Time on Social Media to Boost Blogging Productivity post appeared first on ProBlogger.
Photo by Devon Rogers on Unsplash
This was written by Nicole Avery, Productivity Expert at ProBlogger.
For us bloggers, social media is an important marketing tool. This allows us to grow our blogs, connect with readers, build communities, and stay up to date with current events and news in our niche. But if we let it, it can be a huge waste of time and reduce our productivity.
I see that social media negatively affects blogger productivity in two different ways.
Your social media habits can affect your productivity in two ways.
Have a lot of fun
A person who spends a lot of time on social media, caring about their community, interacting with other communities, commenting, giving links, etc. A blogger who posts and participates in discussions on the internet. This is usually done to increase your presence and visibility in your niche.
continuous monitoring
Then there's the blogger who knows not to spend too much time on social media, tries to stay away from them but can't help but pick them up very quickly, in short bursts here and there throughout the day. . at important times of the day.
How is this social media behavior affecting your productivity? It mainly affects in three ways:
- The total time spent on social media far exceeds any benefit a business can derive from a social media presence.
- More than one social media session per day means significant switching costs. You can read more about switching costs in this article, but in short, this is the time when you need to switch from one task to another, get your focus back, and get to work. A study by the American Psychological Association found that this can consume up to 40 percent of a person's productive time.
- They get distracted by the time they spend on social media and need more time to work on a task like writing a blog post because their mind isn't 100% focused on the task. For example, a blogger is trying to write tomorrow's post, but part of her mind is still pondering a negative comment on her Facebook page and how to respond to it.
Even a small reduction in your time and social media presence can reduce the above effects and increase your blogging productivity. That doesn't mean you can't be on social media, you just need to plan more and be proactive about how to get it done. Here are two things you can do to help:
1. Create a social media strategy
Logging into all social networks and spending time on each of them every day is one way to build a social media presence, but it's unlikely to be successful. To maximize the time you spend on social media, it's best to have a specific social media strategy for your blog. A social media strategy does not have to be complex and detailed, but it should cover the following key points:
How much time per day/week can you spend on social media?
See how much time you blog per day/week and determine what percentage you can spend on social media. The time you spend depends on the blogger and there will be times when you want to spend more time on social media to support your blogging goals. The key is to figure out how much time you will be spending on social media on a regular basis and stick to it.
In which social networks will you be and in which will you be fully active?
Bloggers usually sign up for most social networks, but unless you hire a community manager, you won't have time to devote much time to everyone. . If so, pick 2-3 and focus on them. Create great content to share and spend time building your communities on these networks. The net result of a larger presence on fewer social networks offsets the cost of less time spent on multiple networks. This podcast episode offers some helpful tips on how to decide if a new social network is right for you.
Define your goal for each social network
For the networks you spend time on, think of a reason you are there. For example, my goal is to look like an expert in my niche and create freelance and media opportunities on Twitter (I have a book!) and on Facebook to help my community sort through the chaos of family life with my tips and share them share . Quality items that I make for you. By helping them in any way I can for free, I build trust that I hope will encourage them to buy my products and services.
Determine the delivery frequency.
It's difficult to stay on most social media, but that doesn't mean posting more information will garner more attention. Buffer recently successfully transitioned its social media strategy to Facebook:
We've reduced our Facebook post frequency by over 50% and really focused more on quality than quantity. What happened next could not have been foreseen by even the most optimistic social media executive:
Despite the fact that there were fewer posts, our reach and activity on Facebook started to grow!
Monitor your progress and change your strategy
Every social network has some kind of analysis associated with it. Look at the data and see how it fits your purpose. If it works, keep going. If that doesn't work, why not try something new to get the results you want.
If you're looking for tips on building a social media strategy, check out this article on using social media to promote your blog.
2. Create a social media data collection process
Logging into social media every time you want to post something will drastically decrease your productivity due to the reasons mentioned above. There are definitely times when you need to go live and interact with your audience in real time, but most posts can be scheduled.
Scheduling on social media is the perfect way to manage groups and instantly boost your productivity. You can read how this came about in my previous post here on Problogger: The Science and Art of Dosing to Boost Your Productivity.
Batch processing means that you reserve a block of time to schedule your social media posts for a week, two weeks, or a month. To really see the productivity of social media scheduling, you need to create a process for how to do it. The exact process will vary slightly from blogger to blogger, but I'll share my plan for the main social networks I'm most active on:
Nicole's social media planning process
- I determined how often I would post on each network and what type of content I would share. I use Buffer as a scheduling tool for scheduling Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts (you can share on more networks, but these are the ones I choose to schedule) and it calculates the best time to share on each network.
- I use Feedly to read blogs and articles. This gives me important sources of information to share with my networks. Several times a week I spend 10-15 minutes writing articles that I want to share with my networks.
- I will set aside 45-60 minutes a week to schedule social media posts. I go to Feedly, go to the "Read More" tab and determine which snippets I will share and on which networks. If I think some parts are important, I share them on all three networks, others can be shared on the same network. I use the Buffer Chrome extension for content scheduling.
- I will also save snippets of content from my blog to share on their respective networks.
- At the end of the session I go to the clipboard and make sure I have a good mix of content separated and in the right order e.g. I'm not sharing four recipe posts and then four parenting posts, but a combination of different topics.
Creating a custom process like this means you can reduce the time you spend finding content to post, or delay what needs to be shared. Having planned the week I see this as my main content and if I log in once a day I will continue to frequently share content, add conversations and answer questions/comments in my networks.
Don't let social media slow you down. Create a social media strategy and collection process so you can take control of how you spend your time on social media and watch your productivity grow!
Are you spending too much time on social media?
This article was first published on July 14, 2017 and updated on September 8, 202212
How to Spend Time on Social Media to Boost Blogging Productivity post appeared first on ProBlogger.