The post How to Reduce Social Media Time to Increase Your Blog Productivity first appeared on ProBlogger.
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This is a post by Nicole Avery, ProBlogger's Productivity Expert.
As a blogger, social media is an important tool for us. 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 allow it, it can be time-consuming and reduce productivity.
I see social media negatively impacting bloggers' productivity in two ways.
Two ways your social media habits can affect your productivity
waste a lot of time
There are bloggers who spend most of their time on social networks, interacting with their community, participating in other communities, commenting, connecting, etc. deliver and participate in online discussions. The reason for doing this is usually to increase your presence and get noticed in your niche.
constant monitoring
Then there is the blogger who knows he doesn't spend too much time on social media, he tries but can't help but jump here and there throughout the day, which very quickly becomes a considerable amount of time that accumulates. .
How do these social media behaviors affect your productivity? It affects you in three ways:
- The total time you spend on social media will ultimately outweigh any benefits you might get from working on your social media presence.
- Multiple social media sessions throughout the day result in significant exchange costs. You can read more about switching costs in this post, but in short, it's the time we need to move from one task to another, focus again, and start working. Research from the American Psychological Association has shown that this can cost up to 40% of the work time.
- They suffer from social media inattention and take much longer to work on an activity like writing a blog post because their mind is not 100% engaged in the activity. For example, a blogger tries to write her post the next day, but part of her mind is still thinking about a negative comment on her Facebook page and how to respond to it.
Even a small reduction in the amount of time and frequency you spend on social media can reduce the aforementioned effects and increase blog productivity. That doesn't mean you can't be on social media, it just means you need to be more planned and proactive about how to do it. Here are two steps you can take to help:
1. Create a social media strategy
Logging into all social networks and dedicating time to 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 doesn't have to be complex and detailed, but it should cover the following key points:
How much time per day / week can you dedicate to social media?
Find out how much time you blog per day / week and determine what percentage you can spend on social media. The time you spend varies from blogger to blogger, and there will be times when you will want to spend more time on social media to support your blogging goals. The key is to regularly determine how much time you will be spending on social media and stick to it.
In which social networks will you be and in which will you be fully active?
It's common for bloggers to join most social networks to be on them, but unless you have a community manager, you're unlikely to have the time to devote a significant amount of time to all of them. If so, pick 2-3 and focus on them. Create great content to share and take the time to build your communities on these networks. The net result of a larger, more connected presence on fewer social networks will be slightly greater than spending a small amount of time on a large number of networks. This episode of the podcast offers great advice 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 about a reason why you are there. For example, my goal is to be recognized as an expert in my niche on Twitter and create opportunities for freelancers and the media (that's how I got a book deal!), While on Facebook I help my community navigate the chaos of family life. organize my advice and exchange of quality articles that I choose for you. By helping them as much as possible for free, I build trust that will hopefully induce them to purchase my products and services.
Determine the frequency of publication.
Most social networks are difficult to navigate, but that doesn't mean posting more content will attract more attention. Buffer recently changed its Facebook social media strategy with flying colors:
We have reduced our posting frequency on Facebook by more than 50% and are really focusing on quality rather than quantity. What happened next could not have been predicted even by the most optimistic social media manager:
Our reach and engagement on Facebook started to increase even as we posted less!
Track your progress and change your strategy
Every social network has some sort of analysis associated with it. Look at the data and see how it fits your purpose. If it works, keep going. If not, find out why and try something new to get the desired results.
If you need some tips to start building your social media strategy, read this article, How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog.
2. Create a social media aggregation process
Going to social media whenever you want to post something will greatly reduce your productivity for the reasons mentioned above. There are times when you need to post live and interact with your followers in real time, but most posts can be scheduled.
Social media scheduling is the perfect task for batch processing and instantly boosting productivity. You can read how to do this in a previous post I wrote here on Problogger: The Science and Art of Teaching to boost your productivity.
Batch processing means taking the time to schedule your social media posts for a week / two weeks / a month. To get the most out of social media planning, you need to create a process on how to do it. The exact process will vary somewhat from blogger to blogger, but I'll outline how I plan the major social networks I'm most active on:
Nicole's social media planning process
- I've set how often I post posts on each network and the type of content I share. I use Buffer as a scheduling tool to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (you can share across multiple networks, but these are only the ones I plan) and to set the best time to share on each network.
- I use Feedly to read blogs and articles. This means that I have important sources of information to share in my networks. I spend 10-15 minutes several times a week tagging things I want to share with my networks.
- I'll set aside 45-60 minutes a week for a batch schedule of social media posts. I go to Feedly and go to the Read Later tab and decide which parts I want to share on which networks. I share some articles on all three networks if I think they are relevant, others can only be shared on one network. I use the Buffer Chrome extension to schedule content.
- I will also save snippets of content from my blog to share on relevant networks.
- At the end of the session I go into the buffer and make sure that the content is good and shared in the right order, eg. B. I will not share four recipe posts and then four parenting posts, but a mix of different topics. .
Creating a concrete process like this means reducing the time you spend searching for content to share or postponing what you want to share. When I plan a week, I consider my content to be basic and will continue to regularly share content, add conversations and answer questions / comments on my networks, once a day.
Social media doesn't have to slow down your productivity. Create a social media strategy and batch process so you can track how you spend your time on social media and watch your productivity grow!
Do you think you spend too much time on social media?
This article was first published on July 14, 2017 and updated on September 8, 2022.12
The post How to Reduce Social Media Time to Increase Your Blog Productivity first appeared on ProBlogger.