How To Break Away From Social Media
You all know I love social media. What blogger doesn’t, right? It’s pretty much required. Social media has offered me a lot of great opportunities, but if I’m not careful, it can take over my day and my night. It’s important to know when to step back and break away from social media, especially when you are a blogger and social media is your job.
How To Break Away From Social Media
These tips have helped me to limit my time on social media so I can be intentional and have fun with my time there and not end every day mindlessly scrolling for hours.
Create An Editorial Calendar
Editorial calendars are great for magazines and blogs, but they can be great for social media, too. Schedule 1-2 hours a week to sit down and plan out what you will be sharing on social media for the coming weeks.
You can schedule some of it out in advance using tools like Buffer or Tailwind, or even the native schedulers for platform (Facebook always loves it when you use their scheduling tools instead of someone else’s). But this doesn’t mean that you are sending out old, stale updates. You can still pop on for a bit each day and share something new or trending, and, of course, answer comments and interact with your friends and followers. Even if you don’t pre-schedule anything, having a plan in place at the beginning of the week will save you time all week long.
Set A Timer
When you do sit down to spend time on social media, set a timer! Give yourself a specific amount of time to spend on each platform. It’s good to split this out into “work time” and “play time” if you are a blogger. Work time is answering messages, responding to comments, keeping up with trends and industry news. Pay attention to what times your followers are online or the most interactive, and plan to be available during those times.
Play time is talking to friends, getting inspired by Instagram feeds you love, searching for things on Pinterest, and clicking through to interesting articles. When you are a blogger, it’s so easy for social media to become work that you can lose the fun that drew you to it in the firstplace.
Log Off – Just For A Little Bit
Sometimes you need to get away from the computer and the phone completely so you can read a good book, spend time really talking to a close friend, hang out in a coffee shop and people watch, see a movie, or just relax on your favorite chair.
It’s a great idea to plan for at least one day a month where you are going to stay off of social media. You will come back to it the next day feeling more refreshed and full of ideas than you were before. Do you agree?
XOXO,
BLENDstyles