Balancing social media and blogging: How to stay sane?

Social media is fun and entertaining. Unless you are a content producer or a blogger trying to use it for your business. Well, then it is a chore and is definitely soul sucking. The balancing of your social media presence and your blogging schedule is a constant struggle.

Clap your hands if you are with me on this one.

But you do see so many big accounts do this so seamlessly and still are on top of their blog. It is an absolute sorcery and mere mortals can’t achieve it.

Blink twice if you have tried to balance between your goal to get a huge following on social media, churn out content as your calendar and trying to breathe, and failed miserably. Well, you are not alone and this post especially for you, naïve one.

Balancing Act of Social Media and Blogging

It is hard to balance social media and blogging, when your work and business are mostly online and it is exhausting to say the least. There is no way out, in this age and technology but you can still try to stay sane by following some of these techniques.

• Block your creative time
• Create a social media strategy
• Automate whatever you can
• Batching similar processes
• Watch out for your analytics
• Put yourself first
• What my social media schedule looks like

Block your creative time

With all that is going on in life and your blogging schedule, it gets harder to sit down and do things that require your focus and deep work.

The more your sweat over small things and your routine, the harder it gets to any planning or focused writing done. And that is why it is important to set aside a particular time block each day, away from distraction from the pesky social media messages or Netflix binges.

Use this time to create, write and do things that require your uninterrupted attention. Extra points if they add up to your long term goals.

Create a social media strategy

Keeping up with the news and staying relevant is one of the vital points as a blogger and a business. But doing that all by yourself is definitely impossible.

And that is why you need a social media strategy that includes

• The social media platforms that your blog will be active
• The number of times you will post per week
• The number of hours you will spend engaging, re-sharing and commenting on the platform
• What is your goal for each platform – short and long term?
• How will you track the progress?

Creating out a social media strategy might seem too pretentious if you are a micro blogger or a small business, but writing out them in detail would hold you accountable and give you more clarity on what you do.

Automate whatever you can

Once you have set your goals and task lists in stone (or paper) automate, automate and automate. Use a scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite to send out your posts on premeditated time.

You can allocate a specific time to schedule posts for the following week. Scheduling for a week will reduce the amount of time you spend on social media for promoting your blog/business.

Batching similar processes

Another great time saving technique is to batch similar processes together and get them done together. For example, instead of spending time creating graphics or images for each social media separately, batch them out together and do it when you are designing the header image for your blog post.

Working in batches has saved me more time than every other time managing techniques put together.

Watch out for your analytics

As you automate things and spend time away from social media creating and building your business and blog, keep an eye over your analytics and traffic. Watch out for what kind of posts work and what performs better.

You may even spend a dedicated time every week (or whatever works for you) to analyse the data and tweak your posts.

Put yourself first

This is the single most important thing I learnt in creating a balance between social media and blogging is putting myself and my mental health first.

How much ever we plan there are going to be days when nothing goes as per our plan and that might overwhelm us. We should have to understand that and keep ourselves prepared for unplanned breaks.

Also, plan for some self care routines into your day and don’t forget to take some breaks.

What my social media schedule looks like

What my social media schedule looks like

• As a book blogger, I try to be active on Instagram (though it offers little to no traffic to my blog), Twitter and Pinterest. I also schedule posts on Facebook, but I am not active on FB, personally or for blog promotion.
• I post four times on my blog per week and share the posts on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest as soon as the post go or some time on the same day. To be honest, I am not really strict on the time for this process.
• Weekly once I spend an hour or two to choose the posts from the book blogger community to reshare on my social media platform during the following week.
• Next I spend another 15 to 30 minutes to choose posts from my blog to promote all through the next week.
• On Monday I schedule these links (both from my blog and the ones I loved from the blogging community) to publish over Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest at different times with customized messages for each platform.
• Every day I spend about 15 to 30 minutes on each platform to talk, engage and make friends. Usually I spend about 60 to 90 minutes on the whole each day.

That is it. This is my minimal schedule to allow me to stay on top of social media and blog promotion and breathe as well.

Well, sometimes these schedules don’t work and that is okay too. I stopped worrying too much about it, because I know I have a routine that works for me, most of the days and I can get back to it soon enough.

The trick to balancing between social media and blogging is knowing what you want and when to say enough.

If you like my posts about social media and blogging aspect of it, you should try some of these related posts.

You may like these too

• How Using Instagram For Books And Reading Changed My Life?
• Bookish Questions For Your Social Media Captions
• Books To Kick Start The Reading Habit
• Things To Do Without Leaving Your House

Pin me!

Let’s chat

How do you keep balancing social media and blogging content? Does it ever get overwhelming for you? What does your social media schedule look like? Let us talk.