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.

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. Click To Tweet

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

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.

Balancing Social media and Blogging pin me

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.

Automate for Balancing social media and blogging
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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.

You time Balancing social media and blogging
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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.

Trust the process Balancing social media and blogging
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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.

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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.

15 Comments

  1. A.J. McMahon

    Yes this is a very though thing to do!! I love how Facebook and others are really automating a lot of the things recently!!

    Reply
  2. Sophia @ Bookwyrming Thoughts

    claps hands Yes yes it me I struggle with this SO MUCH, especially as of late. I absolutely love to automate whatever I can, especially when it comes to blog posts and cross posting Instagram to Twitter or Pinterest. I think lately I’ve been winging my schedule, especially with life changes and something major happening (or about to happen) so I can give myself time to adjust; I pop on when I can and schedule when I can, but at the end, this currently isn’t a job for me… and until that becomes the case, I’m taking it less seriously (of course, that could potentially change in a few years, so who knows).

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      Woohoo! Congrats on winging it right.

      Reply
  3. Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction

    Some great tips here for balancing everything. I find that I’m sort of sporadic about how I handle blogging vs. social media. I don’t have an actual strategy, which means that in times like this when things are crazy, I sort of fail. I need to make more of a specific effort.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      I have a strategy and I still fail. Sigh. Blogging is hard!

      Reply
  4. MRIDULA GUPTA

    I am stressed all the time 😛 This is a great post Gayathri. I will keep them in mind.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      We are all on the same boat, but at least I don’t have to worry about my social posts going on time.

      Reply
  5. Katerina

    I think I’ve become more efficient since I started to schedule my blogging-related activities. A schedule is a must, otherwise, it will take a toll on the creative part.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      Yay I am glad at least one of us has it under control.

      Reply
  6. Mrs. P&P

    I know I spend too much time trying to figure out social media! I need to work on that balance. There’s always so much work to do.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      That would be worth it. You should give it a try.

      Reply
  7. Heather Duff

    Great post, I try and schedule as much as possible, I know from experience it can all get on top of you. I’m not blogging to get 100k followers but I like it to be stress free and scheduling does help.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      Stress free blogging is definitely my goal too!

      Reply
  8. Zenobia

    You make scheduling sound so easy 😭 Grear tips! I’m trying to hard to maintain my blogs Instagram this time as well as my blog. It’s hard but worth the effort.

    Reply
    • Gayathri

      Scheduling is definitely easy. Let me help you!

      Reply

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Gayathri

Gayathri

Gayathri has been reviewing books since 2010. When she is not reading books or creating online content, she works as a writer and a digital marketer. Head over to meet me!