Information Overload
Is this you? You’re reading blog posts and articles about social media marketing and everyone has a different recommendation about what to do, how to do it and how often you need to do these things?
Some days, I feel like I’m experiencing social information overload.
And the funny thing is, we do this to ourselves. I should know because I’ve gone into overload when I’m working on a new project and I’m planning out my social plans.
I swear if I read one more article from one more person telling me to break my social media marketing projects into smaller action items and then schedule them into my calendar, I’m going to scream.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read those words and how many different ways that people have written about ‘break it down and schedule it.”
Yes, we know that
If you’ve been in business for yourself for longer than 6 months, you’ve already realized that you need to write things down. You know you can’t do everything at once so you’ve figured out what things you can get done every day.
Chances are, you’ve created some kind of calendar system where you keep a list of your daily to-do items and if you’re like me, you get a small sense of pleasure when you get something done and get to cross that line through it.
So how do you take those things you learned at a webinar, a local workshop or something you read in a blog post and fit them into your crazy busy day?
Take a look at these 7 tips to help you create new habits to help you fit social media marketing into your daily to-do list:
1. Commit to 30 Days
When you add in a new process or step to help you manage your social sites, commit to do it for at least 30 days.
Think about what it takes to lose weight. You wouldn’t just diet for 2 weeks and say, “OK, I’ve tried this diet thing for 2 weeks. I’ll lose weight now for the rest of the month because I just dieted for 14 days.”
It’s the same principle when you add in a new social skill into your schedule.
2. Make it Daily
You may not be able to fit all these new steps into your day but try to do at least one thing, one item, posting to one social sites every day.
If you want to grow your Instagram account, trying to do just a couple of posts to Instagram two days a week { or worse, once every couple of weeks } will make it harder for you to get into the practice of doing these new social habits.
3. Start Simple and Small
Adding to Step #2 – don’t do everything at once. Yeah, I know, I said it and asked you to break it down into smaller bites.
But to turn these ideas into a habit means that you need to start with something small that you know you can fit into your day. Want to grow you social community? Start small by spending 15 minutes in your Facebook groups to comment or post something to share with one or two of your groups.
Starting simple and small gives you a place to start and helps you build from there. When enough time has passed with these small steps, you’ll start to see small victories with comments and engagement, which will keep you moving forward.
4. Create Reminder Messages
Usually about two weeks into your new social plans, you’ll start to notice that life will find a way to interrupt your progress. You forgot about that doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day that throws off your schedule.
Then we miss a day or don’t get a chance to do the extra step. You know it’s gonna happen so why not prepare for it?
Create little reminder messages for yourself and put them near your workspace. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy like a printout with quotes and images with all the colors of the rainbow.
Honestly, I use a sticky note that I keep transferring into different days in my calendar to remind me to post my social media messages in my Facebook groups. Seriously, something as simple as this works just as easily as anything fancy you’ll find on Pinterest.
5. Stay Consistent
This is usually the toughest one for most people. They think they have to do their social skill every day at the same time to turn it into a habit.
It works great for the first couple of days and then reality steps in – you have a meeting you scheduled weeks before you started your plans or your child gets sick and you need to pick him up from school.
Staying consistent doesn’t mean doing the same thing at the same hour, same minute of every day. It could mean doing your steps always in the morning or right after you come home and your kid is doing their homework.
The time isn’t as important as making sure that you’re doing it in the same place every time. Being in the same place either at your dinner table or in your office to share your blog posts out to your social sites will help cue your mind that it’s time to work.
These physical cues will help turn this social skill into a habit that you’ll consistently do.
6. Give It A Try
Suspend your judgements about a certain site or part of the process. Most people will read something and say, “Oh, that’s not me. I can’t do something like that.”
Try it out, even if it’s a smaller version like spending 10 minutes on Twitter when you’ve never tweeted before. Give it a try on your phone before you decide that you can’t add this to your day.
Sometimes when we take a couple of steps outside our comfort box, we realize it’s not so bad out there. And there’s no better feeling than to accomplish something that we thought we never could do.
7. Realistic Expectations
Understand that this is a learning process and you will be imperfect. Give yourself a break and know that you’re doing your best but expect that there will be setbacks along the way.
Don’t expect big changes to happen overnight. Find your your own process to manage your social sites. It’s about creating a social plan to help you grow your personal goals and not what someone else is doing.
Because in the end, it’s not about doing everything or trying to be everything for everyone. It’s about finding that balance to create social media habits that work for you.
PS There’s so much going on in your life. You’re trying to make your business happen, trying to make money happen … it doesn’t happen by chance. You have to deliberately show up when and how they expect you to, if you want grow your business online.
Download the Social Media Productivity Planner! Grab the one tool you need to take you from wishing you had time to grow your business to owning a profitable business.
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