What to Do When Your Social Media Marketing Overwhelms You

When you’re active on social media for marketing, you quickly learn its stressful nature. Social media has powerful business benefits, but it can also easily overwhelm any marketer. With so many platforms and features being constantly rolled out and updated, the process of maintaining an effective social media strategy can be a struggle.

You have multiple responsibilities as a marketing professional, and you can’t afford to get lost in the vast black hole that is social media. So what can you do to manage this?

Here are four tips that can help maximize your time and lessen the stress of social media marketing. Consider applying them for better marketing results.

1. Re-evaluate your active platforms

You might think you need to jump onto any and all of the popular platforms out there. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat… there are so many. For small to mid-sized companies, it’s not practical and often impossible to be active on every platform. When you’re spread too thin, you’re not able to give your best platforms the attention they need for maximum ROI.

You don’t have to shut down or ignore other platforms – instead, consider setting up static accounts that direct your audience to the platforms where you’re active. Better yet, give them a quick and easy reason to go straight to your website.

Focus your attention on the platforms where your target audience would most appreciate hearing from you. Regardless of whether they’re most active on Facebook, they still might prefer to hear from a business on Twitter instead. This requires research and experimentation.

2. Seek assistance

Sometimes, you just can’t do it all on your own – all the activity you’re in charge of can prove impossible to manage single-handedly. That’s when you need to seek out assistance.

You have two choices for how to acquire assistance:

• Hire a qualified social media expert as an employee or intern
• Ask your existing coworkers for help

Regardless of which approach you take, you should always seek help as soon as you realize you’re getting overwhelmed. If you wait, you could harm your business’ social media results and even its brand image online. Don’t wait.

3. Find the right tools

When you’re getting overwhelmed by social media marketing, you could choose to audit how you currently handle the activity.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have multiple tools for different parts of your activity?
• Have you invested in any tool(s) to manage your social media marketing?

To help you prevent social media burnout, consider finding a tool that will streamline your activity all in one place. Find a service that can help you schedule and optimize your content, while also you helping you measure your results. Ideally, you also need to find a tool that’ll connect to your website for easier social sharing of your content.

These are just a few tools you can consider, depending on how extensive your needs are:

• Hootsuite – Provides social monitoring feeds + content scheduling + real-time insights + team collaboration
• Buffer – Provides content scheduling + post schedule optimization + results measurement + team collaboration
• Sprout Social – Provides scheduling and publishing service + engagement management + extensive measurement + team collaboration

4. Have an effective strategy

Perhaps the most important stress-reliever of them all is to have a thorough strategy written out and ready for your social media marketing. Without a strategy, you’re a wandering traveler without a map or destination in mind, and you risk getting lost in the massive social environment – and your results will suffer.

What do you need in your social media strategy? These are just some of the components that will help you make your activity easier to manage:

• The platforms you want to be active on
• The types of content you want to share
• The frequency in which you will publish content
• Who will be responsible for what activity
• How you will handle social customer service

When you have a social media strategy, you lessen the burden you would otherwise have. It’ll help guide you and give you what you need to handle your social media marketing with less stress. Make your social strategy thorough and easy to follow, and you won’t get overwhelmed by your marketing as much anymore.

With social media marketing, you’re bound to get overwhelmed at some stage – new platforms plus new features equals increased stress. The above techniques will help you find some relief.

Main image via geralt/Pixabay

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