How to Stop Information Overload:
Is this you?
You’re reading blog posts and articles about social media marketing and feel like you’re going to explode. Everyone has a different recommendation about what to do, how to do it and how often you need to do these things to reach more customers.
Some days, I feel like I’m experiencing social media information overload.
And the funny thing is, we do this to ourselves. I’ve been there WAY too many times when I’m working on a new project and I’m planning out my social marketing plans.
I swear if I read one more article 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 running a business for longer than 6 months, you’ve already realized that you can’t get everything done in one day. You know you can’t do everything at once so you’ve figured out what things you can check off by the end of the 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 something is done and you 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 fit all that stuff you’ve learned and figure out how to fit this into your busy schedule:
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 start adding in something new with your social media marketing 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 site 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 turning this activity into a habit.
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 new activities 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 marketing schedule, 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 media stuff 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 medias step 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 Instagram when you’ve never created an image 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 marketing 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.
The thing about social media folks is that it works when you’re SOCIAL. It does work when you work it.
It does work when you start sharing from a deeper more meaningful place about why you love what you do and how your products or services is the solution for your customer’s problems.
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